Guild Wars 2

the achievement point IS useless, because achievements are useless.

I am failing to see the issue here…

mulch.2586:

Is it “when queues are full the score is even” or “when score is even the queues are full?”

It’s the former, for sure.

Even if a team holds the entire map for 3 days straight — all you’ve gotta do is hold it for 3 days + 15 minutes of the next 4 to pull ahead.

The easiest way to lose is to stop trying — one thing I’ve learned playing games for too many years is that the overwhelming majority of players aren’t interested so much in a good fight as they are in a sure win, and as soon as things get rough they’d rather bail and start over, and do that again and again until they can keep the upper hand the whole time. Most people don’t like feeling the pressure of being behind and trying to pull ahead — my god, if it doesn’t work that means your best wasn’t enough and your parents won’t love you and you’re just no good as a human being, you’re only good at anything if you either win “effortlessly” or if you quit as soon as you get behind and then claim you only lost because you didn’t care to bother trying!

This isn’t directed at anyone and anyone who’s played any game online that’s competitive, I’m sure none of this is new to you.

So, yeah. Game’s never over until people pack it up and go home. I’ve always been a huge fan of people too stubborn to quit, even in the face of certain defeat. Go down swinging or go home!

Darkothe.1253:

Yeah. If that let’s you sleep easier at night, you keep telling yourselves that. While we’re having a decent match up this week – without the lopsided intervention of JQ server hoppers screwing everything up – we’ll wish you well in your new endeavors…far away from us. Now, with four hours till server re-set, do you SoR people think you could show just the slightest hint of class and stop with the chest-thumping and absurd grand-standing?

I dunno, can you guys stop being sore losers and telling us we don’t deserve this win? We beat you last week, but we couldn’t beat you this week except for the transfers? Please. You guys might have had a fighting chance earlier on in the week if you had more than 10 people in a borderland at once.

But you didn’t, you just gave up. I didn’t see one serious attempt from Yaks to take anything back all week, not after the Friday night fracas (which was well-done).

GoM, yall got spirit, you just need some more people out in the borderlands and a bit better organization — one zerg has uses, but when it’s facing 3 smaller zergs.. two zergs can capture things while the third simply slows down your super-zerg. Sure, probably lose whatever the super-zerg is on, but trading 2 for 1 is a net loss for you).

Yaks.. most of you are alright and were good sportsmen last week. Yer cool, and keep fighting the good fight. The Yaks in here telling us we’re garbage without the transfers..well heh, who cares really. To them, to the sore losers, I simply say: Scoreboard.

Yaks.. most of you are alright and were good sportsmen last week. Yer cool, and keep fighting the good fight. The Yaks in here telling us we’re garbage without the transfers..well heh, who cares really. To them, to the sore losers, I simply say: Scoreboard.And regardless of what happens in our next matchup, at least we’re going to keep trying. You’ll never know how much you can do unless you try.

This is still bugged for me and I found out at least two of my guildmates as well. :| here’s hoping it’s fixed in the upcoming patch…?

Yeah, no, it would not work.

For instance, Mark of Blood. When triggered, bad guys inside its radius suffer 3 stacks of bleed, while good guys get a few seconds of regen.

So… do the good guys get the bleed AND the regen? Why have the regen there? No one would want to be in it, the bleed damage outweighs the regen by more than 2:1!

Yeah… so, in short it would not work, sorry

Agemnon.4608:

warmonkey.8013:

….. don’t move to a large, full, or heavy server. everyone else is doing the same thing. it’s ruining those servers.

SoR is full enough and has already had plenty of bandwagon transfers, now we have wonderfully long WvW queues, sure glad they all joined up.

Obnoxious as it sounds, have you tried coercing other people to transfer TO your server? It honestly would be much better in the long run, for you and for all other servers.

Anet dropped the ball on transfers. They should only have been allowed onto LOW pop servers. Not transferring to a full server because everyone left yours, but transferring to a low pop server because yours is too full. All they’ve accomplished by wide-open transfers is making MORE full servers and MORE empty servers.

Really? I had an insta-queue earlier. I looked for groups in WvW but no one wanted to zerg keeps with me, maybe because it was during off hours but still.

tbh, on rall right now… there’s no keeps to zerg, we own everything. and if the enemies do have a keep or a tower, half the population wants to let them keep it so maybe they’ll come back out to play.
its impossible at this point for us to not be in first place by the end of the matchup, so a lot of us aren’t queuing or playing these last few days out.. it’s just boring out there.

yesterday however, we had 3 hour queues for EB… 3 hours. that’s just not fun

Right now I’m running a 10/20/20/10/10 build.

None of the 30 point traits, IMO, are all that compelling.
10 points in power for the might when I’m in DS (on life blast cast), and 10 in soul reaping to make life blast pierce + cause vuln.

those two are kinda optional, but I got ‘em because I PvE and it’s great for group pulls, and I love pulling as many mobs as I can at once

20 points in curses and death, curses I grab 20% bleeding and GTAoE wells. Or if I’m not using wells, 33% chance at life force on crit. Or faster corruption spells. usually it’s on wells.
20 in death for greater marks and 20% reduced staff cooldowns. That’s the real big important one. Greater marks are AWESOME.

10 in blood. This one is also important. Creates of Mark of Blood when you dodge, 10sec CD. What’s undocumented is that it’s also a blast finisher. Very nice. Plus, extra greater mark of blood every 10 seconds! Woo!

….. don’t move to a large, full, or heavy server. everyone else is doing the same thing. it’s ruining those servers.

SoR is full enough and has already had plenty of bandwagon transfers, now we have wonderfully long WvW queues, sure glad they all joined up.

Obnoxious as it sounds, have you tried coercing other people to transfer TO your server? It honestly would be much better in the long run, for you and for all other servers.

Anet dropped the ball on transfers. They should only have been allowed onto LOW pop servers. Not transferring to a full server because everyone left yours, but transferring to a low pop server because yours is too full. All they’ve accomplished by wide-open transfers is making MORE full servers and MORE empty servers.

And why should PvE be held back for the sake of PvP balance? I don’t care about PvP one bit, while you clearly favor it to PvE. I could go on talking about how you should go play LoL if you want “that garbage”, but I won’t because I feel like those two aspects of the game don’t have to step on each other’s feet, but still have plenty of room to grow. Make WvW separate, like SPvP for all I care. I just want more interesting PvE.

You don’t care about PvP? Awesome. I don’t care about PvE. You’ve got a ton of options to choose from if you want a PvE game with tons of PvE content that it’ll take you months of grinding to be able to access. Point at another MMO where I can run around killing people in 3-sided PvP for towers and keeps, point at another where just a few weeks after launch I can access any and all PvE content I might want to see.

Point one out to me.

GW2 is unique because of those things, and all you want to do is turn it into every other game you’ve ever played. I don’t give two puppies. I don’t even give half a puppy. The market caters to you. This game caters to me.

You’re the guy who would walk into a town’s one lone vegetarian establishment and loudly complain that they serve no steaks. I mean really dude? Go where they do things you like, and stop trying to flatten any diversity in the market.

the cooldowns are a bit long to be honest. but then, all our utility spells have pretty long cooldowns, excepting epidemic..

honestly though, the biggest problem with wells is that we have to take a trait to make them a GTAoE. Honestly, that’s ridiculous. They’re really not useful if you don’t take that trait.

for WvW I’ve been using scepter/horn and staff, staff primary.. it’s fun. greater marks and reduced CD on staff means I get them marks out frequently, very nice if you’re defending a wall somewhere (.. or attacking, cast it on the top, kaboom!)

It’s not as great 1v1, but scepter/horn means I can swap between the two and ideally kite the poop outta someone. Or at least run away.

I’ve got sigil of fire on my staff, >50% crit rate, I cast a mark into a crowd and it goes kaboom. A 2-3-4-5 combo of marks drops 2-5k dmg and ~3k in conditions and another 8-900-ish from the sigil of fire, all AoE, and usually 2 is up by the time I finish that combo so I can get another ~200 instant and ~2k condition dmg in there as well.. it’s not great, but it seems to be effective. I kill people trying to defend stuff all the time. Well of Suffering is nice for dropping people you’ve downed on ramparts. That, and Corrosive Poison. It’s a shame downed people don’t trigger marks

I’ve found I have little patience for WvW without having swiftness from horn + spectral walk. Makes for an easy near-or-over 100% uptime of running fast.

But yeah, as for your question, on your staff get a superior sigil of fire (assuming you’ve a decent crit rate), it’s awesome for massive AoE damage

Tesena.1075:

There is NO endgame content, what so ever. Nothing. Sure there are dungeons, which is great until you have gotten everything you need. Dungeons alone aint enough, not by far.

Now, why should we have raids? Think…. What is the essential of having raids? what captures the essence of a raid? Raids make people come together to have fun, to fight challenges to become a better player. Raids makes you feel that you’re a part of something bigger, and it improves the guild feature by far.

Why would anyone say no to such a game improvment? Please come with a rational answer.

Comments_____________
- Gear is not an issue, it does not have to be improved by much.
- Not being able to join a guild and raid is a stupid excuse for not having raids at all.
- The Casual player does not NEED to play raids because the difference won’t be that big. Why would the casual player even care, he / she is casual..

There certainly is endgame content. Go WvW. It’s fun. You’re not enjoying it? You’re doing it wrong. Period.

Raids? Nope. They’re idiotic. Cat-herding at its finest. Boring.
And then you bring up that raid gear wouldn’t be that much! better than regular gear..?
Why should it be ANY better than non-raid gear? Hmm?
And what happens when you finish that raid and have your JUST SLIGHTLY! better gear? You want to do it again? Well, obviously, it’ll have to be “harder”, which means “gear check”, which means..

Oh kitten, suddenly we’ve created tiered gear acquisition, we have a gear treadmill. The game is suddenly heading towards massive imbalances in player power and PvE gameplay at the expense of PvP.

That’s not a game I want to play, and that’s not a game I will play. In fact, not having those things is why I’m playing GW2.

You want that garbage? The entirety of the MMO market save GW2 has that for you. Have at it.

Ryth.6518:

I still remember the Dungeon 0/.5 stuff in WoW where there were people who couldn’t even complete a 45 min baron run and these were raiders who were carried in 40 mans.

And I still remember those people who couldn’t finish that stuff being the ones in our raids who’d wind up getting drops because they were a critical class, and then once they had a few they’d jump ship to a bigger raiding guild that already had the rest of the raid geared up, leaving my guild constantly struggling and myself unable to progress because I kept having to show up and re-gear new people.
Yeah awesome fun woo bring it on, nothing like doing all the hard work over and over and never getting anything but frustration out of it.
But I digress, and that was really the least of my problems with that game.

Just a head’s up, and it has been mentioned, but complaining about enemy zergs outnumbering you is silly.

You can field just as many people in any battleground as anyone else can. There’s a queue. There’s a cap.

This isn’t DAoC, where the Frontiers would take anyone who zoned in, where you very literally could be, let’s say, Hibernia.. and the Mids on your server are about 2/3 your population.. and the Albs are slightly over Hib and Mid combined. You’re outnumbered, permanently, irrevocably, the only solution being convincing more people to roll on your server.

Yeah, no, I’m not ever going to complain about being outnumbered. I’ll say that a zerg is too large to fight, but I know that it just means there’s fewer enemies at OTHER places on the map.

You’ll never, ever, ever have 3 groups of 250+ bad guys attacking 3 different keeps at the same time here.

This ain’t zerg, this ain’t zerg at all.

lacrimstein.5603:

I don’t remember raiding in WoW being mandatory. Don’t want to do it? Don’t do it. I don’t see why WoW style endgame cannot fit into GW2. Why do you care if another guy has better armor than you? He earned it. You can earn it too. Don’t want to earn it? Then why do you care in the first place, or do you just want gear handed to you on a plate?. PvP is completely separate anyways, no balancing issues to deal with. I remember a joke in the early 2000’s about Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program: " ‘No Child Left Behind’ works by not letting anyone get ahead". I feel like that quote is appropriate here.

I believe you are being intentionally ignorant.
Stop it.

I don’t want to earn raid gear. It’s boring, repetitive, and really not all that hard. The hardest part about any WoW raid, ever, was twofold.
Problem one was getting together 5, 15, 25, 40, whatever number, of players who can actually pay attention, not stand in the fire, heal who they’re supposed to heal, etc. That’s the HARDEST part.
Problem two was gear checks. Your group had to get lucky enough to get the right drops to the right people to progress past certain points. Tiered gear that isn’t high enough won’t have the stats your group needs to DPS down XYZ before an enrage timer.

Boring.

So why wouldn’t that fit into GW2? Because tiered progression, that’s why. Because I don’t enjoy doing raids, but raids will have better stats on gear than non-raids (because if it doesn’t, as you carebears are always so eager to chime in with, “if it doesn’t have better stats why would I raid?”… why indeed, I ask, are you doing something you don’t enjoy doing just to get a cookie at the end?).
I abstain.
Next month a new raid comes out.
Again I abstain, because I find the whole situation ridiculous and endless and dull.

Now I’m way behind the gear curve. There’s no even ground in PvP. Sure, SPvP uses special gear — WvW does not! So I go out, I’m good at fighting players, but my gear is garbage, out of date.. everything else is irrelevant because some chumps spent an hour staring at the floor mashing two buttons, awesome.

No game with tiered gear, a gear treadmill, will ever have quality PvP. Ever. It becomes necessary to spend too much time acquiring gear, and if you don’t the only thing that matters is not player skill but player gear.

People are still playing Counterstrike with the same player models they’ve had for what, a decade or better now? Mario still looks exactly like he did 20 years ago.

I assure you, I will not mind that if in a year or two’s time my character is still wearing the same gear. Not one bit. And heck, if I do want something different, I can go ahead and get it. Just cosmetic, so I don’t feel compelled to go out and get it. I’m not outmatched if I don’t. There’s no hurry.

Besides, what DOES happen if you have raids and a gear treadmill? People finish it and want to do it again. You get a small fraction of the playerbase who actually enjoys and completes those dungeons, who completes their gear, who demand more to do. A new raid. More content. More gear to step up to. And GOD FORBID! God forbid that new content can be completed by people who DIDN’T go through the last raid! God forbid that old gear is handed out more quickly to people not at the bleeding edge so that the greater playerbase has a chance to enjoy the new content that’s been created!

Yeah, you wind up working on new content endlessly to satisfy a small percent of your playerbase. Years ago, I recall a quote from a Blizz dev at Blizzcon, where it was stated that some ridiculously small percent of their player base had been inside Molten Core. I think it was 25%. Been INSIDE, not completed, and this was after Naxx had been released.

Anet can release new content knowing that EVERYBODY is able to see it. They’re not making new things, working for months, so 2% of the people playing their game will shut up about being bored.

But hey, I’m sure you’re right and have actually considered the ramifications of neverending tiered gear progression on other aspects of an MMO. Boy howdy.

I’ve never transferred and just noticed upon reading this thread that I’ve got this bug, always have, and just never realized I was missing out on anything :\ that’s… a lot of crafting mats I could’ve had… a lot a lot

Simonic.2609:

Cosmetic changes are ridiculous motivators. It is time, and not prestige. Yet, even if it required a 100 man raid to defeat something that offered roughly the same stats that they had a newly minted 80…the drive is not nearly as strong. All that work for such little gain.

I will stay informed as to the latest happenings of GW2, but I cannot find enjoyment in its current form. Actually, I can’t find much enjoyment in any MMORPG as it is currently.

Emphasis mine.

It’s a game, bro. There shouldn’t be any work involved. It’s a GAME. It’s not a JOB.

You’re not going to find much enjoyment in any MMO. It sounds like you actually don’t much enjoy putting your nose to the grindstone just for gear, but that you enjoy receiving it.. eventually you’ll come to realize that the ease of getting exotics in GW2 means all the WORK in GW2 is gone, there is no work to be done unless you decide you want to look a specific way.
Because it’s a GAME, not a JOB, and work has no place in a game.

If you don’t enjoy WvW.. that’s not my fault. It’s a lot of fun. It’s the best PvP since DAoC, but GW2 is overall much better than DAoC in most every way. WvW is a ton of fun. Who cares about the bonuses, it’s about winning.. it’s not about WHAT you win, but just winning itself. Competing.

Sure, DAoC has Realm Ranks and abilities, things you’d gain in PvP, but well.. that’s why GW2 doesn’t really. Because it’s broken. Once you add ‘endless’ character progression via tiered gear behind timesinks or timesink grinds for new abilities.. once you do that, you’ve broken your game. People with the most free time will be the ones who get all that time-consuming WORK done to grind their better gear out, and then they’re untouchable in PvP.

Mudflation, and unbalanced PvP thanks to a gulf of gear disparity, take hold. WvW sucks because it doesn’t matter how well you play, all that matters is if you’ve spent enough time to get good enough gear (compared to now, where the difference between a green and a gold is actually not all that much and golds are easy enough to acquire that it’s pretty irrelevant).

Ambrosiaa.6054:

This is a game for casuals. What do you expect of a game with no subscription? I suggest you try WoW, it has a subscription and still has close to 10million players. If GW2 had a subscription, i doubt it would have even 500k players with it’s abomination of an endgame.

Re-imagined my kitten

Go play Progress Quest, it’ll have the endgame you’re after I think. GW2’s endgame is the best of any MMO I’ve played since I quit DAoC all those years ago.

fellyn.5083:

In every single mmo that has come out since WoW people always claim an mmo is failing or dead no less than 2 weeks after it’s initial launch. The thing is no one who made that claim has ever been right yet. Unless we’re talking about FF14.

well, ACTUALLY… WAR, AoC, and I dunno if you’d count them but Hellgate:London and Diablo 3.
All of them were obviously not going to do very well after just a short time experiencing them, and none of them failed to meet that expectation of failure.

I am an old bitter and jaded malcontent. I hate everything.

This game’s not half bad, and is, and will be, doing fine for quite some time to come.

Sure, I even have guildies who have quit GW2, actually quite some time ago already. Frankly? Good riddance. They wanted a grind, they wanted timesinks, they wanted to be able to spend more time than other people playing the game so they could get ahead on the gear treadmill and let their playtime win fights their skill couldn’t.

There’s plenty of games like that on the market. Point to another one like GW2.

Go play Progress Quest if you find GW2’s endgame lacking — I think it would be more your style.

GW2’s endgame is exactly what I have been waiting for for years.

The fanboy crowd in this game is the absolute worst, most brainwashed bunch I have ever seen in any so called MMO. They defend the game regardless even when people try and post constructive critisism, usually by telling people they do not understand the game, or should have read more about what they were buying, or other similar nonsense.

Probably because all the “problems” you people keep bringing up are precisely the things the rest of us LIKE about this game — the things that separate it from all the other PvE carebear grindfest timesink gear treadmill boring-as-poop MMOs on the market.

If we want this game to be around in 7 years time with 4 or more expansions under its belt and still be thriving it’s going to take a lot more mass appeal than it has now.

Nope, don’t want it. Don’t want it because when you say “mass appeal”, what you mean is “all those idiotic features of MMOs that I, warmonkey, cannot stand”.

You can take your rep grinding and tiered content and just go, I won’t miss it one bit.

Dynamite.6584:

The second part is not about gear. The second part is about lacking the motive to be competitive.
PvP is about competition. There needs to be something to compete over. Why do I care if I win 1st place?

lmao. really? are you…. REALLY?

So you only care to compete if there’s a prize involved, huh? That’s dumb. No, really, that’s pretty dumb.

WvW is fun. Winning is its own reward.

Go find another game if you want your never-ending rewards and your gear treadmill so you can constantly find upgrades, and you have fun with your mudflation and ever-increasing imbalances as stat totals reach levels that they were never intended to reach.

I don’t HAVE to do anything in this game, and that means that the only things I do are things that I have fun doing.

You obviously don’t have fun doing anything, but desire things you HAVE to do and you call that fun. Uh, bro, go get a job. Plenty of never-ending kitten you HAVE to do there!

You say nothing distinguishes this game from any other MMO, but you’re pretty much entirely wrong. This game doesn’t have a gear treadmill. That’s significant. That is, in fact, HUGE. It has 3-sided RvR, which no MMO has had since DAoC. That’s significant. It’s the only MMO I’ve played that actually has had content from rolling a character to max level finished on release. NO, WoW did NOT have all content from 1-60 available at launch, don’t even try and pull that lie because I was there — there were MANY zones with no quests or content, just landscape and mobs.

Honestly, you need a prize to compete? You need stat boosts, and to call that progression, to play? Go take a gander at people who ACTUALLY enjoy competition. They do not tend to be in it just for the prize, there’s only 1 winner and if you can’t stand doing something and not winning you will very quickly get mad and quit. The competition, the striving, has value. Nobody plays Chess because if they win enough games they can upgrade their pawns to SuperPawns.

If you need someone to give you cookies for playing, but oh my goodness don’t give out the cookies TOO SOON for there must be GRINDING and TIME SINKS to make it feel fulfilling!.. I suggest you go find yourself a nice asian MMO and knock yourself out. I can’t stand that garbage, and GW2 is a breath of fresh air in the MMO universe. It’s the only MMO that ISN’T trying to emulate the gear-treadmill-PvE-grind paradigm (which isn’t a WoW paradigm, WoW took it from earlier MMOs and improved it but did not invent it, I’m so tired of johnny-come-latelys heaping undue credit on that game).

You like a type of game that I cannot stand and will not play. I like a type of game you don’t like.
Fair enough.
Except there’s many many options available to you if (gear) progression and (gear) rewards and grindy grind grind timesinks are what you’re looking for.
Me? Yeah, not so much — there hasn’t been a PvP-focused MMO, an MMO lacking the grind and gear treadmill and PvE focus since, well, GW1.

Leave me this one game without trying to turn it into EVERY OTHER PUPPY MMO ON THE MARKET

If they hid the scoreboard first weekend, we at SoR wouldn’t have anything to get upset about and motivate us for the rest of the week =)

Sad GoM isn’t doing more, seems like mostly a numbers problem though so maybe it’ll resolve itself

I’d look forward to a DH rematch, but it looks like you guys might have to keep chasing us.. at least at this point it does!
http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA

elocke.7132:

I have to agree with the OP and wonder why anyone has a problem with his suggestion. He’s a customer just like everyone else and has certain things he would like to do at endgame. Shunning that because you don’t like that gameplay type is rude and non MMO friendly. MMOs are all about giving multiple types of players multiple things to choose from at all points in it’s lifespan, especially at endgame.

He like me is waiting for the problem of “longevity” to be fixed. This game is fantastic, until you are basically “done” playing which happens very fast on a fully geared 80 that has finished the personal story and world map completion. It leaves one wondering “what do I do now?” and we(I) end up logging in for about half an hour, dilly dallying around with pvp or maybe helping guildies or friends with lower level content, but it’s not satisfying or as engrossing as it was getting that 80 finished.

This is a legitimate gripe and shouldn’t be overlooked just because Anet does things “differently”. Which is fine, but lets do the endgame longevity differently too and not just completely forget it, which is currently the case.

Hey, how about, no.

Gear treadmill destroys the type of game I want to play. It is the antithesis of the game I want to play. It is the reason I won’t play an MMO — but I’m playing GW2 and loving it. I’m free to do what I want in game, and what I want is to not feel obligated to log in to jump back and forth avoiding fire to kill some stupid PvE content and get a cookie that lets me do the same old puppy to the next stupid PvE content which gives me a cookie that lets me do.. and so on and so on.

You want pointless and meaningless? THAT garbage is pointless and meaningless. Go play Farmville. Have you ever made fun of Farmville? That’s all your worthless PvE progression is in the end, you know. WoW is no better than Farmville when you look at the gameplay. Click this thing to get that thing so you can click this thing.

That’s dumb, I don’t like it, and I don’t want it.

Once you introduce a gear treadmill with ever-increasing stats, you introduce mudflation. You force all players to jump on that treadmill. ALL THE PLAYERS. MUST. BE ON THE TREADMILL. Else they will be left behind and suddenly they’re not at endgame anymore, they can’t do what they enjoy. I want to PvP, and pretty much nothing else. I go out to WvW, knowing that I’m on equal ground with everyone else. Throw a gear treadmill in there, and that’s not the case. Now I have to farm stupid PvE content just to be on equal footing with other chumps who love that uninteresting insipid content. I don’t want to do that. It makes me hate the game. I don’t care about the new pretty shiny I might get — I’d rather not need it to compete, and I’m not going to subject myself to crawling through a sewer pipe just because it’s sunny on the other side. Nah. I can just walk away from the game, if it’s going down that route.

Go WvW. Go PvP. Go pretend you’re in an epic PvE encounter. Who cares! I don’t, because you clearly want to change the game into something you prefer, something which would cause me to quit the game. Immediately.

There’s enough PvE gear treadmill MMOs in the world that it does not need one more. This is the only MMO that has 3-sided PvP that I don’t have to grind and grind and farm and farm for hours, days, weeks, months, until I would get to a competitive level. I’m already there. All that I need is to get better at playing my character. I don’t need some leet purps to make me good — either I’m good, or I’m not. It’s all on me.

I like that.

You don’t? Go play Progress Quest. No, it really is a real game. It’s exactly the sort of thing you’d like. Endless progression! Always something bigger and badder — ALWAYS! You have fun with that.

I’m getting rather tired of you and your ilk always shouting and screaming and desiring the one thing I will not tolerate in an MMO. Really, eventually, some day, you’ll realize all that progression and “work” is as meaningless as running in circles on the roof of the Orgrimmar bank. It got you every bit as far, that’s for sure.

PvP? WvWvW? There, THERE is fun. You’ll never fall behind. You’ll never be ahead. If your only enjoyment is getting that loot cookie that’s new and shiny… you don’t actually enjoy playing the game, just getting the reward.

Learn to enjoy the playing, not the reward. If the doing is not fun, neither is the reward. Enjoy what you do, not what it will do for you.

Wild guess that’s more of a hunch, it does more damage when your staff is out?

Allow me to clarify: I enjoyed battleground PvP in WoW. The feeling of gaining new items and becoming more powerful was what kept me in it. Had it not been for the PvP gear progression, I suspect I would not have played WoW for as long as I did.

I will not deny that I liked it when I, as someone who spent more time on PvP and therefore outgeared my competition, was able to defeat other players who did not put the time in. The ultimate purpose in a video game (as I see it) is to enter a world where things that are impossible in real life, are possible. One of those things being having the ability to become stronger than the competition to experience a feeling of power. Standing out through skill is something that requires a tremendous time commitment and coordination with other players. I simply do not want to invest that time.

Regardless of the reasons, PvP in GW2 does not make me want to do it. The feelings I associate with GW2 PvPare not thrill and exhilaration of advancement but boredom of repetition (not saying WoW PvP was not repetitive).

Here’s the deal. You say that standing out through skill alone is something that requires a tremendous time commitment — I, however, say that standing out through gear is what takes a tremendous time commitment.

Firstly, throw away caring about being the top 5% — the Big Names, the famous folk, the people whose characters will be remembered by their enemies for years to come.
That’s a clique that probably none of us will ever occupy, and that’s cool. Those people put in the time, not just playing the game but understanding the game. It’s not just a time sink, it’s a constant learning experience.

I’m not the best PvPer in the world. In fact, sometimes I’m downright awful. Sometimes I do fantastic things (I’m still laughing about my solo charge into the back of a Darkshore zerg crossing a bridge a few days ago as I calmly stated on mumble, "explicative those guys, i’m just going to run up their explicative and AoE the explicative out of them, and it worked for once, and I was happy).

I almost always have fun, regardless. If I do bad — well, that’s on me. If I do good, well that’s on me too! At no point am I, regardless of how well I’m playing, going to lose just because some other guy was able to deal with the tedium of farming an instance to find the best gear, or because some dude happened to be the class that could easily farm PvP gear in duo tourny.

Yes, I have and do play a fair number of FPS (PC) games — I enjoy a level playing field. I’ve played somewhat competitively in a few, but I was never the best on my team even. It just so happened that through only the time investment that I was willing to offer, that I was good enough to stand out in pugs and hold my own in scrims.

That’s the beauty of it, and I hope you understand that too. Not having to worry about gear progression means that you only have to invest as much time as you enjoy spending. Period, end of story. There’s never a time that you’ll feel obligated to play, because your group needs 1 more, because you need another piece of gear, because your character’s progression requires you to keep playing to keep pace with everyone else.

Here? You only have to play as much as you enjoy playing. I don’t feel like logging in tomorrow? I won’t! I won’t miss out on anything, I won’t get left behind, I won’t have to play twice as much the next day to catch up! That is PRICELESS. Raise your hand if you ever played WoW and felt like it turned into a second job, that you were just logging in to raid or farm mats to raid and even if you didn’t really feel like it some night, you knew that if you didn’t log in and do that garbage that you’d fall behind, that you’d get bumped, that you’d not be able to do the things that you actually enjoyed doing later if you didn’t do the things you don’t so much enjoy now.

Yah… having easily acquired end-game gear means you only have to do the things you actually find fun. Yeah.. it’s fun when you get new gear.. but separate the getting of new gear from the trudging through things to get that new gear. Most MMOs make things difficult, because as we’re seeing here with GW2.. if it’s easy, people will do it fast and then complain they have nothing to do.

Those people don’t actually enjoy MMOs, they’d do just as well playing Progress Quest. They want the cookie at the end, but they’re not satisfied if they’re not made to suffer and torment and toil to get to it.

Me? Sure I’d like the cookie, but it’s not the reason I came. I’m here to party hearty, I don’t care about the cookies, I just want to log in and make stuff die and not have to worry about burdening myself with doing things I don’t enjoy just to do the things I do enjoy.

You say you like PvP, but then decry that you enter PvP on pretty much the same level gear-wise as everybody else, that there’s no progression?

You might think you like PvP but it is clear you do not. You enjoy stomping people who don’t have the time to invest that you do, but don’t enjoy competing on equal footing.

Try to outplay and out-think your enemies in PvP. Play well and play smart, because your time isn’t going to give you an unfair advantage over everyone else that will turn on your Godmode.

You’re basically complaining that Chess is boring because if you spend a lot of time playing it your pawns won’t turn into queens and allow you to stomp new players. That’s ridiculous. If you enjoy PvP, get out there and enjoy PvPing people. Good PvP — and WvWvW is the best PvP I’ve come across in an MMO since DAoC’s Frontiers — is its own reward.