Guild Wars 2

I oppose all forms of farming in MMO’s.

Because the idea of ‘farming’ is quite literally the worst thing that’s ever happened to MMO’s (or any game) in the entire history of gaming.

Again – I’m not saying that getting the best gear should be easy. I’m all for locking it behind extremely challenging content.

What I don’t want to do is to repeat that content over and over – i.e., farming.

Purple enemies in dungeons should drop an dungeon armor skin for that dungeon guaranteed, for example.

Legendary weapons should have a chance of dropping from world bosses, for example.

I shouldn’t have to “run” dungeons over and over and over to get something.

I should merely have to play it 1-3 times to get what I want – then move on to the next challenge.

If that meant actually making the content harder – I’d be fine with that.

I’m not complaining about difficulty – I’m complaining about repetitiveness. The grind.

The farming.

Stop the farming.

Gaming is not a second job. It’s not a chore.

It’s a kitten game, for god’s sake.

You are supposed to have fun.

Now, if “farming” is your idea of fun, then the changes I propose would in no way stop you from doing that.

You could still kill the same thing over and over and over again, if that’s your thing.

But, for those of us who like to experience content a couple times (at most), and then move on to something new, with the stuff we got from the last encounter – well, we would be able to do that.

Without farming for it.

What I’m asking for is an end to farming – even if it meant raising the difficulty.

Ok, I just logged in to check the TP, so for example:

Yakkington’s and Reyna’s are 8 gold per piece right now, ’Zerker’s is almost 7.

That’s what I mean.

On average, exotic armor runs about 30-40 gold or so (give or take) just for the armor set.

Add in a full set of superior runes – Exuberance is almost 16g per rune, and Sigil of Bursting is about 16 1/2

Labjax.2465:

ipan.4356:

On average, each piece comes to about 4-5 gold per piece.

But I mean like, what gear are you trying to buy and from where? Typical exotics off the TP are not usually that expensive, from what I can recall?

I don’t know what you mean by typical, the prices vary depending on skin and stats.

I’m just giving an average that I end up paying – sometimes if I’m willing to wait, I’ll make a custom offer and pay a little less.

I’m just saying that on average, most of my exotic armor has cost between 4-5 gold per piece.

Labjax.2465:

ipan.4356:

A full set of exotic gear is about 30-40 gold.

O.o what exotic gear are you shopping for bro?

On average, each piece comes to about 4-5 gold per piece.

Regardless, you guys are focusing on the wrong problem.

My point isn’t about how hard it is or isn’t to get gear – I would prefer a game where gear like that was obtained from challenging content. I prefer gear to drop directly from bosses, or chests.

That’s not the point.

The point is what they force you to do to get it.

You can argue all day that no one is forcing you to do it, but the point is what else is there to do?

Ideally, as you play new content in the game, you should naturally just acquire whatever you need – whether this is the gear itself, or the currency (of any kind) that you need to get that gear.

You shouldn’t be required to repeat any content more than 3 times to get something.

I have repeated content hundreds of times. And I have quite a bit of exotic gear, but not quite complete on all toons. Almost there.

The point is that cool loot, like Superior Runes and Sigils, Exotic weapons and armor, should drop directly from bosses and boss chests more often – I haven’t seen a single one.

The best I ever get are a few rares, which occasionally sell for 30+ silver – which I then eventually turn into Exotics – after repeated runs doing the same content over and over and over again.

My point is that we shouldn’t have to run the same content as many times as we are required to get the same gear (or the money to get it).

It’s not challenging, when all you’re doing is farming.

It’s just repetitive. It’s a time sink.

Do you think it challenges my gaming skills, or my patience, to do dungeon runs over and over to just to accumulate gold?

There’s no challenge in that – it’s all farming.

I want a reduction in farming, because it isn’t challenging.

And I want more new content on a regular basis. NOt this LS crap – that whole thing is just another zerg fest. There’s almost no challenge there, either.

I want more zones. More dungeons. More solo content.

New stuff to do, while saving up the money to get all that other stuff.

In short, new content. Lots of new content.

Like double the size of the world, new content.

gobax.6185:

Man, players these days wants everything to be handed to them in a silver platter.

Tbh, an mmo without farming / grinding is not an mmo at all.

You guys are just lazy. If you farm for 2hours in frost gorge you can get like 30gold and buy an entire exotic set for your character. 7 chars to gear with full exotic isnt that hard.

Ascended is a different story though. But imo ascended stuffs are only needed for higher level fractals. You cam basically get through everything in game with just full exotics.

Legendaries are legendaries for a reason. They are super hard to get and only the hardcore players should have the right to wield them. That is their ultimate reward for sticking to the game and actually putting an effort on their target goal.

If you guys really hate grinding, i suggest you guys go play f2p games in the market and just buy everything from item shop and become godlike in a day.

30 gold huh?

Last time I checked, a Sigil of Generosity was about 70 gold. So you’re “buy a set” for 30 gold get’s me 1/2 a sigil.

A full set of exotic gear is about 30-40 gold.

Then there’s the full set of runes you need for it – which can run anywhere from 1 gold to 50 gold or more, depending on the rune set.

And then you need 4 sigils.

And that’s just to run one build for the rest of your career.

You need to repeat it if you plan to change builds at all, ever.

Now, repeat for every character you play.

In over a year of playing, I’ve never seen an exotic drop once.

Tachenon.5270:

It’s really very simple. I have a ‘no cash for trash’ policy. If Anet (or any other dev team) wants to get in touch and find out what I what I will or won’t pay for, all they gotta do is ask. That’s the only communication that is necessary.

Dramatization:

Q: Will you give us money if we give you ascended gear?
A: No.

Q: Will you give us money for more Living Story?
A: No.

Q: Will you give us money for Guild Missions your Guild will never be able to play?
A: No.

Q: Will you give us money if we give you Megasuffer?
A: No.

Q: Will you give us money if we give you a new trait system?
A: Details.
Q: Like so (provide details).
A: Hell, no.

Q: Will you give us money if we ditch Living Story and make an expansion that will effectively double the size of the explorable game world and also more than double the amount of available content, including, among other things, new races and professions and weapon-independent skills and free pony rides?
A: YES.

Q: Will you give us money for a petless ranger?
A: No, that should have been an option all along.

Q: Will you give us money if we increase the level cap?
A: Bye.
Q: (perks up) Buy?
A: No, but if you lower the level cap to 20 like it should have been all along I’ll consider adding GW2 to my second Guild Wars account.

Now this is something I like to see.

I’ll add:

Q: Will you give us money if, in addition to the new content listed above (dungeons, zones, classes, weapons, skills, etc.), we also add large numbers of new additions to the costume shop?
A: Yes, I will support the game by buying costumes and skins, but only contingent upon you also releasing lots more content.

Ayrilana.1396:

Take away grind in MMO’s and then what else is there for players to do?

The weird thing is that so few people question this.

Why is this normal?

Why should games be slot machines?

Why would we pay someone else so that we can repeat repetitive tasks?

Games should be challenging – rewards should reflect the level of challenge.

But repeating mindless tasks simply so you can pass a gate and to repeat a different mindless task is not a game – it’s a chore.

Games shouldn’t be chores – they’re games!

And I would start holding developers to a higher standard.

This idea, that ‘this is just the way it is, and all MMO’s are like this’ is what allows MMO developers to get away with it.

Stop accepting the status quo. Stop accepting normal.

Challenge it and light a fire under their kitten . Get up and make them do something about it.

Demand better.

Epic loot was supposed to be indicative of completing epic challenges – hence, once you defeated a really difficult boss, you got an incredibly powerful weapon for doing so.

It’s an indication that you have done something very difficult.

Not an indication of how much time you spent repeating easy content.

Legendaries currently cost, what, like about 3K gold or so (varying depending on weapon)?

Anyone can farm mats, or dungeons, or anything else until they have 3K gold and then buy a legendary.

You can get anything in this game through farming (or buying gems).

But can you get anything by achieving something difficult (such as defeating a really hard boss?).

Nope.

This game is all about farming – it’s not about difficulty or challenge. It’s a treadmill/slot machine.

That would be cool, but don’t hold your breath.

The whole problem is that progress is attained by farming at all.

Is this an adventure game, or is it Farmville?

The Manifesto promised that we wouldn’t have to farm to play.

But all of the end game rewards require the most hideous sort of farming – it doesn’t matter if you’re farming Orr, dungeons, fractals, or moas.

Farming is farming is farming.

Farming is not exploring.

It’s not defeating epic bosses.

It’s not defeating other players in combat.

It’s farming.

It’s repeating the same thing over and over and over to collect enough crumbs to get something.

I think that if an MMO makes you farm to get what you want – then it should be called Farmville.

BlueZone.4236:

You guys are wrong. Destiny is the next MMO golden child (and it’s only semi-MMO and on consoles), with 853k concurrent players during its beta.
That’s compared to GW2’s beta which only had 400k concurrent players at its peak.

Destiny does look really good – but I’m not a console player.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Creatures gain an exploration XP bonus when they have not been killed recently. Try killing yellow creatures you find on the less traveled areas of the map; they don’t get killed very often.

So, what you’re saying is, ‘Go kill 10 rats and bring their pelts back to me’?

In short, what I believe you are saying, is that you want to explore – fighting whatever you find along the way, and just be free to roam and see the world.

But you want to gain experience and loot while you do this, because you want to be able to keep up, and not fall behind the power curve as you go?

Is that it, in a nutshell?

GW2 promised explorers a rewarding experience.

I’d say they did a very mediocre job of it.

I’ve experienced nothing but disappointment from Anet.

First time play through was kinda cool, because everything was new.

Then it got stale by the time I started my 5th or 6th character.

I hardly log in anymore, and I don’t expect anything great to come anytime soon.

Of course GW2 has grind – I don’t even have all my exotics on all 8 of my characters yet, because it’s so expensive to buy them (on average, getting a full set of exotic gear, plus runes and sigils can run anywhere from 50-150 gold per character – it takes me about 2 weeks to farm 75 gold, and I often break for months at a time).

chemiclord.3978:

Ah, so Star Citizen is the next “golden child” of MMOs, I see.

(yawn) We’ll see in a year after release when the locusts abandon it in droves for not giving them everything they want and nothing they don’t.

See also; every other MMO in existance.

That’s totally fair. Just as GW2 was once that ‘Golden Child’ as you put it.

But I don’t see anything else on the horizon – except maybe Archeage, and although it is sand-boxy, everything else about it says, ‘generic fantasy MMO’ to me, so I’m not interested.

Beyond Star Citizen, I am waiting to see what people will come up with for the Oculus Rift (and, btw, Star Citizen has some partial content for the Oculus Rift, with plans to slowly – over time – incorporate more into the game).

Well, I don’t quite agree about the ‘difficulty’ in creating new content – but I don’t entirely disagree, either.

What I’m saying, to the comments about how ‘hard’ it is to push out new content: this is true in principle, but I think that companies don’t do enough – in other words, I think they could actually push out more than they do – but they are constrained by marketing strategies, often strategies that fail in the long run.

Personally, I’d prefer a game where they put out a bunch of new zones (actually, I’d prefer if there weren’t any ‘zones’ to begin with, but rather a seamless world – but that’s another issue) that were partially completed (don’t need ‘heart’ quests, or DE’s, etc.) at first, and the went back and added a little every month.

I know that some people wouldn’t like this – I can already hear your arguments about ‘empty zones’, and I don’t care. I am simply expressing my own view, that I wouldn’t mind, if partially complete zones were added to the game on a monthly basis, and then more and more things were added to those zones over time (as in, they could add a DE or a dungeon or a heart quest, or whatever – slowly, over time – but release the zone itself sooner).

This I would find highly acceptable, and better than the current system.

But that’s just me.

In addition, I think it would seriously behoove Anet to start researching procedural generation – I am aware of how much work it takes to create content, and I believe that judicious use of procedural generation could take a lot of that pressure off the developers.

This is just a guess, but I would think that the first place they could do this is in something like Fractals – or perhaps a new dungeon system that is very similar.

They could use procedural generation to give us an ‘infinite dungeon’ – it wouldn’t have to be terribly complex, just have tons of different tilesets/environments, a huge selection of enemies (much larger bestiary than is currently available), it has to be soloable (scale the content to group size is ideal), and a randomized layout.

Kind of like what Diablo 3 is doing with their rifts.

This would ensure that there is always quasi-new content (as in randomized) available to ‘grind’, while they are working on more serious content, like the living story.

It would satisfy content kitten, and keep the complainers busy, buying enough time for the dev’s to put out the world and story content that they really want to do.

I think that is all it would take: an infinite randomized dungeon, with appropriate rewards (bosses should have a chance to drop exotics).

In terms of communicating, once again I have to point to Star Citizen – CIG has something called Around the Verse and 10 For the Chairman and Letter from the Chairman.

They have, possibly, the best communication I’ve ever seen from an MMO developer.

The best.

Check it out (I bet Anet deletes this, or reprimands me for posting a link to another game – when they should be using it as an example to model themselves after):

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/

@Vayne

I’m hoping Star Citizen will be that game. I’ve seen pretty amazing things so far.

Jack and…?

tolunart.2095:

Vayne.8563:

Most sandbox games so far seem to require a bigger commitment. Most people don’t have the time. The age of the average gamer is going up.

Sandbox games are definitely a niche product. WoW took MMOs somewhat mainstream and improvements to console systems (like adding an online service) helped bring a lot of non-traditional MMO gamers into the genre. But while they can show a profit, there just isn’t a big enough market for more than a handful of sandbox games. They are essentially the framework of a game, a setting and tools players use to create their own games, a lot like the rulebooks for the original Dungeons and Dragons games.

As time goes on and these tools improve, it will become easier to create content or generate content randomly that makes sense. Sandbox games can become more appealing, but when the stock market’s love for new technology crashed around 2000 or so it set back development of new tech quite a bit. So we’re still 5-10 years away from a leap forward in technology that could do that.

It’s interesting, I agree with some of your points, except the last one about being 5-10 years away – I believe we are much closer.

Somebody, at some point, is going to figure out how to seamlessly blend user generated content with procedural generation, they’re going to do it in the Oculus Rift, and it’s going to be the biggest thing since sliced WoWbread.

A game that continues to generate content as fast as you consume it is going to be wildly addictive, perhaps even illegal in some States.

Vayne.8563:

ipan.4356:

Another thing that occurred to me is that a game under development has like, a lot of people working on it, right? Like wasn’t the Anet team 150 people or something?

So, they get this huge team together, spend five years putting a game together, and then what? Do you think the Anet team is still 150 people?

No, I seriously doubt it. There’s a dozen. Maybe two dozen people.

All the effort goes into launching the game, but no one thinks about maintaining that level of production for the game’s life.

Why not?

Ok, maybe it doesn’t need 150 people. But with all the groundwork laid already, couldn’t they keep teams working around the clock creating new content (meaning: new maps/zones, new dungeons, new weapons and armor, new costumes, new enemies, new skills, new classes, new races).

We want a constantly expanding world – not a treadmill. Not a hamster wheel. Not a slot machine.

A.
World.
To.
Explore.

That’s the ONLY thing that will keep people coming back, Anet.

Anet didn’t lay off people. They hired more people.

Then what are they doing?

Another thing that occurred to me is that a game under development has like, a lot of people working on it, right? Like wasn’t the Anet team 150 people or something?

So, they get this huge team together, spend five years putting a game together, and then what? Do you think the Anet team is still 150 people?

No, I seriously doubt it. There’s a dozen. Maybe two dozen people.

All the effort goes into launching the game, but no one thinks about maintaining that level of production for the game’s life.

Why not?

Ok, maybe it doesn’t need 150 people. But with all the groundwork laid already, couldn’t they keep teams working around the clock creating new content (meaning: new maps/zones, new dungeons, new weapons and armor, new costumes, new enemies, new skills, new classes, new races).

We want a constantly expanding world – not a treadmill. Not a hamster wheel. Not a slot machine.

A.
World.
To.
Explore.

That’s the ONLY thing that will keep people coming back, Anet.

Behellagh.1468:

In the end it’s

1) A business
2) It follows the creator’s vision unless it conflicts with 1.
3) Player input is welcome unless it conflicts with 1 or 2.

Yea, it’s very Asimov 3 rules but you get my point. They provide an entertainment product. It’s up to us as consumers to choose to embrace or reject it. As long as income and whatever metric they are using to determine “ratings” stay within expected limits, don’t expect major changes to conform with existing MMO tropes the game went out of it’s way to reject.

And maybe that’s not actually a successful formula…after all, if this is all game developers (and Anet is not alone in following this), and games keep failing, then something must be wrong, right?

Here’s the rub: I have found that when developers actually make a game from a place of intense passion for gaming, people love it.

When developers make a game from the viewpoint of business – players hate it.

In the second case, developers attempt to apply psychological conditioning (Skinner boxes, casino mentality) to games to generate revenue, but very few people actually want that…they just do it to fill the time until something better (or different) comes out.

This cycle repeats over and over, year after year.

At the end of the day I think players just want a gigantic world, one that’s bigger than they could explore in the time they have to do it.

Or, something that is as close to that as possible.

Most games don’t come close.

The only two things I look forward to right now are Star Citizen and the Oculus Rift.

I can’t wait to see what kind of MMO people create for the Oculus.

I’m mostly tired of the hamster wheel that replaces true content creation – no matter what game it is.

I became interested in MMO’s for the idea that someday….someday….we will have a fully immersive virtual metaverse to play in.

Since my day’s playing Ultima, we have been inching our way towards that.

But something happened with WoW.

Not at release – but after it became ridiculously popular.

Suddenly, all of these people wanted to be mulit-billionaire’s, cashing in on us gamers.

They applied the same psychological Skinner box principles to our games that they casinos use to keep people addicted to slot machines.

The entire industry was flooded with crap.

From time to time, you get a game that has a couple ok ideas, but generally really poor execution.

Like Warhammer Online, or Anarchy Online, or Star Trek Online, or Rift, or Tera, or half a dozen other games that were fun for a month or two.

And Guild Wars 2.

Sooner or later, they start brainstorming how to make more money. Experience boosters and other ‘potions’. Costumes. Unique weapons and armor (or just skins). And so on.

And, everything they do drives people away.

The reason is that primarily what players want is more content. That is, more of the actual game itself.

This means expanding the world – making it bigger. New maps and so on.

This means more places to explore within the world that already exists.

And sometimes, like in the case of Cataclysm and the attack on Lions Arch, making permanent, drastic changes to the world (which is a cool thing to do – it keeps older places fresh).

But they do so little of this – expanding their world, that sooner or later we grow bored.

In order to keep our attention they try to entice us with false promises, fake content (LS, holiday events, “dynamic” events, and so on) that are ok for a minute – but grow boring very fast.

I always say this on the forum of every MMO I ever play, and I’ve played (or beta’d) in quite a few – but what players want is a GIGANTIC world with MORE content than they can play through BEFORE you develop more content.

Now, I’m aware that there are some technical and economic limitations that prevent anyone from quite creating that world yet.

But it often seems like most new MMO’s hardly even try.

Instead of creating a truly massive world, we see game after game after game taking it’s shot – and missing.

WoW is probably the largest game out there – and while I haven’t played at all since just before Burning Crusade came out (yep, I never played a single expansion), it IS the biggest game world that I’m aware of.

If you were to start playing WoW for the first time today, you would have a really, really massive world to explore. Four continents and tons of dungeons. You could probably spend a year just levelling one character through all the starting zones.

I did a trial account on WoW a couple years ago just to see the Blood Elves character models and realized just how much was there.

Now, I don’t like the game for it’s outdated graphics, and the fact that they too use the ‘hamster wheel’ methodology to keep players in, but I have to recognize that they’ve at least created a massive world for their players. I mean, Azeroth is really, really big. If you hadn’t done it all yet, there would be so much to keep you busy……

Anyways.

That’s the biggest problem with GW2 – it’s the ’let’s force everyone into a hamster wheel so the keep playing’ methodology that’s actually DRIVING PLAYERS OUT OF YOUR GAME.

Just make more game. Make a bigger world.

Add 10 more zones, and then add 10 more.

Just do it.

And then make a bunch of costumes and stuff for the cash shop – only reason I don’t spend money on costumes is because every time I check, there was like 4 or 5 to choose from. Their should be dozens – hundreds even. If their were tons of costumes, and lots of new content, then I’d be supporting the game through buying cosmetics, while playing through tons of fun new stuff to do.

Instead, we get the hamster wheel.

Until the company’s stop doing this, they will all end up the same way.

I also think that MMO’s should just remove levels completely.

I’m not talking about Anet pulling threads.

I mean when people stop posting, the game is a ghost town.

So be grateful that people are still posting threads complaining about what they don’t like about the game – no matter how immature (and yes most of them are) they are written, they still show a clear interest in the game.

When all of those threads stop, it’s because all of those people have moved on to a new game.

IndigoSundown.5419:

In every online game, someone (or some group) sets the design philosophy for the game. I suspect that ANet is no different.

From the position which we enjoy, it’s sometimes easy to see what that direction is, and sometimes hard. Also, it’s easy for us to get an impression of the game’s direction from what we see, but not to know the behind-the-scenes stuff that links the disparate parts together. With that kind of perspective, it’s easy to mistake our incomplete perspective for lack of direction on the part of the developer, or to develop a view of their game design philosophy that is incomplete, or wrong.

That said, what are the common threads behind the decisions being made by ANet management? What I see as clear elements in game direction are:

• Commitment to the concept of telling an ongoing story with various chapters.
• Commitment to large events in the persistent world.
• Cultivation of GW2 sPvP as an ESport.

If you’re like me, and these things are not really what you’re looking for from an MMO, or if they are, but the implementation isn’t doing it for you, then I can understand why you feel the way you do.

What kittenes me off is that the direction we were told in the Manifesto is not the direction the game has actually gone in.

That really rubs me the wrong way, because it’s broken promises.

I know a lot of die hards complain about criticism on the forums, and I’ve even had a couple threads deleted by Anet.

What they don’t realize is that constant complaints about the game actually mean that people are still interested in it.

I would be highly worried when all the critical threads stop – that means that people have given up any hope that the game will improve, and have moved on to another game.

I have three words:

No. New. Content.

99% of all MMO’s go down the tubes.

GW2 is probably one of them.

It says something that people enjoyed SAB more than the core game – and this is why they remove it – they are embarrassed that this is what people would rather do, while the core game languishes.

Anet is here to sell gems, not make games.

Astral Projections.7320:

knives.6132:

My 2 cents:

It’s NOT an exploit because the event is designed to have 2 VALID outcomes: Success or Fail.
No game mechanic is broken when you purposely fail the event.

I would think the question here is, did ANet make events, any events, with the intention that players would purposely fail them in order to have endlessly spawning mobs to farm?

I would say the answer is no. That they intended players to make every effort to succeed and that events would fail in spite of their efforts. In that case, if players are doing something that ANet did not intend when they made these events, if they are doing so in order to farm in excess of what was intended, then it’s an exploit and players doing so may be suspended or banned or the event changed to stop this farming.

How is that possible anyone’s fault except Anet’s?

Behellagh.1468:

Star Citizen = Space. Much easier to do procedural generation in space than somewhere you walk .

I don’t know about that. It might be harder to do procedural generation in space, at least harder to get something meaningful out of it.

It’s not just generating backgrounds and asteroid fields, you know. How do you generate something useful, in an environment where you largely just find orbiting spheres? (unless you can land on them, of course, at which point you’re no longer procedurally generating ‘space’, but a surface – a planet).

I think what you mean, is that it’s hard to generate believable terrain (no mountains balanced on top of trees, rivers flowing the wrong direction, proper flora and fauna in the right places) and populate it with more than just random mobs.

I agree – procedural generation is cutting edge, and most programmers don’t know how to do it well in a game yet – in fact, I don’t think anyone knows how to do it well.

There are two games, however, that I am aware of that are either doing it, or researching it – Limit Theory, which looks like it’s intending on creating the entire world through PG – and Star Citizen, which has created a dedicated team to researching how to use PG in certain cases (quite possibly instances).

I believe that Anet would behoove itself to do the same thing – in fact, generating new fractals with PG would be the perfect place to start.

The biggest advantage of doing this – for both Anet and us – is that if they can pull it off so that the content is at least playable, then guess what? They have a system that generates new content for the players (even if it’s not the same quality as the dev generated content) that will KEEP PEOPLE BUSY while they work on other content.

In other words, even if it’s just used as a stop-gap, a way to amuse people while they do serious work, this is a huge boon, because it keeps content starved players occupied and not kittening on the forums.

And fractals are the perfect place to do it. They should make an infinite dungeon using procedural generation.

Behellagh.1468:

ipan.4356:

Behellagh.1468:

ipan.4356:

In terms of size comparison, I noticed that my off the cuff count of zones on this WoW map is about 50 or so:

http://mapwow.com/

And the count for Tyria is around 30:

http://gw2.mmorpg-life.com/interactive-maps/

And WoW’s been around how long to include all those areas? How many did it have when it first came out.

Even so, I have two counters to that:

1) Having the experience of hindsight, Tyria should have been bigger on release, because they know they have to compete with what exists currently, not what used to exist. Tyria should have been as big as WoW was at the time GW2 was released, not as big as Azeroth was when WoW was released – GW2 isn’t competing with vanilla WoW, it’s competing with current WoW.

2) Even vanilla Azeroth was bigger than current Tyria – but maybe not by much. If you count the original two continents, you get around 35+ (give or take) zones, while the whole of current Tyria is around 30.

So yes, even vanilla WoW was slightly larger.

But Anet’s also had 2 years to expand, and hasn’t really done so. A little here and there. Southsun and Dry Top and Edge of the Mists is all they’ve added, right?

Not enough.

Well now that is one of the limiting factors in creating new MMOs. “Content” creation is the slowest, most manpower intensive part of making an MMO as on gauge of an MMO is the number of hours of content. The shift from P2P to F2P means the usual methods of inserting time wasting activities to slow down consumption to squeak another month of subscription of a player gets replaced with limitations that are only surmountable, such as minuscule inventory capability, with a cash purchase.

Also the plethora of MMOs out there means for a player, running out of content in one game simply means jumping to another. That means as a game developer, you simply can’t create as much content as a popular MMO that’s been around for a decade, or even five years. Adding content once released is getting difficult due to the shift to F2P from monthly subscriptions. A game first has to pay off the 3-5 years of development costs before the game made one box sale. NCSOFT’s Blade & Soul was reported to cost roughly $50 million to develop over 7 years. ST:TOR reportedly cost $200 million. The company that is bankrolling the team does what a reasonable ROI in a reasonable time frame. Therefore the easiest way to reduce cost is to reduce the amount of initial content.

If GW2 is only a little smaller on day one than vanilla WoW and doesn’t have a monthly fee, that’s actually impressive. But if players insist that for an MMO to be truly successful that it needs to keep up with WoW’s 10 year head start, good luck in finding another MMO besides WoW. EVE may be able to because it’s a sandbox MMO is space. Adding more space isn’t a lot of work manpower wise.

Yeah, but I have two things to say to that:

Procedural generation.

Star Citizen.

Chrispy.5641:

And what’s the point of walking up a mountain if there’s nothing there of any value? That’s the problem that WoW had, way too much land with nothing to do in it. Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have that problem, anywhere you go, there is something to do. Exploration is about a lot more than just spending along time traveling across a lot of land.

You’re obviously not an explorer.

For the explorer, the reward is just getting there.

Chrispy.5641:

ipan.4356:

Chrispy.5641:

What’s with the constant comparisons to WoW? The closest game that can compare (as far as very highly detailed instanced zones go) is the Secret World, and that game world is miniscule compared to Tyria.

Again – I only meant to compare it in size – Azeroth is bigger, so there’s more to explore.

While Azeroth is bigger and there’s more landmass to explore, there’s less in it overall. Its like comparing the United States (of America…..not Mexico) and Russian land masses as game worlds, and we are equating game content with people. Russia is obviously the bigger country and it will take longer to fully explore it, but the United States has more people in it, and therefore more stuff to do.

In this example/comparison – I’ll take Russia.

This “stuff to do” you talk about is mostly just renown hearts and repetitive events.

Some of the events are fun once in a while, but if you are counting those as ‘explorable content’, then I am going to have to disagree. They’re rarely more interesting than the hearts.

SkiTz.4590:

This the beauty of GW2… tons of ppl have bought the game, and a good deal of them have left, BUT they can just as easily come back with a click of a button when(if) anet adds the things that are missing to hold ppls interest.

There’s obviously a very healthy number of players currently playing, but it can be MUCH higher because the MMO market just isn’t that great and anet has the key – No sub to play, free content updates.

GW2 sold millions, but millions aren’t playing this game (talking strictly NA+EU here) …that much I can speculate.

Plenty are happy with the current state of the game, but like every game, it can be much better, and with GW2, the potential is very high. xpac like content has to happen, its in the best interest of anet, financially speaking… you aren’t going to lose players, only gain if you add the things that left many players to “take a break” from this game..

Me and most of my guildies have been “taking a break” for the past 6+ months because what holds our interest, and many others, is WvW/PvP… both of these systems have been badly neglected for a while…until anet actually does something about it, we will continue to take a break.. but the nice thing is we can still team up every now and then and run some tPvP or roam around in WvW as a group.. but its just gotten so stale and boring with the little attention WvW/PvP recieves in this game..

The thing is – once there’s something new to explore – say, Star Citizen – I probably won’t be back, because it’s not worth the time.

This is how MMO’s die.

GW2 actually feels a lot more like WAR in terms of it’s maps – cordoned and small’ish.

Chrispy.5641:

What’s with the constant comparisons to WoW? The closest game that can compare (as far as very highly detailed instanced zones go) is the Secret World, and that game world is miniscule compared to Tyria.

Again – I only meant to compare it in size – Azeroth is bigger, so there’s more to explore.

I want Quaggan underwater mounts.

Behellagh.1468:

ipan.4356:

In terms of size comparison, I noticed that my off the cuff count of zones on this WoW map is about 50 or so:

http://mapwow.com/

And the count for Tyria is around 30:

http://gw2.mmorpg-life.com/interactive-maps/

And WoW’s been around how long to include all those areas? How many did it have when it first came out.

Even so, I have two counters to that:

1) Having the experience of hindsight, Tyria should have been bigger on release, because they know they have to compete with what exists currently, not what used to exist. Tyria should have been as big as WoW was at the time GW2 was released, not as big as Azeroth was when WoW was released – GW2 isn’t competing with vanilla WoW, it’s competing with current WoW.

2) Even vanilla Azeroth was bigger than current Tyria – but maybe not by much. If you count the original two continents, you get around 35+ (give or take) zones, while the whole of current Tyria is around 30.

So yes, even vanilla WoW was slightly larger.

But Anet’s also had 2 years to expand, and hasn’t really done so. A little here and there. Southsun and Dry Top and Edge of the Mists is all they’ve added, right?

Not enough.

Right, stuff like Dierdre’s Steps.

I wish Tyria had a bunch more stuff like that, and was much larger.

Danikat.8537:

ipan.4356:

In terms of size comparison, I noticed that my off the cuff count of zones on this WoW map is about 50 or so:

http://mapwow.com/

And the count for Tyria is around 30:

http://gw2.mmorpg-life.com/interactive-maps/

I’ve never played WoW so I can’t comment on how detailed their maps are or what the exploration is like, but I don’t need to have played it to know that how many chunks the map is divided into is not a good way of judging how much stuff there is to find in them.

Daggerfall probably had one of the biggest maps of any RPG ever made, but the vast majority was randomly generated, uniform terrain with very little to explore.

I played a bit of vanilla WoW, up until right before BC came out – never played an expansion. Never got a character past Lv. 40.

Each zone in WoW is roughly the same size as a zone in GW2. They are somewhat variable though, where GW2 zones tend to be slightly more uniform in size (though there are some exceptions).

I guess it’s because the rectangular shape makes them more likely to end up being close to the same size, where in WoW they are irregularly shaped.

As far as what you can actually do there – WoW doesn’t have dynamic events (at least when I played – I have no idea what they do now, and I know they’ve added stuff that wasn’t there when I last played).

It tended to have a little bit more hidden entrances to secret tombs and whatnot – the kind of thing you find in a cemetery tucked away behind a hill that you can’t see from the main road. Not a ton, but probably more than GW2.

Zones don’t have invisible zone walls separating them, so you could mountain goat your way into new places, finding paths that were never intended – this was a major part of exploration, sneaking your way into zones you weren’t even high enough level to enter, and find ways around monsters without fighting – a fun challenge was to get to lvl. 80 areas when you were lvl 20 or so. This was possible, because you could find really sneaky ways through their zones.

But anyway, WoW is an old game, and the comparison here is not to compare WoW as a game in general, I literally JUST wanted to compare map size, because it was mentioned earlier.

Tyria really is kinda small, and the way it funnels people about, and the waypoint system, makes it feel even smaller.

I feel as if the game should have opened with at least the entire visible map (the areas on the map that are visible, but not yet zoned) available.

The next expansion should open up another 33% – that is, at least 10 more zones.

What’s getting me down is that there is so little to explore in the 30 or so zones we have – I need more to keep playing.

And they could add more to the existing zones – I know they do, kind of, because wherever I go, sometimes little things change here and there.

But we need new dungeons.

How about some open world dungeons? How about some bigger dungeons (like 5-10 times bigger than current dungeons)?

How about 10 new zones every year?

It may sound like a lot, but from my point of view, they put out way too little, and way too late.

Without more content to explore, there’s nothing holding me here.

I hate farming.

I haven’t even done LS2 yet – I was hoping for more zones to be opened, but when all w got was Dry Top, I was disappointed.