Guild Wars 2

RebelYell.7132:

WoW had an unstable launch because more people were playing it AT LAUNCH, than what Ultima Online and EverQuest had at their peaks COMBINED. In the minds of many, World of Warcraft created the MMORPG genre. Including many suits at NCsoft and Nexon, shamefully.

Actually the game did have bugs and balance issues. Balance issues had nothing to do with the number of people playing, though I agree, a lot of people did play at launch. It wasn’t the only reason for the game’s bugs. And it took them an awful long time to get things straightened out.

In fact there are some bugs in the game that persisted for years.

killcannon.2576:

Vayne.8563:

I don’t know any single MMO that discusses exploits though. Even the discussion about them gives people ideas. It’s like having a convention talking about how to break into houses. It’s not done because we don’t want people breaking into houses. Maybe at a police convention they’d have a discussion like that.

Anet is not going to talk about exploits, because it’s their policy not to do so. A policy that every MMO I’ve played in has adopted.

Which unfortunately means all we can do is speculate.

The exploit was closed, supposedly, as was stated from the update. They discussed the snowflake exploit quite openly. And finally, closing an exploit usually doesn’t affect a large chunk of the player base, and when it does, they have posted why they have removed it. There are examples of them discussing exploits in the dungeons forums, pvp forums, wvw forums. It’s never been a black or white policy about discussing exploits, especially after they are closed, regardless of what the terms of service or usage state.

So, there is no reason not to let the player base know why they made their decision.

Can you show me a quote of Anet themselves discussing the snowflake exploit? I didn’t see them discuss it, just other people.

And yes, it is policy not to talk about exploits, even if they decide to sometimes do so. I say it’s policy because that has actually been stated on this forums, if nothing else by mods.

Cameirus.8407:

Rash.6514:

Now, as far as exclusive currency for dailies, that I agree with you. There will be, one day I hope, a MMO that will really give you a choice to get the things you want by doing the things you like. That won’t force you to a certain type of gameplay that you don’t like just because that is part of an item you really want. Life is boring like that. Games shouldn’t copy it, in my humble opinion.

Until then, I believe ANet is doing a great job.

That mmo is called rift btw.

That wasn’t my experience with Rift at all..though admittedly I played it only during the first six months. I felt forced into raiding, even though I didn’t want to raid. There was simply nothing else to do. Planarite as a currency was meaningless. You couldn’t even queue for dungeons without the prescribed gear…it was a nightmare.

About all I had left was some crappy achievements and collecting sparklies. Not my idea of a good game at all.

Don’t you know it’s against forum rules to say something positive about this game? lol

Actually it’s nice to see the occasional positive post. I really like SAB too. On the topic of the Living Story, it would have been a lot better, to me, if they didn’t promote it heavily. It raised people’s expectations.

Part of the reason SAB went over so well is no one expected it. No one was waiting for it. It came out of left field and it was cool. If they’d done that with the Living Story and not really explained it, it probably would have roped more people in.

At very least, more people would have been speculating about it.

I don’t know any single MMO that discusses exploits though. Even the discussion about them gives people ideas. It’s like having a convention talking about how to break into houses. It’s not done because we don’t want people breaking into houses. Maybe at a police convention they’d have a discussion like that.

Anet is not going to talk about exploits, because it’s their policy not to do so. A policy that every MMO I’ve played in has adopted.

Which unfortunately means all we can do is speculate.

The only definite quote I remember about it was by Martin Kerstein and he did say Guild Halls would make it into the game, but it would take time. There’s no timeline on it. Player housing was mentioned in the same statement but I’m not convinced it will make it in as soon as Guild Halls even though the comment suggested they would be in at the same time.

No, I can’t find the quote but it was on the Guild Wars 2 Guru forums when he made it.

It’s no secret that WoW has been a big success, and there is a reason for that success. While it may not be the most innovative product on the market, WoW offers a tremendous amount of content and is an exceptionally polished game.

It was from a founder of ANet during a speech he gave. Clearly, he said it was an exceptionally polished game, but did not mention from launch. So, clearly I may have been mistaken.[/quote]

Wow is an exceptionally polished game NOW, it was not an exceptionally polished game at launch. In fact, during the first week of WoW’s launch, the servers were down just about as much as they were up. It’s true. Anyone who was there will tell you.

The bugs were much worse than what you see today in Guild Wars 1. Balance was just..well…even a couple of years later there were serious problems with balance. If you think these forums are a zoo, you should see what people were saying on the WoW forums.

I have two sons, who at the time were very into WoW. I mean number-crunching, theory crafting, raiding, the whole bit.

Guild Wars 2 had a much, MUCH better launch than WoW did, but it’s not really surprising. The industry is a lot older and devs have some better idea of what to expect.

But there are things that change also. Shortly before Guild Wars 2 launched, the trait system changed completely. They rushed it into the 3rd beta, so people could see it, without any real balancing changes.

You may think 7 months is a long time,. but I tell you in all honesty, it takes most MMOs, even successful ones, a couple of years to really get off the ground and work out the kinks. I can’t think of any exceptions.

The complaints you see on this forum mimic the complaints I’ve seen on every single MMO forum. This is nothing new or special. It’s one of the reasons I step back and don’t take it as seriously as some. Because it will change and it will CONTINUE to change. That’s just the way it is.

If in another year, the game isn’t getting any better/more balanced, I’d start to be worried. Right now it’s still early days.

clay.7849:

Vayne.8563:

clay.7849:

Vayne.8563:

clay.7849:

Vayne.8563:

Guild Wars 1 was not an MMO, and you can’t compare it to an MMO. Sorry to say but having an open world is completely different. For example problems like culling or balancing for more than 8 people in a zone never was an issue in Guild Wars 1. Logic fail.

WoW at seven months was an absolutely mess as far as balance and bugs went. The complaints on WoW forums were as bad or worse than they were here. You didn’t even play the game, how would you know?

Five years to design a world of this size and populate it isn’t enough to rid it of bugs. If you think it is, you obviously don’t program.

It’s about the complexity and size of the world, not just about time. You can’t really judge one without the other. This game is so much more ambitious than Prophecies ever was. Too bad you can’t see that. Other people can.

Lol, I can’t compare GW1 to MMO’s now? How foolish of me. Did you email MMORPG.com for years when it was ranked #1 and told them they can’t do that?

Also, I seem to have this nagging suspicion that an old ANet founder mentioned how bug free WoW was compared to other MMO’s at release. Sure, I didn’t play it, but I trust his word over yours.

You’re right, I don’t program MMOs, just the occasional website, PHP, etc. But, 5 years seems like a long time to me. Did you say how long it should take by the way?

Do you remember Anet, they guys who programmed Guild Wars 1. They said it wasn’t an MMO. They said it was a CoRPG. A cooperative roleplaying game. I guess you know better than them.

An MMO means MASSIVE multiplayer online game. That doesn’t mean 12 people at one time in a single instance, sorry.

Again, your lack of experience in this genre is telling.

I know it wasn’t an MMO silly. It, however, compete with them. Therefore, it can get compared to them. Again, I will reference MMORPG.com for doing the same thing.

A lot of the problems that come from programming an MMO though, doesn’t happen when programming a coop game.

Even you have to admit, it’s easier to balance a game for an 8 man team, than say balance the game for an unknown amount of players. Things like culling never existed in Guild Wars 1, because you couldn’t have 200 guys on the screen at once.

There’s so much difference in what’s required to make an MMO, as compared to what is required to make a COOP game. It’s a whole different ball of wax.

Yes, that is true. Really, I don’t think ANet would have released the game in the stage it was in without pressure from NCSoft, so by beef is with them, not ANet.

It is probably a shame that GW2 was released before it was ready. And, clearly it wasn’t ready. Not because the bugs are all that bad, but there are a lot of band aids.

I truly want to see GW2 get better, but I think it will be a long road, and I don’t know if it will make it. I really hope it does. I just wish that it had some of the magic of GW1 that I can’t find.

I’m still convinced they released the game early because of the imminent release of MoP. It was a business decision and I’m not sure NCSoft forced it on them.

WoW is by far the most popular MMO ever created. Nothing even comes close. There are more active subscriptions right now than Guild Wars 1 accounts sold over seven years. It’s a remarkable phenomena.

Now put yourself in Anet’s place. They are coming out with a new game, and MoP is launching around the same time. Well, what would YOU do? Take a chance the game is going to suck and hold off, and have less sales. This game had more sales, guaranteed because it launched a month before MoP. People were willing to buy the game to play for a month while waiting for the game to come out. They had a chance to capture some of those people before they got MoP and it worked for some of them.

If they didn’t come out..well, then why would people even TRY Guild Wars 2? It was a business decision and in my mind a smart one.

clay.7849:

Vayne.8563:

clay.7849:

Vayne.8563:

clay.7849:

I have always said I didn’t like heroes. Having heroes is not the antithesis of good combat in GW1, it merely ruined the cooperative need on GW1.

Well, that’s part of our difference then, because heroes were in the game when I started Guild Wars 1. And there were often not enough players around to do some missions, so you had to use heroes. Later I joined a Guild, but with PVe only skills, much of the content was trivialized.

Sorry to tell you, but you missed the best parts of GW1.

By EOTN a lot of people had left.

Yep, I wish I had found it earlier than I did. And I still loved the game..but I’m not looking at it through the same rose-colored glasses that you did.

On the other hand, I’ve played a dozen MMOs easily. So I can compare Guild Wars 2 to them. Guild Wars 2 is a whole lot more like Guild Wars 1 in playing it than it is like other MMOs.

I don’t doubt that GW2 is better than most, if not all other MMO’s. But, from what GW1 players that played from Prophecies find, is that it lacks a lot of things that made GW1 and ANet different than the rest. I did try a lot of MMO’s and never played for more than a month.

Yes, my glasses are rose colored. I remember the good things more than the bad, because as GW1 got worse, I played less and less.

But you’re also not willing to give Guild Wars 2 the time to grow into something a lot better than it is. Skills WILL be added. Weapons will be added. Traits will be added. Elites will be added.

I was talking to people in my guild today and I thought, when you were a necro, no one used the skill Aura of the Lich until they changed it. After the changed it you either used Aura of the Lich or Discord as a necro. Maybe if you were a rebel, you used Flesh Golem. Again I’m talking PVe here, since I’m not qualified to talk about anything else.

If you were a necro and didn’t have necrosis in your toolbar it was a waste. Because that skill was so OP.

There wasn’t as much build variety when I played as you might think despite the skills. It really was build wars, but so many people just ran the same builds.

Guild Wars 1 was a great game for it’s time. But because it wasn’t an MMO, I don’t compare it to MMOs.

Compared to other MMOs, Guild Wars 2 is a breath of fresh air.

ScottBroChill.3254:

Vayne.8563:

ScottBroChill.3254:

Vayne.8563:

ScottBroChill.3254:

Thank you, clay, I have no idea why i forgot to include that. The realm of the gods was some of the most incredible stuff, from the feel of it, to the rewards, and to the difficulty of it untill speedclears came about. But even then, speedclears take a lot of focus and timing, which requires SKILL.

So Arah explorable mode doesn’t require skill? High level fractals don’t require skill? Hell even the redo of AC requires skill.

Name places in the open world in Guild Wars 1 that required skill please.

dude I said fractals requires skill, but that’s about the only thing. Everything else doesn’t really have a strategy for beating it, just enduring it.

I would really like it if people didn’t put words in my mouth, thank you.

I find certain hard mode dungeons do require skill. ANd yes, surviving is skill. If you want to test your skill, get a team together and try to do some explorable mode dungeons without dying.

But see, this is it. I shouldn’t have to challenge myself in a game it should challenge me. I don’t get anything from not dying and I’ll just respawn anyway and with my progress why would i restart? I’m not grinding for a weapon or skin I want, I’m grinding for currency. Now I have this middle man in the way keeping me from my real goal.

As I said, I didn’t find that much of Guild Wars 1 challenging with heroes. I had to make my own challenges, like trying to solo vanquish The Plains of Jarin, which I enjoyed. But that isn’t really part of the game. By the time I played the game, I had to make my own challenge.

clay.7849:

Vayne.8563:

clay.7849:

Vayne.8563:

Guild Wars 1 was not an MMO, and you can’t compare it to an MMO. Sorry to say but having an open world is completely different. For example problems like culling or balancing for more than 8 people in a zone never was an issue in Guild Wars 1. Logic fail.

WoW at seven months was an absolutely mess as far as balance and bugs went. The complaints on WoW forums were as bad or worse than they were here. You didn’t even play the game, how would you know?

Five years to design a world of this size and populate it isn’t enough to rid it of bugs. If you think it is, you obviously don’t program.

It’s about the complexity and size of the world, not just about time. You can’t really judge one without the other. This game is so much more ambitious than Prophecies ever was. Too bad you can’t see that. Other people can.

Lol, I can’t compare GW1 to MMO’s now? How foolish of me. Did you email MMORPG.com for years when it was ranked #1 and told them they can’t do that?

Also, I seem to have this nagging suspicion that an old ANet founder mentioned how bug free WoW was compared to other MMO’s at release. Sure, I didn’t play it, but I trust his word over yours.

You’re right, I don’t program MMOs, just the occasional website, PHP, etc. But, 5 years seems like a long time to me. Did you say how long it should take by the way?

Do you remember Anet, they guys who programmed Guild Wars 1. They said it wasn’t an MMO. They said it was a CoRPG. A cooperative roleplaying game. I guess you know better than them.

An MMO means MASSIVE multiplayer online game. That doesn’t mean 12 people at one time in a single instance, sorry.

Again, your lack of experience in this genre is telling.

I know it wasn’t an MMO silly. It, however, compete with them. Therefore, it can get compared to them. Again, I will reference MMORPG.com for doing the same thing.

A lot of the problems that come from programming an MMO though, doesn’t happen when programming a coop game.

Even you have to admit, it’s easier to balance a game for an 8 man team, than say balance the game for an unknown amount of players. Things like culling never existed in Guild Wars 1, because you couldn’t have 200 guys on the screen at once.

There’s so much difference in what’s required to make an MMO, as compared to what is required to make a COOP game. It’s a whole different ball of wax.

clay.7849:

Vayne.8563:

clay.7849:

I have always said I didn’t like heroes. Having heroes is not the antithesis of good combat in GW1, it merely ruined the cooperative need on GW1.

Well, that’s part of our difference then, because heroes were in the game when I started Guild Wars 1. And there were often not enough players around to do some missions, so you had to use heroes. Later I joined a Guild, but with PVe only skills, much of the content was trivialized.

Sorry to tell you, but you missed the best parts of GW1.

By EOTN a lot of people had left.

Yep, I wish I had found it earlier than I did. And I still loved the game..but I’m not looking at it through the same rose-colored glasses that you did.

On the other hand, I’ve played a dozen MMOs easily. So I can compare Guild Wars 2 to them. Guild Wars 2 is a whole lot more like Guild Wars 1 in playing it than it is like other MMOs.

clay.7849:

Vayne.8563:

Guild Wars 1 was not an MMO, and you can’t compare it to an MMO. Sorry to say but having an open world is completely different. For example problems like culling or balancing for more than 8 people in a zone never was an issue in Guild Wars 1. Logic fail.

WoW at seven months was an absolutely mess as far as balance and bugs went. The complaints on WoW forums were as bad or worse than they were here. You didn’t even play the game, how would you know?

Five years to design a world of this size and populate it isn’t enough to rid it of bugs. If you think it is, you obviously don’t program.

It’s about the complexity and size of the world, not just about time. You can’t really judge one without the other. This game is so much more ambitious than Prophecies ever was. Too bad you can’t see that. Other people can.

Lol, I can’t compare GW1 to MMO’s now? How foolish of me. Did you email MMORPG.com for years when it was ranked #1 and told them they can’t do that?

Also, I seem to have this nagging suspicion that an old ANet founder mentioned how bug free WoW was compared to other MMO’s at release. Sure, I didn’t play it, but I trust his word over yours.

You’re right, I don’t program MMOs, just the occasional website, PHP, etc. But, 5 years seems like a long time to me. Did you say how long it should take by the way?

Do you remember Anet, they guys who programmed Guild Wars 1. They said it wasn’t an MMO. They said it was a CoRPG. A cooperative roleplaying game. I guess you know better than them.

An MMO means MASSIVE multiplayer online game. That doesn’t mean 12 people at one time in a single instance, sorry.

Again, your lack of experience in this genre is telling.

clay.7849:

I have always said I didn’t like heroes. Having heroes is not the antithesis of good combat in GW1, it merely ruined the cooperative need on GW1.

Well, that’s part of our difference then, because heroes were in the game when I started Guild Wars 1. And there were often not enough players around to do some missions, so you had to use heroes. Later I joined a Guild, but with PVe only skills, much of the content was trivialized.

killcannon.2576:

So lack of foresight then? Did they have guild banks in Guild Wars? (no clue) Did none of them ever play another mmo? See previous post above about them being award winning game developers and at least of moderate intelligence.

And this doesn’t speak to the people who have 5 to 10 people in a guild either, or the casual guilds, or a number of other things.

My point of all this is not to try to figure out why they did it, but to instead highlight that they need to communicate these changes which may affect a significant portion of the player base in a more effective manner. Especially after closing said exploit. Many issues here on the forums and in game could be handled with less player suspicion with just a few lines of text explaining the “whys” of changes, instead of just arbitrarily announcing them.

Player discussion and input can and does help games and developers, but something I have picked up on while on these forums is that the rapport between developer and player has drastically decreased between anet and their playerbase from the times of Guild Wars.

I don’t remember guild banks from Guild Wars 1. I’m pretty sure it didn’t have them. We had guild halls, but no guild banks. They’re working on Guild Halls as far as I know. You could access your personal chest in Guild Halls, but there was no way to actually access your storage at all out in the world. You had to return to an outpost.

ScottBroChill.3254:

Vayne.8563:

ScottBroChill.3254:

Thank you, clay, I have no idea why i forgot to include that. The realm of the gods was some of the most incredible stuff, from the feel of it, to the rewards, and to the difficulty of it untill speedclears came about. But even then, speedclears take a lot of focus and timing, which requires SKILL.

So Arah explorable mode doesn’t require skill? High level fractals don’t require skill? Hell even the redo of AC requires skill.

Name places in the open world in Guild Wars 1 that required skill please.

dude I said fractals requires skill, but that’s about the only thing. Everything else doesn’t really have a strategy for beating it, just enduring it.

I would really like it if people didn’t put words in my mouth, thank you.

I find certain hard mode dungeons do require skill. ANd yes, surviving is skill. If you want to test your skill, get a team together and try to do some explorable mode dungeons without dying.

clay.7849:

Vayne.8563:

clay.7849:

Vayne.8563:

clay.7849:

Aristio.2784:

clay.7849:

Aristio.2784:

clay.7849:

Leo Paul.1659:

The thing I found the most annoying at the moment are guilds that require “24/7 representation” which ultimately detracts from the concept of multi-guilding altogether. I wish influence is shared equally among the guilds you have joined (probably scale the amount to minimize exploits) or something.

Just one more, of many, poorly implemented designs so that the game could be released in time to stop NCSoft’s plummeting stock prices.

Oh shut up about this.

Can you name me ONE, just ONE Triple-A MMO that has EVER came out with EVERYTHING totally fixed and balanced? Where there were zero bugs, and all the content that the devs wanted to ship with, got into the final product? Just please lift me from my ignorance that a AAA MMO cannot be release with an absolute perfect product! Show me one MMO that was absolute perfection at launch.

If you can’t, move along and stop complaining. You sound like an entitled little child.

Wow. Sad that your expectations are so low for a genre. Personally, I prefer to spend money on games that work.

How long should we give an MMO to get their kitten together after launch? I would think 7 months would be plenty? But, there’s arguably more problems now than at launch.

Snip

“Games that work,” oh seems to me that Guild Wars 2 loads up fine (Works perfectly too on the new Windows 8 ) and I have been playing since launch with no more than 2 crashes since. Get over yourself and “setting the bar low.” MMOs come with bugs and always will come with bugs. It’s part of the genre. You would have known that if your first MMO wasn’t World of Warcraft.

Again, name me one AAA MMO that came out perfectly at launch.

For god’s sake, there are barely any games at all that don’t come with performance issues, bugs, glitches, and the like. Software development is a hell of a field to work in and anyone can that works in it can confirm that there is rarely a perfect program.

Maybe we should stop calling them AAA if they can’t get their kitten together.

Maybe we should indeed. Or we could also realize that there is no game in existence even remotely as time consuming and high cost to produce and they really do need their own set of rules. It would be different if ANY MMO had worked this stuff out at this stage in it’s life, but that hasn’t been my experience.

I think people need to rewrite their expectations to reality, not to artificially impose a set of requirements for a genre that has never met those requirements.

Lol! You’re actually advocating that we lower out expectations to include bugs and glitches in a game? Seriously?

Snip

I’m advocating having realistic expectations. It’s not a question of lowering our standards. It’s a question of looking at what can be reasonably accomplished in a certain amount of time and expecting it.

If I were building a house and I expected it to be done in a week and done “right”, I’d be sorely disappointed. To know whether or not something can be constructed both within budget and on schedule takes a measure of experience, and even experienced guys get it wrong, because unexpected stuff crops up in construction.

The same is true when you’re building a program or a world. Just because you have unrealistic expectations, admittedly born of your lack of experience with the genre, doesn’t mean I need to share those unrealistic expectations.

When you show me the game that has done better, then we can talk. Until then, you’re arbitrarily setting numbers that have nothing at all to do with reality.

WoW and GW1. Easy.

And I think they spent 5 years on this game, not a week. What is a realistic timeline to make a relatively bug free and balanced game? Seems like 5 years is reasonable, no?

Guild Wars 1 was not an MMO, and you can’t compare it to an MMO. Sorry to say but having an open world is completely different. For example problems like culling or balancing for more than 8 people in a zone never was an issue in Guild Wars 1. Logic fail.

WoW at seven months was an absolutely mess as far as balance and bugs went. The complaints on WoW forums were as bad or worse than they were here. You didn’t even play the game, how would you know?

Five years to design a world of this size and populate it isn’t enough to rid it of bugs. If you think it is, you obviously don’t program.

It’s about the complexity and size of the world, not just about time. You can’t really judge one without the other. This game is so much more ambitious than Prophecies ever was. Too bad you can’t see that. Other people can.

clay.7849:

ScottBroChill.3254:

Thank you, clay, I have no idea why i forgot to include that. The realm of the gods was some of the most incredible stuff, from the feel of it, to the rewards, and to the difficulty of it untill speedclears came about. But even then, speedclears take a lot of focus and timing, which requires SKILL.

Even solo farming was more difficult and intrinsically rewarding than anything in GW2.

Solo farming? LMFAO!

So that’s what you like about games. No wonder you don’t like Guild Wars 2. BTW, being a 55 monk and solo farming wasn’t very challenging for me at all. It was quite easy in fact. Solo farming vatteirs in EotN wasn’t that challenging either.

And this is from a guy who couldn’t do it for long, because I get bored farming really fast. But even in the short time I did it, it wasn’t challenging. Maybe you’re thinking of a different game.

clay.7849:

Lol Vayne, every time you post about GW1 you keep contradicting that you liked the game. Seriously, face it, you didn’t really like GW1 and don’t see why it was so successful. It was just a pretty game to you.

I could make a list of stuff I don’t like about Guild Wars 2 that would surprise you. There’s plenty of it. Would you also say I don’t like Guild Wars 2?

Bad logic remains bad logic.

clay.7849:

Vayne.8563:

clay.7849:

Aristio.2784:

clay.7849:

Aristio.2784:

clay.7849:

Leo Paul.1659:

The thing I found the most annoying at the moment are guilds that require “24/7 representation” which ultimately detracts from the concept of multi-guilding altogether. I wish influence is shared equally among the guilds you have joined (probably scale the amount to minimize exploits) or something.

Just one more, of many, poorly implemented designs so that the game could be released in time to stop NCSoft’s plummeting stock prices.

Oh shut up about this.

Can you name me ONE, just ONE Triple-A MMO that has EVER came out with EVERYTHING totally fixed and balanced? Where there were zero bugs, and all the content that the devs wanted to ship with, got into the final product? Just please lift me from my ignorance that a AAA MMO cannot be release with an absolute perfect product! Show me one MMO that was absolute perfection at launch.

If you can’t, move along and stop complaining. You sound like an entitled little child.

Wow. Sad that your expectations are so low for a genre. Personally, I prefer to spend money on games that work.

How long should we give an MMO to get their kitten together after launch? I would think 7 months would be plenty? But, there’s arguably more problems now than at launch.

Plus, your crybaby act telling me to shut up won’t work. Nice try Internet tough guy.

“Games that work,” oh seems to me that Guild Wars 2 loads up fine (Works perfectly too on the new Windows 8 ) and I have been playing since launch with no more than 2 crashes since. Get over yourself and “setting the bar low.” MMOs come with bugs and always will come with bugs. It’s part of the genre. You would have known that if your first MMO wasn’t World of Warcraft.

Again, name me one AAA MMO that came out perfectly at launch.

For god’s sake, there are barely any games at all that don’t come with performance issues, bugs, glitches, and the like. Software development is a hell of a field to work in and anyone can that works in it can confirm that there is rarely a perfect program.

Maybe we should stop calling them AAA if they can’t get their kitten together.

Maybe we should indeed. Or we could also realize that there is no game in existence even remotely as time consuming and high cost to produce and they really do need their own set of rules. It would be different if ANY MMO had worked this stuff out at this stage in it’s life, but that hasn’t been my experience.

I think people need to rewrite their expectations to reality, not to artificially impose a set of requirements for a genre that has never met those requirements.

Lol! You’re actually advocating that we lower out expectations to include bugs and glitches in a game? Seriously?

I wish the rest of the world worked that way. When things don’t work properly in real life there are recalls and class action lawsuits.

I’m advocating having realistic expectations. It’s not a question of lowering our standards. It’s a question of looking at what can be reasonably accomplished in a certain amount of time and expecting it.

If I were building a house and I expected it to be done in a week and done “right”, I’d be sorely disappointed. To know whether or not something can be constructed both within budget and on schedule takes a measure of experience, and even experienced guys get it wrong, because unexpected stuff crops up in construction.

The same is true when you’re building a program or a world. Just because you have unrealistic expectations, admittedly born of your lack of experience with the genre, doesn’t mean I need to share those unrealistic expectations.

When you show me the game that has done better, then we can talk. Until then, you’re arbitrarily setting numbers that have nothing at all to do with reality.

ScottBroChill.3254:

Thank you, clay, I have no idea why i forgot to include that. The realm of the gods was some of the most incredible stuff, from the feel of it, to the rewards, and to the difficulty of it untill speedclears came about. But even then, speedclears take a lot of focus and timing, which requires SKILL.

So Arah explorable mode doesn’t require skill? High level fractals don’t require skill? Hell even the redo of AC requires skill.

Name places in the open world in Guild Wars 1 that required skill please.

ScottBroChill.3254:

The 25 missions where a lot more fun than most of any of the pve in GW2. Although opinionated, I believe most people who have experienced both would agree.

I liked that older content became easier, It made me feel like I was improving, like I was top dog and that I’ve made progress. This didn’t bother me in the slightest. This game is different though, and it’s a nice feature added to make your level accordingly to the area you were in, this keeps high lvl players from the taking the experience away from low level characters.

I would say the endgame in both games, initial release were about the same in how short lived they are. But, gw1 had an awesome team oriented pvp and the random arenas I enjoyed more than this conquest capture mode. This is opinionated so I don’t mind about that, but there’s still only one game type. Atleast structure it like alliance battles, that was a better structure.

dynamic events are cool the first time, the second time, and maybe the third time. They become irritating as hell every other time and repetitive because they are the same as quests accept you don’t know what the hell is going on. You usually just sit around fighting off easy waves of enemies.

I’ll give it time, especially since the first expansion isn’t out, but this is how I feel about the current game and I dislike the direction they seem to be taking with it. I’ve said this in different ways multiple times.

Ummm no, most people wouldn’t agree. Let’s go through some of those missions one by one.

I agree the first four missions were fun. I also think everything in the Maguuma Jungle was just godawful filler that didn’t need to be there.

Do you remember the mission in the Southern Shiverpeakes? Thunderhead Keep? You fought your way to the center of the fort and then stood there for half an hour while wave after wave of Mursaat and white mantle attacked you, four at a time. You’d kill a wave in ten seconds, even in hard mode and have to wait for the next wave. That was REALLY fun for you? Because it bored me senseless?

Do you remember the similar mission with the temple in Divinity’s Reach, with the undead attacking around the healing fountain? Boring as dishwater. Maybe you like standing there waiting for 20 minutes of guys to spawn who represent NO CHALLENGE AT ALL TO YOU, but I didn’t. It felt like a complete waste of my time.

Then there were missions that were awesomely challenging, until you knew how to do them.

There are great missions in Prophecies. I agree with that. There were also some very very bad ones.

I never found the Dragon’s Lair mission fun or challenging. Maybe, MAYBE the first time. It was just too easy.

Admittedly, I didn’t do that when Prophecies first came out, so it might have been harder.

Skills like Pain Inverter, Technobabble, necrosis for necros, builds using discord, the sabway three necro build (all before the ritualists become too powerful) made a joke of most of the content.

Maybe it would have been different if I’d been there playing Prophecies at launch but when I played the game, some of those missions were way too easy. Because they never redid the missions to compensate for heroes. And they couldn’t because not everyone owned Nightfall or EotN.

killcannon.2576:

80 is still larger than 1 through 79 last I checked. Where is the arbitrary cut off on guild size being useful? Some mmo’s required a petition of x amount of players to start a guild (although you can easily get 10 sigs for a charter..sorta pointless). At some point Anet needs to come out and just plainly, in clear terms, state what their stance is on the arbitrary number they want for a useful guild size. Either guilds should be useful to everyone or start setting up some boundaries. Otherwise this “anet hates small guilds” talk will continue.

Right and people do them with 50 people guilds and 40 people guilds. I’m just saying this constant use of the word 400 member guild is misleading. I offered the 80 number, because it happens to be the number of people in my guild, not because it’s the minimum you need to do a guild mission.

If you can’t see the difference between a guild with 50 members and a guild with 400 I’m not sure there’s anything worth talking about.

clay.7849:

The game isn’t easy because of exotic gear, the game is easy because the combat system is garbage. There is no need for skills 2-5 and 7+. Not because of armor.

Aside from the fact that this is completely wrong, it’s also the very essence of YOUR opinion stated again as fact. The combat system isn’t garbage. You don’t like the combat system. Can you see the difference between these statements?

There are plenty of uses for those skills in harder combat. There are uses for them when soloing champions and certainly in dungeons and fractals.

As I’ve already pointed out, in Guild Wars 1, if you have the right heroes with the right bills, something you could look up on PVX wiki, you didn’t need to attack at all, even in hard mode, anywhere in the world.

So that makes the Guild Wars 1 combat system even more garbage, by your logic, considering you didn’t need to use ANY skills.

killcannon.2576:

Vayne.8563:

I’m guessing the reason they raised the price is because they don’t want single players who have private guilds to be able to have extra storage for free. I’m not so sure this is unreasonable.

A lot of people in this game, due to the multiple guild system, have personal guilds for storage. They simply use it as extra storage. Guild banks aren’t really meant for personal storage, so it’s a way of people getting around buying bank space.

In fact, if you have this upgrade in a single player guild you don’t need remote bank access either. And the summon guild vault that’s a reward for guild missions becomes virtually meaningless if they left it where it was.

Is it a heavy-handed change, or was it too easy to get in the first place? I guess that would be a matter of opinion.

You honestly believe it took them 7 months to figure out people would use guild banks for personal storage? It’s a staple of most mmo’s, been around for years. Not to mention the fact that the staff at Anet are award winning developers, and I would have to assume, at the very least, moderately intelligent. But you’re gonna go with that. Okie dokie.

Here is a non comprehensive list of what people think or have thought this exploit was

Gold sellers using them

Being used in SAB

Player disparity (some people think it’s unfair that they are free, while some pay for extra bag space, never mind the fact that EVERYONE had access to them)

Anet wants people to buy more bank space (if this is true, I fear what they may remove arbitrarily in the future in order to make a buck)

Anet no longer wants to cater to smaller guilds (would be odd considering some of their recent statements being contrary to this, but is possible)

Devs don’t like farmers (even though most top tier cosmetic and stat gear requires it)

More traffic in major town hubs (no clue)

What they could, and in my opinion should have done, is release what the reasoning was behind this change, especially since they have supposedly closed whatever “exploit” that caused this in the first place. Player discussion and feedback could be a lot more constructive with it, but alas, what we have here is a failure to communicate with a dedicated and passionate player base.

I’m saying while they were changing this for the exploit, it’s why they raised the price…or a possibilty of why. Before the exploit, whatever it was (and I’m relatively sure there was some reason to do that kind of upgrade on a weekend), they didn’t change it but since they had to change it anyway they put in that change.

A solo person only gets 2 influence for a dynamic event. A person with a friend in his party doing the same event gets the guild 20.

It’s entirely possible that at launch they didn’t think single people would sit there and grind out all those 2’s to get extra storage yes. It takes a damnably long time. So long in fact that it probably wasn’t a problem until now.

@Clay

Except that I don’t see gear progression, in and of itself, as bad design. I see content gating as bad design. Gear progression, handled properly is fine by me and always have been. There’s a difference, to me, between optional gear that makes you marginally more powerful and required gear that you need to enter an instance.

Anyway there’s a bit of inconsistency in some of what you say. For example, you claim that the game is easy because you can get through the game using just the 1 skill. Then you claim that there’s gear grind in this game, because people need better gear. But if the game is that easy, arguably you shouldn’t not only need that better gear…you shouldn’t even want that better gear. It will only make the game easier.

So which is it? If the game is easy enough to beat in exotics, you don’t need ascended gear and there’s no problem. Or do you really need to grind gear, in which case you can’t play the game because it’s too hard without it?

ScottBroChill.3254:

Oh no, trust me, I wanted a fully persistent mmo don’t get me wrong.

I have never had any trouble with any of the missions or pve aspects of this game. Fractals is different, because the challange keeps increasing, but that’s all they got and it’s tacked on and added vertical gear progression. In GW1 I would often have to repeat missions to make new strategies in order to beat them, THAT is fun for ME. (opinion, I lack a challenge because It makes me think). And I never grinded to the point where I could deck out all of my heroes in equipment, armor/runes, skills, and all the other best things because that took a ridiculous amount of time on it’s own. So, I never felt the easiness of having the npc’s do all the work and found the game increasingly difficult when people started to leave.

I like the combat system. I never said I didn’t. I said I didn’t like the fact that there’s no depth into the customization of the combat via skills, traits(this is hardly customizing, just makes everything usually more gimmicky), weapons, and the second half the skill bar may be customizable, but really? they are all high cd abilities that hardly affect the majority of combat.

I’m not using that “one line” from the manifesto as my whole argument, I’m using it as a basis for why I might be mad at the false advertisement. Everything else they advertise is here, but what about that?

And your telling me that one character representing the same role of Kormir in a someone crappy storyline, in which the general public seems to agree is underwhelming, is supposed to be enough of gw1 nastolgia? I’m not looking for gw1 easter eggs in this game. They ruined how the lore from gw1 could have went and made it unengaging.

I’m looking for more of parts of gw1’s character system, skill system, armor and weapons, and things of the like. Really the only thing that has stayed is the class names and weapon and armor skins being only cosmetic. The latter sort of blows because there’s so very few attractive skins in this game unless you are a heavy armored character. This upsets me because they literally have one of the best art teams out there, I’ve seen the concept art and everything is epic. Why hasn’t any of the epicness transferred over?

GW1 felt the way it did because of it’s skill system. Being able to reload you skill bar in town and customize it to your liking. They kept the ability to change it and not get stuck in one bar, but took away customization to a higher degree than I think they should have.

snip

I’m telling you that a lot of the same sensibilities in this game are from Guild Wars 1…and that I see them. That I play this game very similiarly to how I played Guild Wars 1. That I get the same feeling going around the world. They may not have quests in this game like Guild Wars 1, but they still have an epic feel to the world that many MMOs miss. The challenge, however is hit and miss.

For example, yesterday I was in Wayfarer Foothills. It’s a starter zone. And I’m near the wurm cave. So we’re doing this event and suddenly one of the storm events from the living story starts. Out of the blue, on top of the event we were doing. Well, now there are ice elementals in addition to a couple of veteran ice elementals, and you know, we’re scaled down for this. So then a portal opens up right in the same area, and we have dredge and charr coming through the portal. There were a bunch of people there, but it was still tough.

Do you remember going back to Ascalon in Guild Wars 1? How you’d take your 20th level NF or Factions character back from LA to get the first missions. And how there was no challenge at all, you’d just run through the entire zone? With a 20th level character, and heroes, most of Guild Wars 1 was silly. And remember the game didn’t launch with hard mode. That came later.

So here you really can make this game more challenging for yourself. There are all sorts of champions you can try to solo if you want. There are tough group events in out of the way places you can do with less people than you’d normally need. Some of these battles are hectic.

There were only 25 missions in Prophecies. That’s it. The other stuff all came later.

So when you compare this to Prophecies, we’re just around the point where hard mode was introduced. Prophecies had nothing like the fractals, had no dungeons…people need to give this game time. Content takes time.

They need to solidify the core game before they go onto make the game harder. But the harder still will come. It’s just a matter of time.

If you take away Nightfall, Factions and Eye of the North, a lot of the stuff I liked best about Guild Wars 1 personally, including hard mode, wasn’t there at launch.

I still say, and haven said repeatedly, that 7 months into the lifespan of an MMO is no time at all. Games are forced to launch too early because the amount of time and money that goes into them is just insane. They launch early and play catch up. For most new games it takes about six months.

Evidence to this fact, some of the features that were supposed to be in the game at launch didn’t appear until many months after launch and some haven’t appeared yet. They simply ran out of time/money and had to release or they had to release for MoP came out or it would have hurt sales badly.

So a new MMO spends the first six months cleaning up the launch mess, and then goes on to fix the core game which is where we are now. It all takes time.

In another year, people will be complaining about completely different issues. lol

Mwerevu.4013:

killcannon.2576:

I love that some players reaction is to state “join a bigger guild”. Pure comedy.

It’s been that way since guild missions went in. Some people just can’t conceive why someone wouldn’t want to be a member of a 400-person guild. Unfortunately, it looks like ArenaNet agrees with them.

You don’t need a 400 person guild to do guild missions. We do them with an 80 person guild,. and a pretty strong social core at the middle of it.

I’m guessing the reason they raised the price is because they don’t want single players who have private guilds to be able to have extra storage for free. I’m not so sure this is unreasonable.

A lot of people in this game, due to the multiple guild system, have personal guilds for storage. They simply use it as extra storage. Guild banks aren’t really meant for personal storage, so it’s a way of people getting around buying bank space.

In fact, if you have this upgrade in a single player guild you don’t need remote bank access either. And the summon guild vault that’s a reward for guild missions becomes virtually meaningless if they left it where it was.

Is it a heavy-handed change, or was it too easy to get in the first place? I guess that would be a matter of opinion.

clay.7849:

Aristio.2784:

clay.7849:

Aristio.2784:

clay.7849:

Leo Paul.1659:

The thing I found the most annoying at the moment are guilds that require “24/7 representation” which ultimately detracts from the concept of multi-guilding altogether. I wish influence is shared equally among the guilds you have joined (probably scale the amount to minimize exploits) or something.

Just one more, of many, poorly implemented designs so that the game could be released in time to stop NCSoft’s plummeting stock prices.

Oh shut up about this.

Can you name me ONE, just ONE Triple-A MMO that has EVER came out with EVERYTHING totally fixed and balanced? Where there were zero bugs, and all the content that the devs wanted to ship with, got into the final product? Just please lift me from my ignorance that a AAA MMO cannot be release with an absolute perfect product! Show me one MMO that was absolute perfection at launch.

If you can’t, move along and stop complaining. You sound like an entitled little child.

Wow. Sad that your expectations are so low for a genre. Personally, I prefer to spend money on games that work.

How long should we give an MMO to get their kitten together after launch? I would think 7 months would be plenty? But, there’s arguably more problems now than at launch.

Plus, your crybaby act telling me to shut up won’t work. Nice try Internet tough guy.

“Games that work,” oh seems to me that Guild Wars 2 loads up fine (Works perfectly too on the new Windows 8 ) and I have been playing since launch with no more than 2 crashes since. Get over yourself and “setting the bar low.” MMOs come with bugs and always will come with bugs. It’s part of the genre. You would have known that if your first MMO wasn’t World of Warcraft.

Again, name me one AAA MMO that came out perfectly at launch.

For god’s sake, there are barely any games at all that don’t come with performance issues, bugs, glitches, and the like. Software development is a hell of a field to work in and anyone can that works in it can confirm that there is rarely a perfect program.

Maybe we should stop calling them AAA if they can’t get their kitten together.

Maybe we should indeed. Or we could also realize that there is no game in existence even remotely as time consuming and high cost to produce and they really do need their own set of rules. It would be different if ANY MMO had worked this stuff out at this stage in it’s life, but that hasn’t been my experience.

I think people need to rewrite their expectations to reality, not to artificially impose a set of requirements for a genre that has never met those requirements.

clay.7849:

Aristio.2784:

clay.7849:

Leo Paul.1659:

The thing I found the most annoying at the moment are guilds that require “24/7 representation” which ultimately detracts from the concept of multi-guilding altogether. I wish influence is shared equally among the guilds you have joined (probably scale the amount to minimize exploits) or something.

Just one more, of many, poorly implemented designs so that the game could be released in time to stop NCSoft’s plummeting stock prices.

Oh shut up about this.

Can you name me ONE, just ONE Triple-A MMO that has EVER came out with EVERYTHING totally fixed and balanced? Where there were zero bugs, and all the content that the devs wanted to ship with, got into the final product? Just please lift me from my ignorance that a AAA MMO cannot be release with an absolute perfect product! Show me one MMO that was absolute perfection at launch.

If you can’t, move along and stop complaining. You sound like an entitled little child.

Wow. Sad that your expectations are so low for a genre. Personally, I prefer to spend money on games that work.

How long should we give an MMO to get their kitten together after launch? I would think 7 months would be plenty? But, there’s arguably more problems now than at launch.

Plus, your crybaby act telling me to shut up won’t work. Nice try Internet tough guy.

You would think seven month is plenty, yet you’ve admitted to not playing any other MMO besides Guild Wars 1 (which wasn’t an MMO). Seems that your 7 months is plenty line is inaccurate.

Because MOST MMOs not just a few, but just about all, at the 7 month mark were barely playable. Maybe your expectations are off because you never actually played a 7 month old MMO. In which case your lack of insight should be forgiven.

The fact is, by this point in it’s career, games like AoC, Warhammer, Rift, SWToR, and yes even WoW were really buggy and imbalanced. There are very few MMOs that could say otherwise 7 months after launch.

Maybe you need to stop comparing everything to one game. In fact, this game is far far more ambitious than Prophecies was, and I’m sure that 7 months after launch there were still plenty of complaints about Prophecies.

It takes a couple of years for an MMO to mature. Maybe it’s just an impatience thing. And no, the game isn’t arguably in worse shape now than it was at launch, it’s in a different shape. There are a whole lot of people who think it’s in better shape, including a number of people who left and came back.

ScottBroChill.3254:

Well then why was I promised that the game would include everything I loved about the first game? and they stopped caring about gw1 so I can’t go back and am now stuck with this “new” direction.

A manifesto is a statement of intent, not a promise. Ergo, you were promised nothing. This is one single line from one single ad. Almost everything about the game, and I do say almost. we knew well before launch.

We knew weapon skills were tied to weapons. We knew there would be less skills. We knew there would be different professions. We knew there would be an open world. We knew there would be active dodging. We knew there would be dynamic events. We knew there would be a marketplace.

Please don’t say that based on that single line from a manifesto (which is a statement of intent, not a promise of features), you thought we’d have a dual class system, with dervishes and rits, because it’s completely disingenuous.

There are definitely legitimate complaints about the direction of the game, but trying to use a single line from a manifesto that appeared two years before the game released is not only not realistic, but shows a lack of understanding of what a manifesto is.

The problem is a lot of Guild Wars 1 players didn’t heavily play other MMOs, and Anet was making an MMO. Compared to other MMOs, this game feels a whole lot more like Guild Wars 1 than most people are willing to believe. A game is a whole lot more than just a collection of features.

Simplest example, Komir and Trahearne are almost exactly the same, in that they sort of steal the story from you, though they didn’t do much. There are so many aspects of Guild Wars 1 I see in this game that people are just ignoring.

Dante.1508:

Vayne.8563:

@OP, I agree with some of what you say. The combat system in Guild Wars 2 isn’t as deep as it was in Guild Wars 1. That’s a trade off. Guild Wars 1 became impossible to balance and it causes no end to troubles.

Which is strange because i’m seeing just as much imbalance here in GW2 even with the trade off as we did in Guildwars 1, so i don’t believe for a second the combat system here is any better..especially the lack of skills part..

It in my opinion is because they balance the game in a tiny part very few play spvp..and let the other two parts pve and wvw get messed up..

Actually, I don’t think that the balance in this game is near as bad as it was in Guild Wars 2, from a PvE standpoint.

That is to say, if you ran around with certain heroes, you could do pretty much anything in the game, including soloing hard mode dungeons. A couple of rits in your party and there really wasn’t much you couldn’t do, even if you didn’t play.

Someone said the skill system in Guild Wars 2 is bad because you can get through the entire game hitting the 1 key. Then the skill system in Guild Wars 1 must have been terrible, because my heroes didn’t need me to be there at all.

clay.7849:

Vayne.8563:

clay.7849:

Vayne.8563:

clay.7849:

Don’t you see that putting in a band aid fix instead of fixing the core problem is the root of laziness? What you described is a clear example of being too lazy to make something better. You would think in the 5+ years of making this game, they could have done something better. I thought they didn’t want us to “kill 10 wolves or gather 5 plants”. FedEx quests are still FedEx quests, except the start and finish are in the same spot, and instead of taking to someone, it just pops up in your screen like your character is some clairvoyant that just happens to know someone needs 10 Orc pelts… Ya, that’s not lazy…

And you refuse to see that better is in the eye of the beholder. What’s better to one person is not better to the other. I think you’ll find that my better and your better are completely different betters.

So you talk about lazy design. What if they designed something brilliant and I hated it, or you hated it. It’s just not as simple as you make it out to be. The hearts do PRECISELY what they were meant to do. You know the KISS principle, right? Keep it simple, stupid.

The reason a lot of designs fail is because they’re overly complicated. Anet found a problem in their system and they fixed it. It’s not lazy design just because you don’t like it.

When you design something to go against the principles you founded the game on, because it’s an easy fix – that’s lazy. Not only that, it’s insulting to your customer base.

There’s nothing subjective about it. Just because you might like bad design doesn’t make it good. Just like if you like bad music it doesn’t make it good.

I don’t think Anet thinks they went against those principles. I think you do. That IS subjective.

No, it’s objective. You just refuse to see it or admit it.

I’m surprised you can even spell objective. I’m saying I played Guild Wars 1 for five years, so I must have liked it. You don’t play a game for five years if you don’t like it..at least most people don’t.

But just because I see kittens in the armor of an old game, doesn’t mean I didn’t like it. And if you can’t see that objectively you’re not being objective.

Good idea. A number of NPCs already do engage you. I’ve had NPCs walk up to me and say stuff and I’ve talked to them. Certain events start that way.

Expanding it wouldn’t be bad at all. But like WoW, most people would just skip it.

Drew.1865:

Guild Wars 2 has a better and nicer community and is like a living painting.

Wow has:
1. Better combat system and classes that can be something besides dps.
2. Doesn’t have patches that continue to buff the strongest classes while nerfing the weakest so the devs can think they have pvp balanced.
3. Better loot and I’ve never killed 6 things in a row in Wow with no drop like has happened to me playing GW2.
4. The game is focused on being fun and not focused on the economy and gem store.
5. Blizzard actually tests things yes it’s shocking.
6. Dungeons are a lot more fun in wow and you actually get decent rewards for doing them.
7. Wow can be played the way you want and you don’t have to feel paranoid about hitting DR when you farm mats to craft.
8. Small and large guilds are both able to do ALL of the game content and small guilds aren’t punished for being small.
9. Mounts.
10. All my friends quit playing GW2 but my friends that played WOW are still playing it.

1. Wow’s combat system isn’t better. It’s got a lot more skills of which you use less of. Most of the time you have to stand still while casting. Dodge is a percentage, not something you do actively. You may personally like it better, I found it dull as dishwater.

2. WoW always has people complaining about balance. Maybe you should visit their forums. In fact, in the early days, there were so many people that left Wow for balance issues it wasn’t funny.

3. WoW lets everyone get lots of money fast. It also has lots of inflation which means everything costs a ton too. New players are often hopelessly left behind.

4. WoW is focused on slowing down gameplay so you can pay another $15 for another month. In addition to a monthly fee, WoW also has a cash shop. It does quite well I understand. Slowing things down is built into everything in WoW, because the company is essentially a greed machine. They don’t NEED to charge a monthly fee. They do it to make money. Pretty much what all companies try to do.

5. Blizzard’s launch and WoW at six months was terribly bug ridden. You might not have been born yet, but I assure you, early WoW was a major bug fest.

6. Dungeons in WoW depends on whether or not you like the trinity and whether or not you find waiting for a healer and a tank fun. I don’t. I don’t like the trinity system at all. Another “fact” that is just your opinion.

7. WoW can be played any way you want, as long as you don’t mind boring quests and the quest hub system, walls of text no one reads, and grinding out gear to play content because most of it is gear gated.

8. Yep, small and large guilds can do all the content…asssuming they want to grind dungeons over and over to get the gear to do the next dungeon. The very worst thing about WOW is the constant need to update your gear to do more content.

9. I agree with this. WoW does in fact have mounts.

10. You should definitely go join your friends. We’ll all miss you.

clay.7849:

Vayne.8563:

clay.7849:

Don’t you see that putting in a band aid fix instead of fixing the core problem is the root of laziness? What you described is a clear example of being too lazy to make something better. You would think in the 5+ years of making this game, they could have done something better. I thought they didn’t want us to “kill 10 wolves or gather 5 plants”. FedEx quests are still FedEx quests, except the start and finish are in the same spot, and instead of taking to someone, it just pops up in your screen like your character is some clairvoyant that just happens to know someone needs 10 Orc pelts… Ya, that’s not lazy…

And you refuse to see that better is in the eye of the beholder. What’s better to one person is not better to the other. I think you’ll find that my better and your better are completely different betters.

So you talk about lazy design. What if they designed something brilliant and I hated it, or you hated it. It’s just not as simple as you make it out to be. The hearts do PRECISELY what they were meant to do. You know the KISS principle, right? Keep it simple, stupid.

The reason a lot of designs fail is because they’re overly complicated. Anet found a problem in their system and they fixed it. It’s not lazy design just because you don’t like it.

When you design something to go against the principles you founded the game on, because it’s an easy fix – that’s lazy. Not only that, it’s insulting to your customer base.

There’s nothing subjective about it. Just because you might like bad design doesn’t make it good. Just like if you like bad music it doesn’t make it good.

I don’t think Anet thinks they went against those principles. I think you do. That IS subjective.

Morfedel.4165:

I never played WOW, but I have a couple friends of mine who were telling me how WOW used to be packed, especially in some cities that they said were far more crowded than Lion’s Arch, now feel empty by that same comparison.

They feel that WOW is getting desperate to get subscribers back, emailing out free x day offers and such. I don’t know, never been there, so I can’t say for myself, just found it interesting.

Don’t kid yourself. WoW is still the king of the hill and will be for some time to come. I don’t think it’s a great game for my play style..but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad game. On the other hand, I do think that being on top for a long time tends to make you complacent.

Cloud.7613:

Aarean.5398:

The animosity comes more strongly from the wow community saying they play the best game of all time and it will always be gold. I just wanted some clear heads on the subject. My friend not being one of them lol. Wows dungeons are more boring and afk in my opinion. They didnt create paths and each dungeon got boring after 3 runs. Gw offers alot more replayability. And they hold difficulty. I tanked all wow dungeons half asleep.

GW2 had the first dungeon that actually has a boss you can afk during the entire encounter, doesn’t get much more boring then that. It’s a matter of opinion.

Try it with some of the other bosses though. We’re not comparing boss to boss, we’re comparing the whole feel of the dungeons.

I’m not a fan of the trinity system and never have been. It’s one of the things in the past that has prevented me from enjoying MMOs. It’s always felt too contrived.

Aarean.5398:

The animosity comes more strongly from the wow community saying they play the best game of all time and it will always be gold. I just wanted some clear heads on the subject. My friend not being one of them lol. Wows dungeons are more boring and afk in my opinion. They didnt create paths and each dungeon got boring after 3 runs. Gw offers alot more replayability. And they hold difficulty. I tanked all wow dungeons half asleep.

My issue with WoW has very little to do with WoW itself.

It has to do with WoW’s staggering success, which everyone went out and copied. For a long time, no matter what game you were playing, it was a variation on WoW…and I didn’t enjoy WoW.

So MMO after MMO was a disaster, not because of WoW, but because everyone copied it to get a piece of the pie. That’s probably why I like Guild Wars 2 so much. It’s the first MMO I’ve played that doesn’t feel like WoW.

clay.7849:

Don’t you see that putting in a band aid fix instead of fixing the core problem is the root of laziness? What you described is a clear example of being too lazy to make something better. You would think in the 5+ years of making this game, they could have done something better. I thought they didn’t want us to “kill 10 wolves or gather 5 plants”. FedEx quests are still FedEx quests, except the start and finish are in the same spot, and instead of taking to someone, it just pops up in your screen like your character is some clairvoyant that just happens to know someone needs 10 Orc pelts… Ya, that’s not lazy…

And you refuse to see that better is in the eye of the beholder. What’s better to one person is not better to the other. I think you’ll find that my better and your better are completely different betters.

So you talk about lazy design. What if they designed something brilliant and I hated it, or you hated it. It’s just not as simple as you make it out to be. The hearts do PRECISELY what they were meant to do. You know the KISS principle, right? Keep it simple, stupid.

The reason a lot of designs fail is because they’re overly complicated. Anet found a problem in their system and they fixed it. It’s not lazy design just because you don’t like it.

I really liked Polymock in Guild Wars 1, but I did it without buying extra pieces. It’s an acquired taste, I admit. It took me quite a while to beat Grandmaster Hoff, but I loved it when I did.

Later, I did it on different characters to unlock the Asuran summons skills.

clay.7849:

Vayne.8563:

RebelYell.7132:

World PvE has been rewarding for me playing it as a duo. Having that much more DPS/boons/aggro division increases the sorts of risks we can take.

It’s a shame there are some anti-party mechanics in world PvE such renown hearts. I still wonder why they included those. They’re so counterintuitive to the dynamic world idea.

The included hearts specifically to slow people down, so they’d be where dynamic events spawn. That’s why you can’t do them faster…except sometimes you can.

There are hearts that interacting with an inanimate object spawns some sort of creature. If you activate that object, you can only do it once. Then you kill the creature. With two people doing it, you each activate it, so you get two kills instead of one, increasing the heart completion by about 30% time. It’s not as fast as other stuff, but it’s faster than soloing.

Lazy design is lazy design. Same with the 15 different currencies. And balance issues. And, well, most of the game.

You can say the words lazy design over and over, but that’s not what the hearts were. See, they did the whole dynamic event thing, and they play tested it. And people would just run around and not find events and run onto the next area, because there was no reason for them to wait for events, or they didn’t realize they should stay around.

Adding the hearts wasn’t a lazy design decision. It was a design decision to keep people in an area till events spawned. Orr has no hearts at all, and originally the whole game was supposed to be that way.

I’m not sure, now that people are trained to look for events that any new areas introduced in expansions will have hearts at all.

And, believe it or not, there are people who like the hearts. It’s also for people who like to have more of a breadcrumb trail of where to go.

Honestly, I don’t think one game is better than the other. Only better FOR ME.

They appeal to a different type of player. I couldn’t play WoW, even though I tried. I can understand what people like about it, without liking it myself.

Why does one have to be “better”?

Drew.1865:

Vayne.8563:

Rizzy.8293:

Vayne.8563:

Rizzy.8293:

Vayne.8563:

@Rizzy

ESO probably has a lot of potential, but all MMOs launch with bugs and lack of content. Every single one. At around the time that launches, Guild Wars 2 will be getting its act together. You can bet that a lot of people will try it, but I’m not convinced it will retain a lot of people.

It might…but it’s by no means a sure thing. The surest thing about a new MMO is that it will be buggy as hell, and it will not have enough content for the content locusts.

This is true but its been 7 months.

7 month is NOTHING to an MMO. It’s the bottom of the line time wise. Most MMOs today are forced to release six months early. They spend the first half a year catching up. This is what the game should have been on release.

It really does take a year or two before MMOs find themselves. And this is true of almost all of them. There has to be enough there to hold people till that happpens. Rift did it. And theyr’e doing okay.

In another year, this game will rock, but now…it’s just in it’s growing stage. It’s pretty typical.

Its been in development since the release of GW:EN, in 2007
Thats a long time for development.

7 months after release is a long time.
This game needs to start showing more polished features soon before more players start leaving.

JQ’s Malchor leap might as well be Undead territory since no one clears any of the outposts other than those needed to get to the temples, a stark contrast to when the game was new and players controlled all the contested WPs.

7 months after release is a long time by who’s standards? Most MMOs are forced to released early, because of financial pressure. The cost is just too much to bear without getting anything back to pay staff. Other MMOs launch early for strategic reasons. I firmly believe this game launched to beat out MoP, figuring there would be a lot more sales if WoW didn’t already have a bunch of people hooked on their new expansion. They were probably right, too.

So if they launched early, the first six months are playing catchup. Stuff like WvW culling issues and guesting didn’t launch until many months after launch. There are still features it was supposed to launch with that aren’t in the game, including the shooting gallery and the barroom brawl.

Development takes time. To you seven months is a long time, to a programmer, not so much. What I try to do is to compare MMOs to other MMOs, as far as development goes.

So much time in the first months goes to fixing unexpected bugs, and finishing up the stuff that should have been released, but never made it in.

Rift had the best MMO launch I’d ever seen (except for the security/hacking problem they had) but the world was really really small. There wasn’t that much to do. So they made a tiny game but it was highly polished. As soon as it launched and they started changing stuff, the bugs started creeping in.

Guild Wars 2 launched with a massive world, lots of stuff to do, but more bugs than anyone could reasonably expect in any game (except maybe a Bethesda game which is in a class of its own as bugs go).

In the end, saying 7 months is a long time is a relative statement. For playing, sure. For programming, not so much.

Nobody does bugs like Bethesda (fallout 3 new Vegas) anyone?
But even with all the bugs ESO I bet ends up being much more fun as far as combat and builds and what you can do than this game and probably won’t have DR.

I think you’ll find that games without DR end up being a lot less fun than you think they’ll be. Because most games that don’t have it end up with completely out of bounds inflation that don’t allow new players to ever catch up.

Rizzy.8293:

Vayne.8563:

Rizzy.8293:

Vayne.8563:

@Rizzy

ESO probably has a lot of potential, but all MMOs launch with bugs and lack of content. Every single one. At around the time that launches, Guild Wars 2 will be getting its act together. You can bet that a lot of people will try it, but I’m not convinced it will retain a lot of people.

It might…but it’s by no means a sure thing. The surest thing about a new MMO is that it will be buggy as hell, and it will not have enough content for the content locusts.

This is true but its been 7 months.

7 month is NOTHING to an MMO. It’s the bottom of the line time wise. Most MMOs today are forced to release six months early. They spend the first half a year catching up. This is what the game should have been on release.

It really does take a year or two before MMOs find themselves. And this is true of almost all of them. There has to be enough there to hold people till that happpens. Rift did it. And theyr’e doing okay.

In another year, this game will rock, but now…it’s just in it’s growing stage. It’s pretty typical.

Its been in development since the release of GW:EN, in 2007
Thats a long time for development.

7 months after release is a long time.
This game needs to start showing more polished features soon before more players start leaving.

JQ’s Malchor leap might as well be Undead territory since no one clears any of the outposts other than those needed to get to the temples, a stark contrast to when the game was new and players controlled all the contested WPs.

7 months after release is a long time by who’s standards? Most MMOs are forced to released early, because of financial pressure. The cost is just too much to bear without getting anything back to pay staff. Other MMOs launch early for strategic reasons. I firmly believe this game launched to beat out MoP, figuring there would be a lot more sales if WoW didn’t already have a bunch of people hooked on their new expansion. They were probably right, too.

So if they launched early, the first six months are playing catchup. Stuff like WvW culling issues and guesting didn’t launch until many months after launch. There are still features it was supposed to launch with that aren’t in the game, including the shooting gallery and the barroom brawl.

Development takes time. To you seven months is a long time, to a programmer, not so much. What I try to do is to compare MMOs to other MMOs, as far as development goes.

So much time in the first months goes to fixing unexpected bugs, and finishing up the stuff that should have been released, but never made it in.

Rift had the best MMO launch I’d ever seen (except for the security/hacking problem they had) but the world was really really small. There wasn’t that much to do. So they made a tiny game but it was highly polished. As soon as it launched and they started changing stuff, the bugs started creeping in.

Guild Wars 2 launched with a massive world, lots of stuff to do, but more bugs than anyone could reasonably expect in any game (except maybe a Bethesda game which is in a class of its own as bugs go).

In the end, saying 7 months is a long time is a relative statement. For playing, sure. For programming, not so much.

Paul.4081:

See, I knew you would. GG Vayne

I wasn’t even going to post in this thread until you referenced me. Then I felt sorta honorbound. lol

Paul.4081:

zenleto.6179:

Early months even ScottBroChill. Give it time and watch how it pans out. It may end up sucking beyond all imagining or being pretty kitten good. Some people already find it one or the other but time will tell.

I’m all but done on the game, I keep checking here for hope. I think if Anet after years of experience with GW1 were going to pull something amazing out of the bag they would have done it already. My original main is a Necro and from what I keep reading they still are getting no love while Warriors are getting constantly buffed (whats that about?)?

Ps. INB4 Vayne comes to defend all things Anet and tell you that you’re all wrong unless you agree with him :P

Vayne never said anything about you’re wrong unless I agree with you. Vayne simply said there are two sides to any story and some people don’t necessarily agree with that’s being posted. You should probably read what Vayne says more often, and you’d understand it better.

@OP, I agree with some of what you say. The combat system in Guild Wars 2 isn’t as deep as it was in Guild Wars 1. That’s a trade off. Guild Wars 1 became impossible to balance and it causes no end to troubles.

The story in Guild Wars 1 is very different to the story in Guild Wars 2, because you have the same characters with you all the way throughout the story, instead of a cast of changing characters. In general, there story is Guild Wars 1 was probably better…but some of the missions really really annoyed me, particularly mission bonuses that seemed to come out of left field (Blacktide Den, anyone?).

This game is not Guild Wars 1, and probably couldn’t be in an open world. But then I’d be comparing this game to Prophecies and not all of Guild Wars 1. That’s where I differ from most people.

I don’t think Prophecies had more to do or work for than this game. I think it had less. Just my opinion, of course.

But in my mind, until this game is a couple of years old, it can’t possibly be as good as three full Guild Wars 1 games and an expansion.

I definitely feel, though, that it’s better overall than Prophecies alone.

Rizzy.8293:

Vayne.8563:

@Rizzy

ESO probably has a lot of potential, but all MMOs launch with bugs and lack of content. Every single one. At around the time that launches, Guild Wars 2 will be getting its act together. You can bet that a lot of people will try it, but I’m not convinced it will retain a lot of people.

It might…but it’s by no means a sure thing. The surest thing about a new MMO is that it will be buggy as hell, and it will not have enough content for the content locusts.

This is true but its been 7 months.

7 month is NOTHING to an MMO. It’s the bottom of the line time wise. Most MMOs today are forced to release six months early. They spend the first half a year catching up. This is what the game should have been on release.

It really does take a year or two before MMOs find themselves. And this is true of almost all of them. There has to be enough there to hold people till that happpens. Rift did it. And theyr’e doing okay.

In another year, this game will rock, but now…it’s just in it’s growing stage. It’s pretty typical.