Guild Wars 2

I’m getting a lot of this in personal story instances, and even in open world PvE combat. They’ve changed something big (stealthily) and it’s not working right. My suspicion is the change is colliding with the culling code and producing bad results, because NPCs are popping in all over the place, and even my pet gets “lost” at times and then suddenly rubber-bands in to attack my target at guided missile speed. Something’s not right.

Anet’s fascination with dynamic, procedural balancing is a coder solution, not a designer solution. It’s also – IMO – a mistake and a balancing nightmare. Procedural systems always create unnatural consequences when solely relied upon, and end up removing natural and pleasing dynamics, much like the overuse of compression in audio. Ironic no?

What you GW2 apologists didn’t get (or didn’t listen enough to understand) is the way PvP changes negatively impact PvE play is a gamebreaker for those who enjoy PvE. This is the point the OP is making and every single other MMO that implemented both has the same problem – which why I believe an MMO should be one or the other.

@OP are you the same poster who was making similar claims in a previous post about players not “playing the game right”?

When endgame content is designed well, you don’t have to explain to people why they should be playing it, they will stay up for 24 hours+ straight for a chance TO play it and gain what it offers (I’m not saying that’s good or healthy, just that’s the sort of desire good endgame content generates).

If you have to explain where people “should” be playing, there’s a fairly obvious problem with the content. Come on, that’s almost too obvious to have to say.

This is the major flaw with mob tethering, and why I’ve always thought it’s a second-rate solution to the issue of mob aggro. The industry seems to have accepted it and it’s become a standard, but I hated it the first time I saw it in a game for this reason. It’s a mistake, and developers need to find a better solution.

Ctrl-F4, then uninstall.

Ok, not really, but someone had to say it

What notes! Where? Wha..?

Onshidesigns.1069:

MMo have to have less graphics capability than single player game. Developers of MMO’s need to cut corners to make the game run smoothly on their servers.

It would require a game new engine and faster computers to make a MMO look like crysis 3.

The server tech side has nothing to do with client graphics performance. The two are unrelated. The only issue is the size of MMO worlds and the potential number of characters on screen at a time. A single player game can guarantee a limit to what is drawn onscreen at any one time. An MMO can’t really, except through other means – some of which are reducing the number of pollies in the world geometry and character models, and limiting the number and complexity of effects etc. That means lower detail generally for the most part.

jaqviolet.2749:

So, I’m left with a themepark game, but everyone is telling me to play it like a sandbox.. I don’t get it, there isn’t enough sand for me to build anything and their aren’t enough rides either.

Yeah I completely understand your point. I wasn’t having a go at you, just pointing out that the casual design inevitably results in this conundrum. I think what you want is a different game, and fair enough.

You guys are painting yourself into corners. You don’t want MMO gameplay, but you want to play MMOs. You don’t want difficult, time-consuming tasks and complain about not being invested in your characters. No kidding. If you don’t work for anything, and it’s all easy, and everyone’s a hero, suddenly no-one is and you don’t get the sense of satisfaction and achievement that comes with doing something difficult.

What the OP is describing is the inevitable result of the design. Congratulations on feeling it, but understand you don’t get one without the other. You can’t have both easy and rewarding. Take your pick, it’s one or the other.

Krosslite.1950:

and they prove that everyday by stating there is no endgame when they choose not to go to the endgame.

I call it like I see it. So yes they are playing the game wrong

Like I said this is just plain sad

If the game isn’t leading people to the “endgame” by simple desire for what it provides, that’s the issue, not that people “don’t get it” and refuse to go there. That’s just silly talk.

P.S. My only beef with language change is when words are altered in their meaning to mean something we already have a perfectly adequate word for. That makes the language progressively poorer, and removes subtlety and graduation of meaning. A good example is the colloquial use of “wicked” to actually mean “great/fantastic” etc., though there are hundreds of examples. I’m looking at you America

I’m sorry, is the OP suggesting people are “playing the game wrong”? No offense, but that is a pompous game designer arrogance that has gained some traction recently e.g. Diablo 3. If people aren’t playing your game the way you wanted or expected them to (and they always will), the problem is with your design. Actually the problem is with the philosophy behind the design.

If you have to tell people how to play the game (beyond the basic paradigm of rules and mechanics), you have a fundamental problem with your game. Blaming the player is not only puerile, it’s completely moot. People play what they like, and will go play something else if they don’t like what you built.

Re. DE’s, they are a nice innovation, and perhaps the only nice innovation I can see in GW2. The cooperative nature of them is great, and leans the effort/reward gradient toward cooperation. The problem with DE’s is they are by their nature light and immediate, and so “shallow” gameplay. They are dip elements, and do not provide the deeper cooperation and goal setting that endgame requires and should reward. So, while good, they will never replace the other styles of play.

There is a way to pronounce something that makes it understood. When I am overseas and speaking with English as second and third language people, I speak very clearly and hit all my consonants and sound all my vowels. It makes it much easier (or even just possible) to be understood. Interestingly, many people as a result think I’m British instead of Australian. If I speak like an Aussie, few understand. That suggests to me that there are simple physical rules of pronunciation that make the language comprehensible, and these are tied into the physics of sound and our physiology, not scholastic tradition. This also, coincidentally, seems to correlate with how the language is spoken at its source i.e. England.

Anyone who has done any drama training already knows this. It’s bashed into you until it’s second nature. If you speak badly from the stage, the audience won’t understand you. This is just simple expedience, not preference for one form or another.

TL;DR Pronunciation matters, and there’s more often than not a reason the “traditional” version is the way it is based on the sound of vowels and consonants and the aural separation between them. In this sense language is not completely “dynamic”.

Dude, you are using American online dictionaries. Seriously? You’re from the US right?We can get into a link war if you want, but I was really just teasing the OP

BTW the etymology is really interesting – it basically comes down to a version of a word that means “weariness, exhaustion, fatigue”.

darkace.8925:

tolkien.6317:

BTW it’s “shamen”.

No, it’s not.

Hmm, very solid counter argument there. However, Google is your friend.

BTW it’s “shamen”.

The fact this even has to be discussed is an inditement upon the state of the Ranger class…

The first MMOs were difficult. Mass market can’t deal with difficult; they want trophies for just turning up. So, here we are. Enjoy.

I just nerfed a private story section by running through walls of mobs instead of killing them, and getting to the end of the section, which triggered the finishing cutscene. If you tried that in a game like EQ your character would be stunned, snared, and summarily buried, and you’d have a nasty, nasty corpse run.

In another area of the same section, I was killed four or five times, but because the design can’t deal with death during these areas, I was magically restored to continue fighting i.e. I couldn’t lose.

You can’t have meaningful achievements without genuine loss. There must be something to gain, and something to lose. Modern game design removes the “something to lose” and wonders why the “something to gain” suddenly means nothing.

In response to the OP, I want to enjoy it, I really do. But as I’ve said before there are so many things working at cross purposes.

However, the biggest issue I have right now is that despite all the obvious effort gone to make the game not be a grind, it’s a total exploration grind now, only it’s got JUMP PUZZLES which are ^&%$#@! annoying to anyone who dislikes platformers and was burned out on that lame mechanic years ago. I spend all my time completing the POI etc. in a map and then moving on.

So much effort has been put into the visuals, which are gorgeous, and the gameplay mechanics are structured to move you through as fast as possible so not only do you stop noticing, you end up trying to figure out why despite all the beauty it really does not feel like a world at all.

There are really so many elements that go toward this effect, but I’ll spare you. Suffice to say that no, I’m not really enjoying it. I’ll take my character to 80 and see how the endgame looks.

Holyblesserx.7618:

I understand religion is a sensitive subject for many and being an atheist i don’t care much for it at all. Throughout the game I have noticed dialogue that catered for or against religion within the game realm and i was wondering why it is needed in video games? for example the tournament master would say “I pray to the spirits of the wild…but they hardly answer” there would be other dialogue similar to this throughout the game but i was just curious as to why this is necessary in games .

You need to read – movies don’t count – some of the seminal RPG works (LoTR, Conan the Barbarian stories). It’s a non-question.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Hey, can I shout out for one of the developers who worked on a game I really enjoyed once upon a time and didn’t have levels in a strict sense?

Look up the blog of Brian Green, aka “Psychochild”. The game was an ancient beast I played on a dialup modem (28.8!) called Meridian 59.

Meridian 59 is quite possibly the first true graphical (2.5D) MMO. I played it briefly, and had a friend who played it a lot. Ground breaking game for its time!

Wanderer.3248:

Some single player RPGs, like Skyrim have levels based on skill, rather than the other way around. I think a Skyrim style advancement system could work well.

Trouble is that there are a lot of gamers that have been practically institutionalised by WoW and are very, very resistant to alternate concepts.

Whatever the level is based upon, it’s still a level. A level is just a number that allows progression and comparison. I used to think in the old days of P&P that we’d eventually get past the approximation that levels were created to provide. But it’s a core system that just works so well and the logical outworking of systems around it has grown to what we have today.

This is what RPGing is – the depiction of skill and power growth as represented by passive numbers as opposed to pure player skill. However you disguise that (level) number, it will still be there – whether that’s through skill advancement, or gear acquisition etc. It’s just a number, so after years of thinking around it both professionally and as a player, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s better to expose it rather than pretend it’s not there.

The real alternative is skill based games. And they are different games. The internet is not quite fast enough yet to support true skill based multiplayer games without some deference to the inevitable lag. And honestly, that’s not of interest to most RPGers. The whole point is that the progression is passive, not actual. That’s the game, and the charm of it.

If we wanted a challenge of pure skill, we’d be playing sport, or any of the competitive FPS’s .

Re. WoW, it’s quite honestly a horrible benchmark. If anyone refers to it without making reference to other games, I assume they don’t know any better because they haven’t played anything else. It’s just not an indicator of much except gaming naivete in my book. It’s a good start, but for the love of God play something else in the genre and discover the universe outside its cheesy, pop culture infested mediocrity (that’s not directed at anyone inparticular, just a general statement).

I think the problem here is that many of you don’t actually enjoy MMO gameplay or RPG games. That’s fine by the way, horses for courses. These aren’t hard and fast things anyway, game “genre’s” only appear due to the wild success of a new mechanic/idea (FPS = Wolfenstein/Doom; RTS = Dune 2 etc.) , and are changing all the time.

However, I’d like to re-emphasize that when you remove levels you create a whip for your own back from a design perspective and end up reproducing the same dynamic in another way anyway. You also fundamentally change the game, and lots of people like the feel that levels bring. What you are really talking about is a different type of game – which is, again, fine. Just be honest about that in the marketing so people know what they’re buying into.

Vayne.8563:

Yet Runequest was a pen and paper game without levels that worked marvelously. It had a skill based system, where individual skills increased in power as you used them, without having a level for your character. So you could get better at various things you did, but it wasn’t dependent on an overall level.

That’s ironic, because Runequest is my classic example of why it doesn’t work, and is why the system never took off. It was way too clunky and difficult to manage, and in a world where everyone cast spells with equal ability it was unwieldy in all ways. This underscores my point – it sounds good on paper, but just doesn’t work in practice.

I actually sat on a “next gen” MMO in the formative stages and tried to do exactly this – come up with a system that worked without levels. I already knew the problems from years with pen and paper systems, and playing all early CPRGs and many MMOs. I argued from the beginning that it wouldn’t work, and if it did it would be difficult to understand and pick up. After 3+ years of fruitless development, they hit crunch and changed everything to be level based (then they closed down a few years later due to enormous stupidity and mismanagement, but the point remains).

There are just so many reasons that levels make sense, raw coding prerogatives included. You need a way for players to be able to easily make power comparisons (I still favour EverQuest’s “con” solution), as well as a thousand other things that need a number to relate to. As has been said, level-less (and classless) systems have all been attempted many times already, with varying results, none of them too good from what I’ve seen. Levels + class are the way to go in RPGs IMO. And that’s after decades of experience with this stuff as a player. It is subjective, but not completely.

There are other ways around the problem though without artificially deleveling. In older systems like Rolemaster, the more of any mob you fight simultaneously, the more dangerous it is. A single rat is trivial, but 30 of them could pose a serious risk. It’s not a flat level vs. level check (i.e. greying out a mob). It’s dependent upon whether you’re attacked from the front or behind or the side, or above, the size and number of the mob attacking, the type and speed of attack, the type of defense etc. etc. These things are tedious with dice, but simple with computers. If it’s realism you’re after there are much better ways to do it. Deleveling is an inelegant solution that creates as many problems as it solves (IMO).

I agree, and I’m not sure what we’re discussing now… What you’ve done is point out the problem with levels in GW2, not the original function of levels in D&D. Part of the problem you’ve shown is with the high numbers in modern games (level 80 etc.) I mentioned that in my first reply – it’s another reason these high numbers are bad IMO.

marnick.4305:

In Lord of the Rings, after almost 80 years of combat experience, Aragorn is almost killed by, of all things, a worg. A typical mob for a lvl1 zone in many games. That’s how it should be.

Firstly, that (horrid) scene was added by Peter Jackson. It’s not in the books, and doesn’t belong in the story except as a pretty arrogant director fabrication. Secondly, just because wargs in “many games” are Level 1 mobs doesn’t mean anything except game designers weren’t being literal. In The Middle Earth they were always nasty and dangerous beasts capable of ripping anyone apart, so it doesn’t translate at all.

If you were going to put Tolkien wargs into the MMO setting, they would be high level mobs that even the most experience adventurers would have trouble with. It doesn’t affect your point, but it’s a bad example. Your point has already been addressed more than once in posts above (tl;dr many people disagree for various good reasons, but we get why you say that).

Elbegast.6970:

I liked the idea of zone by zone down-leveling until I actually began to play the game. It seemed like a great mechanic on paper.

Now that I’ve tried it, zone by zone down-leveling has caused me to lose all motivation to progress. There is no sense of accomplishment or pride in my character. It feels like the game has thrown away all my hours of hard work when I pass through a lower level zone, constantly running because I don’t feel like struggling with or being killed by mobs that are half my (true) level.

It doesn’t matter what down-leveling was meant to correct on the technical side, the feeling (a sense of character pride, power, accomplishment) is what matters. And right now, at least to me, it feels absolutely horrible. My character feels weak. I may as well just park him in The Grove and pretend to be a commoner or a merchant.

Here, experiencially, is the clear reason why I say de-leveling doesn’t work for many players. For GW2 it’s a moot point as it has embraced it and it’s not going to change. But for future games, I say take careful note.

Einlanzer.1627:

I don’t think this is true. I think many more people like the downleveling than not. And the reason why is obvious – it is both more realistic, and it avoids the problem plaguing many MMOs of content being backwards-gated. WoW is horrible about this – at any given time 90% of the content of the game is utterly useless and might as well not exist.

That said, I do agree about small numbers- I hate the super-scaling that occurs in modern games. It is one of my least favorite things about WoW and honestly it isnt’ a whole lot better in this game.

Yeah there will always be personal preference with this stuff, so it’s not that anything is right or wrong really. The useless older content thing in WoW is an outworking of their larger design issues (and the many bad and trivializing decisions they made in that area in my opinion). In a game like EverQuest the linear progression opened up huge areas of new gameplay in revisting old content just for the thrill of dominating it, helping lower level characters, getting that item you could never get before etc.

This admittedly brought other issues (bottom feeding), but these are much smaller issues than the one’s you get otherwise. Another modern design mistake is to go to exorbitant lengths to fix what are in reality small problems, and create a monster (for a beautiful example of this see EverQuest 2’s “answer” to player griefing – locking people out from any meaningful interaction, and so undermining the core reason people play MMOs in the first place).

Down-leveling also fundamentally reduces the value of higher level characters versus lower levels. Max level used to be an achievement in itself, and seeing a max level character created a feeling of awe and the desire to get there yourself. Now it’s what everyone races to in order to start the real game. So much has been lost in gameplay as result :/

If you say de-leveling removes that as it keeps all content “viable”, then I say why have levels at all, and back we got to the beginning. All GW2 has done is keep the notion of levels, and shifted much of the gating to other things (skills and gear). That’s a mechanic that works at cross purposes to the deleveling, and pits the systems against each other.

What you lose with down-leveling is the sensation of progress and power you gain from leveling. This is an extremely potent gameplay motivation that has been misunderstood and undervalued a lot in recent years. It’s not a “realistic” mechanic, but it works within a game. This can be attenuated with other things (skills for example, multiple opponent rules such as systems like Role Master had) in a nicer way.

Anyway, now we’re entering geekdom and the minutiae of RPG nerd interest in RPG systems Your comment that there are many more that like the deleveling is probably true, but only within the GW2 fan base. The wider MMO games community (and particularly RPG players) don’t like it as much as the alternative. It’s a self filtering thing within the game, naturally; those that don’t like it just don’t play.

There have been RPG systems and games that removed leveling, and they haven’t worked. Almost everything has been tried in one form or another, actually (and before computers became the main platform – pen and paper systems tried it all years ago). As soon as you start building a game system without levels, you’ll understand why levels are such a powerful core mechanic.

For me personally, the GW2 experiment with changing your levels as you enter particularly leveled areas does obviate the entire purpose of levels. In this I agree with you – their system is at cross purposes on this point. I know lots of people playing the game love it, but more don’t like it and don’t play for that reason. More importantly, at the design level it pits character progression against the content in an inelegant and non-intuitive way IMO. And inelegant mechanics will always continue to create problems as they play out. One of those problems in this case is the logical result that levels feel pointless, so why have them at all? If you remove them, you have an entirely skill-based system, and you jump into the deep design issues those systems continue to have (they get murky and unsatisfying quickly, and incredibly difficult to manage and balance; there are no longer any archetypes in the world for players to identify with).

I’m a big fan of class distinction and levels, and small numbers (modern CPRG systems have gone the Japanese way and made all the numbers huge, and so less meaningful). It’s time games went back to go forward, in my opinion.

Vayne.8563:

I’m an immersion player and Guild Wars 2 isn’t horrible for me. That said, it’s never going to be as immersive as a single player game. But as MMOs go, I’ve yet to find what that is more immersive.

“You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.” (Princess Bride)

@Dafomen As someone once said, don’t bother explaining yourself to people who are committed to not understanding you. They aren’t listening, they are arguing, it’s the fanboi way. Noone has yet bothered to offer any rational counter-argument beyond ad hominems. The devs may read and listen though, you never know (I hope our comments don’t get pulled by mods as previous comments have – no disrespect to the mods intended, they are just trying to keep things positive, even if those efforts get a bit heavy handed). There’s an enormous amount to GW2 that is progressive in a good way, and a small but profound shift in direction is all that’s needed (IMO naturally).

For the record, I think SAB was very well done for what it was. It wasn’t novel; it’s all been done before in other games more than a few times. But it’s nicely executed.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t conflict with the rest of the GW2 world, though. Imagine Mario stumbling into a Call of Duty, gritty realism with blood and gore and real world weaponry, and you get an idea of what I’m saying (some hyperbole notwithstanding).

marnick.4305:

tolkien.6317:

Most here are missing the point. It doesn’t matter if you like or don’t like SAB. It doesn’t matter what you think of the 8-bit retro style or the Super Mario cut and paste. That’s an entirely subjective thing, and whatever your taste, more power to you. The only thing that matters is that the new content does violence to, and trivializes the aesthetic of the existing game world. This is the only point. It undermines the world and art style the original GW2 devs went to such extraordinary lengths to establish. That is why SAB and it’s ilk makes no sense, and takes more from the game than it gives. Most people will feel this and not be able to articulate what it is, but all they will know after time is that the game doesn’t “feel” like it used to and is somehow less fun. Some people will never feel it because aesthetics simply don’t matter to them or they like the pizza pastiche of conflicting styles, aesthetics, and artistic conflict. That doesn’t mean the new elements aren’t fighting against the rest of the GW2 world. They are, and do, and it’s frankly bizarre.

What part of “April Fool’s Joke” do you not get?

Do you not understand the point I’m making? A contextual April Fool’s joke would live within the game world, and be more effective for that. It would add to the world, not drain it and undermine it (actually, ignore it almost completely). Whatever the reason for introducing thematically jarring content into your world, it’s always (always) a mistake.

Most here are missing the point. It doesn’t matter if you like or don’t like SAB. It doesn’t matter what you think of the 8-bit retro style or the Super Mario cut and paste. That’s an entirely subjective thing, and whatever your taste, more power to you. The only thing that matters is that the new content does violence to, and trivializes the aesthetic of the existing game world. This is the only point. It undermines the world and art style (and flows on into the gameplay) that the original GW2 devs went to such extraordinary lengths to establish. That is why SAB and it’s ilk makes no sense, and takes more from the game than it gives. Most people will feel this and not be able to articulate what it is, but all they will know after time is that the game doesn’t “feel” like it used to and is somehow less fun. Some people will never feel it because aesthetics simply don’t matter to them or they like the pizza pastiche of conflicting styles and brash, jarring aesthetics (that’s not a criticism, some people genuinely like that and I acknowledge it). That doesn’t mean the new elements aren’t fighting against the rest of the GW2 world. They are, and do, and it’s frankly bizarre.

BroScientist.9875:

I’m done playing this game. I will check back on update days but that’s it. ESO beta is right around the corner.

Thanks for the heads up! Signed up.

sinzer.4018:

Theoldman.6483:

Men and women are not created 100 % equal except in games.

When are we going to get gender based profession/race differences besides looks.

Gender’s the wrong term to use as gender is a social construct.

Wait, what? Gender roles may be social constructs, but gender is a biological distinction regardless of what John Money tried to do to the word. You’ve been reading too much feminist propaganda.

Original RPG systems made gameplay distinctions between the sexes, by the way. Dungeons and Dragons used to take one from the Strength stat and add it to the Dexterity stat if you rolled a female. Not entirely realistic, but it meant the best archers (which relied on Dex) were always girls.

UnderdogSMO.9428:

and yeah Voltron GW2 holds the record for fastest selling MMO of all time.

Western MMO. Asia kicks all sorts of kitten with MMOs. Numbers in the West don’t really come close.

The more you have personally invested in something, the more likely you are to defend it, and the more likely you are not to be objective in that defense. Just sayin’…

Are Shortbow Thiefs viable throughout PvE and endgame PvP? It’s an intriguing build.

As someone not yet completely burned out on dev shenanigans with GW2, what class would people who have given up on their Rangers suggest? I’ve heard a lot about Mesmers – are they still a recommendation?

P.S. I don’t necessarily want FOTM (by the time I get to endgame the month will have passed on), but I don’t want to have to cry into my cups after every patch. A steady, solid class is all.

Good grief, I just want to know why no matter what game I play I choose the class having the most issues and getting the least justice from devs!

P.S. No doubt part of this is due to the fact that lower level areas are pretty empty. There’s not ever a lot going on, so I’m left to my own devices for the most part. I can see how things would get more interesting if there were Events being fired off and people coming from all over to join in etc. There’s not much point in running over to a “nearby event” when it’s all AI and the named mob is unkillable solo at similar level, particularly when the mobs you kill in order to get to it all respawn within seconds of you getting there. Best to just run on through and get onto the next area ASAP.

You know, if the respawn rate scaled dynamically in relation to how many people were in the area, it would possibly make things a bit more interesting.

Yeah that would work if the systems leaned that way. That’s the bemusing thing right now. There is no impetus (beyond one I bring myself in contrast to the game) to do much else BUT run around as fast as I can and unlock all the points. The personal story is pretty much the only thing driving me forward, and it’s level limited so I have to level if I want to continue it. The fastest way to do that is explore due to the way XP rewards work. Everything feels just a little… disjointed, awkward, and disharmonious system-wise. It’s all a bit at cross-purposes.

It’s obvious that a lot of effort has gone into all of the areas, and some of the scripted events and gameplay moments are really cool, but the game is pushing you to move through them as fast as possible. The crazily high respawn rate reinforces this. It’s bizarre. It’s kind of like a world on one hand, and something else on the other. It’s half-way between an MMO and an ARPG, and yet neither. It feels caught between the two to me.

killcannon.2576:

You may want to rethink GW2 then, because I can see a future post in about a month that goes along the lines of “There is no end game, bored, etc etc.”

That’s kind of the point of this post. What is the end game? PvP (which is a pretty reasonable endgame)? Does it hold up? Does it make sense of the journey there?

The thing is, the systems don’t reward much else. Mob tethering means I can run with impunity through areas pretty much (a few you can’t for long as they are tight and mobs are densely packed, but not many). The insane respawn rate coupled with the very low XP reward from killing mobs and pretty ordinary drops outside of quest rewards means there’s little impetus to fight my way anywhere I don’t have to.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a visually beautiful game for the most part, but all the systems direct you toward moving through areas ASAP, and so the impact of the visuals is minimized and undermined because the “life” of the areas is trivialized. It’s all very well to say “you don’t have to do that”, but if that’s the path of greatest reward it’s the way the gameplay leans. Leveling and increasing in power and gaining access to better items is a core part of the gameplay. The systems around that are fighting against it, from what I can see…

I may be missing something, but right now the entirety of GW2 play for me seems to be rushing breathlessly around maps finding all the points to unlock, completing the requisite tasks to get each heart, and then moving on to the next area. This is by far the best XP (killing mobs not linked to other tasks is tedious in comparison). Is this by design? It seems very un-fun and tedious after a short time.

For all the talk of new systems and new types of gameplay, GW2 has settled into the same sort of MMO tasklists, only it’s reduced the game world to exploration tick boxes and jump puzzles. What happens once you get to 80 and there is no longer even the motivation to do that?

Yes, I didn’t know the precursor was called The Lover. It’s perfectly apt though, and underscores my point. When the game you are playing starts drawing upon muppetry for inspiration, you better be prepared for it to devolve toward eight-year-old aesthetics.

Argh.