DarkGanni

They made this pretty clear in the year-plan. Casual daily open world grind is their focus. Dungeons they can't even be bothered to "overhaul" like they suggested, if you can call fighting the howling king on the stairs an "overhaul." This is not Vanilla WoW where everything pointed towards raids. Dungeons are just a bone thrown at a specific kind of player, but with not nearly enough attention to make them a robust experience.

This attitude towards "hardcore" PvE content really shouldn't surprise anyone considering this is the company that gave us Shadow Form. Though I have to say I'd take the GW2 meta over actual optimal GW1 dungeon builds, at least you have to worry about responding to big boss attacks rather than holding down the "I win" button.

Guardian of the Light, on 16 May 2013 - 10:44 AM, said:

Maybe they shoud have given Rox and Braham greatswords.

Shield, Mace and Bow which not even all classes can equip and which are not exactly the most popular weapons can not be indication.

Compare them to being able to obtain weapon that you can and want to actually wield with your character and build.

What story?


Honestly, I only followed the story up to lvl 10 and then I simply got tired of having to constantly jump back and forth to follow it. Don't get me wrong, I quite disliked Factions' closed gates, but as Prophecies shows, there's a happy medium where you can give players the freedom to do their own thing, but still keep them engaged in the story.

It's garbage, from cinematics to story. I think there was only one part in the entire game that had valid, decent lore and it was just an extremely short recap of the Guild Wars told by Trahearne around level 40, then the story goes back to being terrible. At that point I thought oh sick finally some interesting then ANet all like lol nah jk, here fight some dragon and his billions of minions that you don't give a shit about. I really hope they don't butcher palawa joko because he is my favorite character and that alone has the potential to redeem. Screw the dragons, give me interesting character development.

I agree with most of the article but think it's far too late in the game to fix it unless they start listening and making some serious changes. Which they won't because trading post  / gem store / gems to gold. $$$

ShezuTsukai, on 30 April 2013 - 09:13 PM, said:

Not everyone who stops playing the game "rage quits." Some play other games, or go about the rest of their lives. Is it also karma for these players?  

Not to mention, if those who did, as you put it, "rage quit," left because of a lack of new content, and the return to see that much of the content added was just temporary distractions and people are doing the same old stuff they were doing when they left, it sort of validates their reasons for leaving in the first place.

Personally I feel like ANet has dropped the ball by pushing the living story so much. It's a lot of wasted resources for something that isn't very memorable or interesting. The game still lacks meaningful endgame content.

I think Dasryn and Loperdos are spot on.

GW2 was meant to be an "action" MMO. Always moving, clicking, few buttons to press and easy to get into.
This design idea has been realized. Definitely! But at what expense?

I also always wondered if GW2 designers had a "jumping trauma" from GW1 given how many jumping puzzles the game has. (Newsflash, ArenaNet, are you really sure MMO gamers are platformer game fans?)
But maybe it dates back to the core inspiration of its design. The desire to make MMOs more action oriented.
There is the problem: These 8-bit era platform or whatever games have little to do with MMO gaming. You cannot help people much if at all in a jumping puzzle. Either it's you who falls down and has to jump all of it again or the other, not much chance to help or cooperate except for killing some mobs.
I am also a bit worried that the exploration content is such a solo jumping affair.

Unfortunately ArenaNet lost people like Jeff Strain and some others. Colin Johanson created the GW1 Bonus Mission Pack, and this is where it started going down this wrong GW2 lane: It was very fun - but only once, twice and when people got their weapon skin of choice, they never went back. Unfortunately many hearts and events in GW2 are auto-attack clickfests and even the more difficult ones later are AoE mass zerg orgies (Balthazar Temple e.g.). The lower level bosses die so fast that one realizes that down/upscaling of player level has its limitations.

GW2's combat is fast paced and leaves little time for communication. I can type while fighting, most can't. There is no downtime after a fight, people go on into the next fight. Again no communication. You are alone. Your heart progress only counts for you, not for people in your party if you are in a party. Mobs and mob number adjust to you if you are solo or two, three players.

Guild Bounties etc. are quite social, their implementation is rather flawed though. The UI for them is hidden in the Guild Interface and they are not that "dynamic", fixed routes for every bounty.

Now take a look at the living story. Were you rocked by it so far? 10 minutes with Braham and Rox, then it's some generic events and scavenger hunts for weeks.

I took a break of some 3 months and recently got back into GW2. It's a beautiful game but I am sad to say it's fundamentally flawed and I doubt this can be fixed other than creating GW3. I read that no expansions are planned for the next time, so it is up to improved living story bits and... whatever... to keep us going.

I hope they do better than I fear, as the player churn of GW2 is enormous. I have seen guilds of 200-400 peeps go down to 2-3 players online, 1 of them maybe something one could consider "active". After 3 months many seem to be done with the game. I am not sure if many of them return like me.


P.S.: Guesting and Servers. This is also what destroyed and splintered the international GW1 community. Guesting is such a PITA, switch chars and don't forget to guest again, limit of 2 servers, most abuse it only for event farming oh my. Cannot visit American buddies anymore at all, not even for dungeon runs.

(off-topic but somehow nevertheless related: How would you continue developing GW2? If I would be given the task to expand on what's there, that's quite difficult. No wonder there is one jumping puzzle after another and a shallow story with the ever same events.)

So we all know now that guesting is not working. All it does is make it so people who play on a server can never do a event on there own server in primetime or on weekends unless they are there at min a hour early.
So block all guesting on servers. And then make a guesting server. If you want to play with friends guest to the guesting server which is not attached to any other server and play with friends.

Instances are working great. Instance dungeons do not mess with servers because they are outside the actual servers so leave them.

This game is about everyone having fun and not messing with other peoples fun. Well guesting as it is now is messing with people trying to events on there own servers because half the people at the event are guesting from another server!

So I think my idea will make it so everyone can play with friends WITHOUT SCREWING OTHER PLAYERS OVER IN THE PROCESS.

What do you all think?

GW2 has an economy?

Better graphics.

Worse in every other regard. Although, WvW has a lot of potential.

I feel like A lot of people thought this game was going to be more than it is. It's a good game, but the hype was way too much.

Azure Skye, on 24 February 2013 - 12:02 AM, said:

The point I'm making is that large guilds tend to attract the attention-seekers who can't go 30 seconds without saying something in guild chat, and gets upset if someone doesn't reply. That's not being social, that's being annoying. A guild with 5 actively regular players who get along and converse is plenty social. I don't need to wade through a bunch of tween BS in order to get my communication fix.

I'd rather they develop an official expansion by dec to bring in loads of new content. Right now, they should be focusing on the community and KEEPING dedicated players. Servers are rapidly depleting, it's a huge problem. I wouldn't be surprised if at least 10 servers were empty by the end of the month.

Things they should work on ASAP: reduce # of servers drastically (6-9 per region), a real dedicated LFG tool

These two ideas should fix the community for now.

Additional content (events, missions, etc.) should be the least of their concern with player populations severely dwindling.

And let's be real tea. There's no point in extra content if the game is already dead, which it could be in a few months, if they don't make some drastic changes now.

The level cap should have been 1.