Astalnar

Craywulf, on 05 May 2013 - 12:01 AM, said:

So, we should be subjected to lazily developed content simply becuase the developers chose a financial model that is probably even worse for consumers than the sub model?

I'd gladly pay monthly for good content and decent developing. Not the garbage ANet has turned into.

Let's get something else straight: everything they have been doing has been about stuffing their pockets with customer cash. Their attempts at adding "expansion sized update" have fallen short in both size and expectations. This game is nothing but a giant cash shop and ANet it seems has lost their will to make a good game for the sake of making a good game. Greed and false promises are now their only goal. I wonder when you will realize you've been had?

El Duderino, on 05 May 2013 - 04:37 PM, said:

Just give it up El Duderino. They are so hanged up trying to prove that achievement points don't mean anything, that they circled the fact that:

1) This Living Story deal is sub-par;

2) That Colin Johanson is full of it and is unaware of the game's issues;

3) That those 3 million accounts, while ensuring the game has payed for itself and still be considered a astonishing success, don't expiate the fact that the game's direction has gone sour and most of those accounts might not even be playing actively, as you tried to prove in this thread time and time again, using the leader-boards as factual evidence;

4) That this game has been driven towards the Cash Shop revenue, as opposed of selling us additional content in increments like the original game, and that has decreased the overall quality of the game as they don't feel compelled to make good content anymore;

5) That I'm having more fun doing the Eye of the North campaign today that I ever did doing the Personal/Living Story;

Our inputs are clearly undervalued here El Duderino. But I for one will have the last laugh, when their eyes have finally opened and I have moved on a long time ago to greener pastures. Maybe ArenaNet will caught up with this before they pull a Cataclysm. I can only hope so, because I am really trying to like this game.

In the mean time, I get to practice my lovely prose. Probably wrote this in two minutes.

Arfuriz, on 05 May 2013 - 02:20 PM, said:

So basically, it's ok for people to tell me I'm wrong, but not for me to tell others they're wrong. I should just sit and take whatever made up arguments people say as fact without trying to counter them?

Sounds like the normal apologist mindset.

I feel the living story is just a promo event for the gem store. It's very badly written, in fact very boring content and to end with just a temporary dungeon is very poor return on developer time.

What GW2 needs is an expansion of the world. I always used to wonder what was in the zones you could not see in GW1, I wanted to explore there, they finally added more in GW:EN but there was still vast amounts of the visible world you could not go to. Now GW2 is here and there is even less of the world you can go to than GW1. I think the priority needs to be all about adding level 80 content, unveiling the visible lands on the map. It's obvious that this is ( or at least was) their intent, but pushing a year in and they give us pointless junk like the living story when they could have given us a new zone.

If they want to have a living world, they should retire some of the old events (Lord Beetlstone must be getting sick of scale eggs by now) and replace with some new ones. Better communication around the zone meta events too, I would quite happily spend a lot of tine doing the meta events if I knew they were happening, especially in those abandoned zones, and with the right rewards they would be well attended.

tldr

No to living story
Yes to new zones (level 80 only)
Yes to better use of what they already have

Desild, on 04 May 2013 - 02:46 PM, said:

Right? I really don't get the GW1 had less content at launch. IMO it had probably the same amount of content - and it was way better and more repeatable than anything GW2 has to offer. Plus, it didn't have tokens and 15 different currencies tied to grinding for gear. You played because it was fun - and every now and then (way more than in GW2) something awesome dropped. Sure, it may not have been perfect 15^50, but you still got fun rewards as "treasures" not for doing content 20 days in a row so you can get 1500 tokens.

Enjoying how the entire point that WoW, with only EQ and DAoC as any sort of reference to draw upon, managed to create more content in its first 8 months than GW2 (a sequel by a company that had already had a previous MMO under its belt).  That by this point, WoW had already attempted to address its LFG issues with meeting stones.  That they had added two rather large dungeons.  Say what you will about either Dire Maul or Mauradon, but they were beautiful.  Plus Blackwing Lair.  Battlegrounds, and an attempt at a PvP reward system.  Christmas, Children's Week and the Darkmoon Faire.

Fun is subjective.  These are fairly quantifiable accomplishments in terms of software and content development.  WoW was more productive.

I'm sick of it.

Why not just put skins on the cash shop directly + the chests.

Anet are missing out on using the cash shop to bolster their profits. Look at league of legends. Give people skins they can apply to their COMBAT gear and I bet they will start making a killing. More options = Happier players = More profit.

Astalnar, on 13 November 2012 - 04:03 PM, said:

Not ashamed to say it, I was one of them. I took ANet's word at face value. I may be pleasantly surprised by the new ascended stuff, if the lack of runes balances them with exotic.

Two lessons I'll bring back with me: 1) wait and see. 2) don't believe talk from game developer's until it's been physically backed up by deeds.

Kichwas, on 17 September 2012 - 04:34 PM, said:

People saying this are *ing retarded. I played WoW since Closed Beta Phase two to current, and the community had ALWAYS BEEN THE SAME. There was NEVER a magical change in LK that all the sudden turned the blizzard community to dip shits. . . . they were dip shits before WoW was ever even in development.

Come up with your OWN blizzard hating quotes, because when you say that DFinder ruined the community, you show just how *ing stupid and ignorant you are.

Astalnar, on 10 September 2012 - 11:51 AM, said:

WvW won by skritt zerg ftw

Dear Arena Net and Guild Wars 2 Guru users it has come to my attention that the slyvari dance is not that interesting and is rather odd and has some parts that simply go too fast.

I would like to suggest an alternative that would be much more memorable to everyone in the community

The Gangnam Style Dance

https://www.youtube....h?v=9bZkp7q19f0

If this change comes to the game I can guarantee sales will improve by 413% and user satisfaction will be so high the customer support team will spend most of their time dancing as slyvari in The Grove with the rest of the player base.

Thank you for listening, Dance on Guild Wars.

Gilles VI, on 02 September 2012 - 11:51 AM, said:

For starters, don't say people in this thread are asking for stuff for free, it's inflmatory, a blatant lie and undermines the integrity of your argument. What you and everyone else who uses this garbage argument don't understand is a grind is a grind regardless of why you are doing it. Does it matter that it's optional when it's the content you want most (more than levelling) and thus end up doing it anyway? When it's the content they've designed to be your end game? The destination (grind town) is the same regardless of how or why you are there. They removed the grind from the levelling process but they deffinitely hard core committed to it with the gearing process. You don't need to pray for that armour piece to drop, you know you will be in this dungeon 11 more times just to get it, regardless of how lucky you are.  I was in a group which failed hard at Twilight Harbour story mode on the poison spider summoning boss (we eventually beat him when I circle straffed him while other res ran). Some of the content is so difficult and punishing it's going to be out of reach and ignored by the majority. I want the game to have a healthy population for a long time and decisions like this one make that so much less likely.

Honestly, dungeon sets below max level were pointless - no-one was going to bother to get them and even if they did they would outlevel them in the process. Their only use was going to be for individual pieces and transmutation at end game. Now we are all intended to jump on the grind treadmill for end game if we want the dungeon rewards. Let me be clear, with transmutation and how aggressively you level up in this game I expected them to do something like this so as not to undermine the value of a level 80 armour set but I didn't expect each piece to cost so many runs, honestly I prefer the random chance aspect, currently dungeons are very grindy and unrewarding.

As far as max stat armour being easy to find end game, HAH! Please, show me that NPC because I haven't heard of them. It's not our fault ArenaNet made transmutation stones when they wanted skins to be their end game, yet we are paying the price.

Honestly I'm not surprised they pulled stuff like this, I've always been saying ArenaNet love grind more than WoW and they've pulled it off again. It's just unfortunate it's so out of sync with how they promoted their game. Honestly I've been very negative about the game on these forums since launch and it hasn't been an accurate view of how I feelt. A big part of the negativity is because so much of the game is so good and done so well, it's sad and dissapointing to see them spoil it with stuff like this.

Another thing which baffles me is how they've made reaching max level quickly so important. There's really no reason to stick around at low levels, none of the gear you gather is worthwhile, there's not point running the dungeons because you won't be suiting up until 80 anyway (you can start saving for it, but they won't be used until 80 so even with a full set the level 80 goal is more important), the gear treadmill only matters at level 80, until then everything is irrelevant in 10 short levels and thus not worth a lot of work. The sooner you get to 80 the sooner the real end game begins, and that's the really confusing part.

Astalnar, on 30 August 2012 - 12:07 PM, said:

I want to comment on this admittedly good point.

The problem with WoW in this respect was that whilst the story did move on, nothing in the world seemed to change. The ogres will still be cutting mushrooms in Zangarmarsh (for example) like nothing happened. And this is accentuated by the fact that in terms of story, you did kill a bunch of them and put an end to their leader! The world will appear the same even after you kill the leader. Now the phasing used in WotLK helped with this a lot (the DK starting area for instance was awesome!) - but you got cut off from other people in the area, which meant that you sacrificed the feeling of persistance in terms of the players which gives MMOs their charm.

In GW2 the dynamic events serve to make the world feel different every time you're in the area - and the fact that there are many people focusing on the event and actually changing what is happening together gives it a more, ehm, dynamic feeling The personal story is meant to give that feeling of story advancement, with the dynamic events providing a more vibrant, living world rather than offer plot advancement on a grand scale. Or so I see it!

So in short: I think that the WoW quests provided a sense of dynamic story advancement at the cost of a static world, DEs provide a more dynamic world at the cost of a looping, more static, story.

I personally don't hate WoW, I have a lot of fond memories of it - but I do find fault in a lot of its aspects, which I won't go into (no point). I won't go about bad mouthing the game, but I will criticize aspects of it that don't agree with me as much as I will praise things it got right. It's a very good game that happens to not be my "type", if you will. There are some things about it though that really annoy me - not directly game flaws, but things that have had an effect on the gaming industry in general - that often have me hovering close to the WoW-hating bandwagon (I don't get on though because, as aformentioned, I have good memories from the game).

I guess what annoys me is the way it got the MMO genre in a rut for many years. It was not WoW's fault directly of course. It was the bandwagon-jumping greedy developers who thought they would make a quick buck by copying it (e.g. SWTOR, which could have been so much more if it hadn't followed the WoW formula as closely as it did). WoW was a "once in a hundred years" phenomenon which unfortunately and unintentionally set back the MMO genre.

Also, I really get annoyed at the pig headed attitude of many fanboys who think that the WoW formula is the only way to go, anything that veers away is a failure in their eyes (I remember not so fondly a number of arguments I had with their type on the SWTOR forums before its release ><) Not to mention, the forum community can be pretty awful. However I've rarely had problems with the in-game community (maybe because I got lucky with the RP servers I chose)

I don't play WoW any more, in fact I know now for sure that this type of game is just not right for me. But I don't regret playing it as it opened me up to a new gaming genre and gave me many good experiences. I don't want the game to die or anything - but I do hope that it will eventually move a bit sideways and give space to new ideas and visions Maybe GW2 will turn out to be one of those games that will exist side by side with WoW!

sifr, on 29 August 2012 - 11:01 PM, said:

The real question is who really cares if you hate the fact that they downed him so early.  I find it extremely amusing that someone wasting time on the internet GAMING forums is whining that some is wasting time INSIDE the game that they are POSTING about.

C wut I did there?