Guild Wars 2

OP you claim Anet isn’t doing it right because they have less players than the most popular MMO of all time? I have a better question. How many millions of people have tried WoW and walked away from it, because they didn’t like it. More or less than the number still playing?

Even the number 9 million is misleading because a lot of those people being counted paid for a year of WoW to get D3 for free and those people are counted as still playing, but in fact, I know many who aren’t. I wonder if that works out to millions.

Did you realize Guild Wars 2 has become the fastest selling MMO of all time? At least that’s what’s been published in several places. They’ve sold 3 million copies in under six months. That’s staggering. That means more than a million copies since launch.

You also make the staggering claim that a product that has less players is worse than a product that has more players. That’s a tremendous flaw in logic. There are more people who watch soccer world wide than watch tennis. But no one says tennis should be changed into soccer. There are tons of people who watch tennis.

There are tons of people who play games like Skyrim and Dragon Age. Possibly more people than those who currently play WoW even.

Now, would WoW have all those players if it didn’t come out when it did? If it didn’t have the history. How many people are playing because their friends are playing? Look at how many games have tried to copy WoW and failed. Not necessarily because they didn’t do it right, but because a percentage of people are tired of that whole thing. I dislike the holy trinity immensely, I dislike gear grind and I dislike being lead around by the nose.

Guild Wars 2 doesn’t lead you around by the nose as much as WoW and that’s hard for some people. But that doesn’t make it worse. It makes it a better game, from my perspective. Sure there are people that prefer WoW. There are also people who prefer American Idol and Big Brother to better television shows. What does that mean?

Generally the more people who love something, the more dumbed down it is.

I play male and female characters, depending on how I want to play them. I’m not an RPer, in the sense that most people think of RP, but I am an immersion player. I like to immerse myself in the game and the world. In my head, my characters have depth, even though I don’t talk in character in game. But I do tend to play the game as if the world was real. Like I’d thank an NPC as soon as I’d thank a player.

Certain characters just feel more right to me being a certain gender. I big burly hammer melee guy, I’m likely to make a guy. But if I were going for a nimble, lithe, ranger character, that could be male or female. Some characters seem to suggest one gender or the other to me, and so that’s what I play.

But then, I write a lot of fiction and I’m used to being inside character’s heads. And since I have both male and female characters in my fiction, it’s not a huge step to see why I’d have characters of both genders.

The problem here, in my opinion, is that you played WoW for many years. Right there, that’s the issue. That’s great. You’re an expert. I played WoW too…and couldn’t continue to play it, because I didn’t like it. For all it’s popularity, WoW has turned off as many or more players than it appealed to.

In its MMO Manifesto, Anet made a claim. “If you like MMOs you’ll want to check out Guild Wars 2, and if you hate MMOs, you’ll REALLY want to check out Guild Wars 2”.

See, not everyone loves MMOs the way they are. So the people who DO like them are actually less qualified to comment on what’s going on in Guild Wars 2 than the people who don’t. And I don’t like the way MMOs were before. Guild Wars 2 is my main game and it’s an MMO I can finally play long term.

The very things you want to change, are things I don’t want to change. You’ve been programmed by WoW to think that an RPG (and this is an MMORPG) MUST be about gear. Gear, gear, gear. Loot, loot, loot. Phat Lootz. Ummm no.

Dragon Age was a pretty popular game, and wasn’t gear based. Skyrim was pretty popular and not gear based. These are RPGs. By making an MMO that really isn’t gear based, Guild Wars 2 has done the MMO genre a favor. Changing it to make it more like WoW would destroy everything that’s good about this game, and lose a lot of players in the process, including me.

You make another claim. You claim the community is shrinking. My experience is exactly the opposite. The community is growing.

What we’ve lost is the people who don’t get what Anet is trying to do here. And since you people have dozens of games to choose from, that’s fine. There are tons of games that cater to your style of play.

But Guild Wars 2, at this moment, is the ONLY MMO that caters to my style of play.

You may be an expert on WoW and MMOs, but you clearly don’t have much of an idea of what Anet is trying to do here, and why it would appeal to a huge subsection of the playerbase.

I got 3 of them today in the Twlight Arbor Explorable mode.

It won’t happen for the same reason you can’t make characters look exactly how you want in customization. It ruins how the world looks to many players.

You want to look how you want to look and that’s fair enough. But Anet set limits on character creation so you couldn’t look ridiculous. Looking ridiculous would ruin the immersion of many people. As it is, I have to ignore half the names I see, because they’re ridiculous. But I can turn off names.

Anet is creating not just a game, but a virtual world. They’ve said it themselves. They’re in the business of world building. And in that world, casters wear light armor, because that’s the rules of the world. It’s not just about how you look, it’s about how other people see what’s going on in the world.

A lot of people don’t want to see mages in heavy armor, or warriors in cloth. It would be unsettling. Fantasy has certain acceptible sensibilities that make the world seem more real, and certain unacceptible ones. It’s acceptable for example, for a woman in armor to not cover most of her body and still get protection. It’s a normal part of the genre, whether we like it or not. It bothers some people, but it’s there.

But changing something like who can appear to wear what armor class will visually affect how the game looks. It would be incongruous within the rules of this virtual world.

Personal freedom is never going to trump the aesthetics of the game, because it’s not your game…it’s Anet’s. What you’re paying for is access to the world.

And it would completely screw over WvW, where half the game is quickly identifying the possible professions you’d be facing.

I’m pretty happy with the game right now. It’s not perfect, but I see the potential it represents and I’m happy to wait and watch as it fulfills that potential. Already it’s more fun than I’ve ever had in an MMO.

I don’t know. Last month it was 7 fractals. I completed them in one day, leaving me 29 days to play the way I wanted. It wasn’t that hard. Sure it’s annoying if you’re not a big dungeon guy (and I’m not), but it’s also not like it’s that hard.

Five dungeons this month take longer than 7 fractals last month, but you know, it’s like a bit over 1 dungeon a week. With a halfway decent group, AC takes about half an hour to complete. You can make that run five times if you like. That’s about 2.5 hours to do part of your monthly.

Is it annoying? For some people, I’m sure it is. But it’s a big reward, it requires a bit of sacrifice. Play with friends and try to have a good time, and it might not be as bad as you think.

It’s a terrible and loaded question. The thing is if NOBODY got loot, it would be a completely different game to start with.

People get loot to buy stuff that helps differentiate them from other players. It’s not about the loot itself for a lot of people but the look. Do people play FPS for the loot? Not many, I think. But plenty of people play FPSs.

A lot of it has to with the feeling of progression. As long as you felt like you were progressing somehow, it wouldn’t matter if there was loot, because no one would have it.

I’d play any game I enjoyed playing, loot or no loot. People played tetris for years, and there was no loot. But the game then needs to be designed around not having loot. You simply can’t take one thing out of the equation and ask that kind of question if you want the answer to be anything resembling meaningful.

Doing a dungeon does not have to mean using a pug. I do dungeons with my guild. You need to find either four other guildies who also want the monthly, or you need to make some friends who like doing dungeons.

Join or make a secondary guild just to do dungeons, and you don’t have to pug when they come up.

I don’t mind dungeons at all, but I hate pugging. So I run dungeons with friends. Doing dungeons with pugs is a whole lot worse than doing dungeons.

Black Lion Salvage kits will guarantee that you keep your runes…but you’ll lose the old armor.

Underwater combat in some professions is much worse than in others. An engineer underwater, using a grenade kit (which is directly targetable instead of ground target while underwater) is pure win. My warrior does well underwater too, particularly with a spear.

On my mesmer, however, I’m not thrilled with underwater combat and don’t enjoy it nearly as much.

Without the change, dyes would have been worth a lot less on the auction house and wouldn’t contribute to the economy at all. Now if you want a black dye, you have to get one for each character. It makes them more salable and raises their price.

Those who play the marketplace should be quite happy that dyes aren’t account bound.

The story in Guild Wars 2 isn’t bad. It’s not Shakespeare either, but it’s not bad. It’s fine. Considering most MMOs don’t have a story at all (they just have lore), it’s a step in the right direction.

Compare it with something like TSW, which has a decent story and voice acting, but doesn’t voice your character, so everything ends up being a monologue. Since most MMOs have pretty much on story at all, the story in Guild Wars 2 is one of the best stories in any MMO, even if you don’t like it.

The limitations of the format account for part of the problem with the story, but the words universally accepted, or your earlier use of the word objective are just wrong. What you’re saying is subjective and since I don’t consider it bad, it’s not universally accepted.

Hyperbole remains hyperbole.

Not perfect but the best MMO I’ve played to date.

Saying that dailies should reward you just for logging in sound a bit entitled to me. Dailies are there for a reason and giving you free stuff for logging in should really have never been one of them. Not to mention the fact that none of the new dailies are particularly hard or time consuming. If you want them, you’ll do them. It’s that simple.

There are plenty of people who felt the old dailies were broken and I’m one of them. They were completely taken for granted. It was the same every day and you always got them. I’d much rather have dailies that require me to do something different each day. It takes 20, maybe 30 minutes to do these dailies. Anyway who chooses not to do them, well that’s a choice.

Doesn’t mean everyone was happy with them before they changed though.

I got my precursor by sheer luck. Dropped from the chest at the end of the Karka event, but I agree with the OP at least in substance. It shouldn’t depend on RNG. Not for something that much a part of the process. It’s too frustrating to be believed. It’s an artificial way to keep people playing and it pretty much sucks.

I’m a fan of the game, and Anet generally, but in this case, I think they got it wrong. Fortunately, the precusor that dropped for me is one I need for one of my characters. If it weren’t for that, I probably wouldn’t have even gone for a legendary the way it’s laid out now anyway.

mstanton.3561:

I would have agreed with this a few months ago before the fractal implement. Now if you want top tier gear you not only have to grind fotm you also have to complete monthly and dailies to get the highest order gear. If ascended gear was on par with exotic stat wise with only the added agony resistance I wouldnt be looking for a new mmo to play.

A difference that makes no difference is no difference. Content isn’t gated by these drops. People are so conditioned by other MMOs they think BIS gear is the only way to play a game, and if they don’t have it, they’re completely disadvantaged. And in most games, they’d be right, but not here.

I can do everything in the game without a single piece of ascended gear. The ONLY exception would be the higher level fractals, and that’s where you’d get the gear you need anyway.

I WvW, run dungeons, play anywhere in the world quite easily in exotics.

I’d agree with the OP if the content was gated. That is, if you needed that backpack to do anything. But since I can do anything in the game without that backpack, I don’t see an issue here.

Most games that have gear grind gate content. They say you can’t enter this dungeon without having a stat at X or some sort of requirement. Anet doesn’t do that. They have a level requirement on dungeons and that’s it. You can go in with green gear, blue gear, white gear if you wanted.

And since you can do dungeons in green gear, and rare is so cheap, which is even better, I hardly think this is an issue.

I don’t have a single piece of ascended gear, and I can go anywhere and do anything.

I’ve been pretty luck since the patch… luckier than I was before the patch. I was beginning to feel like Anet was punishing me for something, since guildies were doing just fine. Since the patch, I’ve been getting ectos quite regularly.

Yep, but Zhaitan is dead in the personal story, so it makes sense that it’s eased up some. Less undead, not quite as strong. From a narration point of view, it’s fine.

I never found Orr that challenging either (and no, I didn’t play a warrior, I’ve played ranger, mesmer and engie) but I still like the change. Before it wasn’t really hard, so much as annoying (as someone else said). I didn’t have trouble killing stuff, I just had to kill a ton of unnecessary stuff to go to where I wanted. I still got there, just more slowly.

But it wasn’t hard. I don’t see this change as being negative.

Nope. You could have transferred for free before the last update, but now you have to pay. Anet gave us a good amount of time to transfer for free prior to this update.

I don’t see any reason to call PVPers whiners. I’m sure many PVPers never even go to forums, and the biggest percentage of them lurk, just like in any other forum. I’m a PVe’er and I have friends who are PVPers who don’t whine nearly as much as I do. lol

But the real answer to the question is that the PVP patch is coming in February, and that will have stuff for you guys. No reason to give you this stuff, when you’ll have your own stuff in a month or so.

You can get one a day from your dailies and starting with the February monthly, you can get an extra 10 per month by doing that.

dimgl.4786:

Vayne.8563:

Because GW 1 was very well balanced. It was so easy to balance all those skills. What you might not be realizing is that GW 1 was a nightmare for some people, because of the number of skills. People didn’t know how to make builds. A lot of people tried the game, failed heavily and went on to different games. Anet doesn’t want that to happen again.

Now people are forced to take a self-heal. They’re forced to have at least some skills that work together. Sure it doesn’t suit you, personally. Doesn’t particularly suit me either. But that doesn’t mean it’s not better from a design point of view, or better for the game.

The combination of the number of skills in Guild Wars 1 and the second profession mechanic made the game virtually impossible to balance. It screwed with PvP and PVe became so easy it was meaningless, down to the point where you could use a Rit to solo farm ectos in the underworld.

I too miss the skill selection from Guild Wars 1, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a good reason for not having it in Guild Wars 2.

Omg! A game that makes players think?! SAY IT AIN’T SO!

I love games that make you think. I also recognize that the kind of game Guild Wars 2 was going to be depends on traffic and, unfortunately, if you make people think, you’ll seriously limit the number of people playing the game. Guild Wars 1 had 20% of the staff of Guild Wars 2. This is a much bigger project and has to appeal to a much wider audience.

WoW doesn’t make anyone think and has a zillion players. Guild Wars 1 did make people think and had far less (though many just as devoted). I’m a Guild Wars 1 fan and loved the game.

But I’m also aware that a game that aims to be mainstream can’t make people think too much, because there are fewer smart people than average people (pretty much by definition lol).

I don’t get some of you at all. I play this game with no ascended gear and, I don’t know about you, but I do dungeons, WvW, run around Orr. There’s NOTHING gated in this game that makes you grind if you don’t want to. Don’t have a ring or a backpack? So? This is all in your mind. You don’t need this stuff to play the game.

More to the point, most of the dailies are stuff I get just doing other stuff anyway. I mean rezzing people? Really? Crafting 10 ingots?

Grind is a state of mind. I played Guild Wars 1 for five years and PLENTY of people grinded in Guild Wars. They farmed ectos in the underworld, they did voltaic spear runs, speed clears of dungeons. They farmed faction for Luxon and Kurzick rank. Anyone who thinks there was no grind in Guild Wars 1 probably didn’t play as much as they think. But all that grind was voluntary.

The same is true here. You CAN grind, if you want. Or you can just play the game. Without even trying to get dailies, 90% of the time I got it without knowing I was going to. It just happened. I’d go around, kill stuff, do events and by the end of my play time I had my daily.

Today my daily consisted of 13 kill types, 60 kills, 10 rezzes, 15 dodges and 20 gathering.

The gather, and 60 kills is a no brainer. Dodging 15 times…in the course of a gaming session I’ll dodge a lot more than that. It’s not really hard. And NPCs are lying around dead all over the place…in end zones, in outposts that have been taken over, in certain hearts and events, so rezz ten of them. How in the name of Lyssa is that grind? Kill types? The only way you won’t get 13 kill types is if you never leave Orr. You can get them in WvW, or PVe pretty much wherever you are. Don’t forget to kill mosquitos, rabbits and those other zero level creatures, because they count.

I saw some people were complaining about a crafting daily. You can get it by making 10 of any kind of ingot. It requires almost no time to farm copper or leather, just by playing in a starter zone and then make your stuff.

I just don’t get it. You know, I’ve played games with grind. And what made those games grind was the gating of content. If you wanted to do dungeons in Rift, you HAD TO have a minimum stat. You couldn’t even queue for the dungeon if you didn’t exceed that stat. So to get into the dungeon and experience that content, you had to grind. You had to get the required gear. That situation simply doesn’t exist in Guild Wars 2.

This game isn’t going in the wrong direction. People simply have forgotten what actual grind is.

stalks.2703:

Syeria.4812:

Solid Gold.9310:

Nope don’t like it, what are they thinking of.

Play the game the way you want to…. nope.

It just looks like even more grind.

I normally play in a party with a mate, we do stuff together, the old dailies were not a problem, and if I hadn’t finished them by the time he logged of, I went off and made them up.

I won’t be bothering with them now, way to take part of the game away from me ArenaNet.

You do know that if you don’t like the dailies, you don’t have to complete them, right?

The point is the old version of dailies, we did like. It wasn’t broken, why was it “fixed”?

They also permanantly plastered the UI with a “daily counter”, begging you to complete it. And I think everyone likes daily rewards.

It was broken. It was broken in that it ceased to even be something we thought about anymore. For some people the daily is about getting free karma, and that’s it. But from a game design view, it was certainly broken. It was mindless. It was just a free gift to anyone who was interested. Not really good game design.

I welcome the changes to the dailies. So you have to think a bit more, and go out of your comfort zone? I don’t see a problem here.

Bugs aside, I don’t see anything wrong with this. It’s not like any of it is hard. Rezzing 10 NPCs? Crafting ten ingots from copper ore (or any other kind)? Some people have self-comboed to make their daily.

It’s really not as bad as some people are painting it. And in a lot of ways, it’s good for the game.

Good to see a positive post. I too am happy with the changes in this patch, particuarly changes to the fractals, and the new dailies. I’m also happy for the laurels. I haven’t yet run a dungeon where you can’t rez while someone’s on combat, but I think that will do something positive for the game.

Instead of people being able to death-zerg a boss, they’ll actually have to learn how to defeat the boss, you know, like for real.

Good job Anet.

This game has tons of stuff out for a game that’s less than six months old. I played Rift for the first six months and the armor was dreadful. They didn’t have different dungeon sets for each dungeon. They didn’t have cultural armor to speak of. Everything looked like your starter gear. Stuff will come. That’s it.

If you’re not patient enough to wait for it, go play another game, until more stuff is released. It’s not like you’re paying a monthly fee to play, after all. It’s not like you can’t pick it up again in six months when there’s a ton of stuff to do.

This game, in my opinion, was released early because they wanted to get it out before a certain competing game was released, and Anet has been playing catchup ever since. This happens with just about every MMO. It comes out, a few months later, people say there’s not enough to do, a year later, there’s more to do. I’ve never seen an MMO that hasn’t had this problem.

Full servers aren’t full all the time. Wait until a time of day when the server isn’t full and join the server then. It might mean waiting up late one day or getting up early, but in my opinion it’s worth it. I’d rather be on a busier server myself.

I can see positives and negatives in this. Sure, it would be exciting, but one of the issues of not having enough people in certain zones at certain hours make this risky. Because as it stands now, if the boss is in one place, I can avoid the boss if there aren’t enough people to take it down, which is sometimes the case.

I live in Australia, so during the times I play, there are often less people around in any given zone. By keeping the bosses localized, you give people like me a chance to play the rest of the game.

It works for a well advertised event, because there are enough people for it to work for.

I do agree it would be exciting when it did work, but I think the cons may outweigh the pros.

The people posting in this thread act as if most players are farmers. I play this game every day. I have an 80 and 40. I haven’t noticed any appreciable drop in my income from normal playing.

I understand that some people believe because they play a certain way and they’re frustrated, that people are so frustrated by this they are leaving in droves, but I asked around in my guild of 80 and no one has noticed anything at all but this thread.

Honestly, while this does affect a percentage of players, it’s a pretty small percentage. And I have confidence it will be fixed….that numbers will be adjusted.

Everyone wants everything now, today, but that’s not the way programming works. Changing one element affects changing others and everything has to go through a process, including testing on a test server of some kind.

If your’e really frustrated, take a break and come back later, but don’t make it sound like 20-30% of the people playing this game are farmers who are all going to desert because it takes a couple of months to fix a bug that affects a small percentage of players.

It’s a new and ambitious game with a lot of stuff that has to be fixed. This is just one of those things.

If you use an invisible bag, and keep your minipet in it, then it won’t get sent to the bank when you deposit all collectibles.

Currently, there’s an option to turn off map markers for various things, including zone completion rewards.

As it currently stands, if you turn off the zone completion icons, you can’t see any zone completion icons even after you’ve found them.

I’m guessing that a large number of people who would use this feature, probably most of them, are turning off the zone completion icons so that they can find everything themselves.

The problem with the system as it stands is that you don’t see points of interest, vistas or skill challenges that you’ve already found. For an explorer this means you have to keep a notebook and pen and paper by the side of your desk and try to record where each way point is.

There should be an explorer mode where you turn off map icons until they’re discovered, afterwhich they appear. This would allow old school RPGs players to play the game as explorers, much more than what exists now.