Ghostwing

DuskWolf, on 10 January 2013 - 07:35 PM, said:

Speak for yourself. Mapping a zone is quite frankly my favourite part of the whole game. I find the environments gorgeous, and the dynamic event system extremely flexible and relaxing to participate in.

Others may not. That's fine. Nobody's opinion is objective fact, and the types of content that different players enjoy and prioritise is so varied that presenting any opinion as such more than a little misleading.

I also disagree with most of your negatives about the combat system. Dodging is useful, though YMMV depending on how resilient your class/build is to damage, and it's very actiony and engaging. It's also pretty easy to pick up, and doesn't require huge amounts of time investment or extensive research to make sure you don't make your character 'wrong'. All of this is extremely casual-friendly. It's also kind of hilarious that you think other games don't have bot problems.

Here's the thing - that stuff you call grind is the stuff I find enjoyable about playing the game. Doing dynamic events is fun. The personal story is fun. Exploring a map is fun. If you don't enjoy any of these things, then I guess you might consider them a grind, but then why are you playing PvE in the first place if you don't actually like the gameplay?

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Really? Have you ever done a daily achievement? Depending on the map, it usually takes less than an hour for me. It's also not compulsory and often completed just going about your exploring and progression anyway. I often complete mine entirely by accident without going out of my way at all.

I'm not going to tell you not to feel negatively about the game. You're totally entitled to your opinion, and if you don't enjoy something, then you don't enjoy it. But, as I said, it's pretty misleading to present these things that you don't like as concrete evidence of casual-unfriendliness.

The definition of 'casual' varies. Here it's primarily a time limitation, and the OP hasn't come back (I don't think) to clarify what they like to get out of a game. But, as a casual player who plays in a guild with a lot of other casual players, here are some relatively common traits and where GW2 fits with them, from a much more objective standpoint:

• Short play session length:
  
  • The good: Waypoints, logging in exactly where you log out, short-length hot-joinable PvP matches, the availability of boosts for increasing efficiency, the general ability to proceed at your own pace, and the lack of pressure from a monthly fee
    
  • The bad: LFG functions are lacklustre, which can make getting a group together for group content time-consuming. Some areas of content, such as dungeons and significant contributions to WvW, require a solid couple of hours at once to complete.

• Slower progress/Fewer hours overall to sink into the game:
  
  • The good: Pay-once-play-forever means no rush to complete content, insta-max-level for PvP means you can jump right in
    
  • The bad: Serious long-term/grindy goals, like legendaries, may be mostly out of reach, and unlike GW1, it will take a while to get to max gear levels
• Prefer non-repetitive content > gear treadmills/endless power creep:
  
  • The good: Casual time restrictions will probably make the PvE campaign content last you a while, if you enjoy it and aren't inclined to rush through it.
    
  • The bad: Due to the 'living world' aspect of GW2, some of the special event content so far has been quite time-restricted, and the initial suggestion of a power creep with ascended gear makes the prospect of a gear treadmill and content-gating worrisome

• Prefer cosmetics > Power:
  
  • The good: Transmutation stones make aesthetics flexible, the gem store is available for extra non-time-required customisation or boosting your gold with RL money, and there's quite a lot of armour available
    
  • The bad: Some skins are only available at the end of long content grinds, and town clothes are a pretty abysmal implementation of non-combat cosmetics. Also no further word yet on promised cosmetic features like housing.
• Often play solo/with other casual players:
  
  • The good: Tonnes of content does not require looking for a group, as the game is designed around easy, casual collaboration e.g. cooperating with other players in PvE maps, hot-join PvP, grouping/guilds not required for WvW
    
  • The bad: There is still content that requires a group to play, such as dungeons. Higher level maps are very dense with mobs, with dynamic events designed for multiple players, so they can be extremely frustrating to play solo

I guess that about sums it up. Ultimately what I'd say is if you like PvE for its own sake, enjoy exploring and soaking up the ambience, customising your character and following the story, you will get your money's worth out of GW2 as a casual player. I don't play much PvP or WvW so I can't really advise on that side.

GW2 has flaws, but for the amount of time you'd be playing the game, you'd be mostly hitting the great, polished content.

Rickter, on 04 January 2013 - 01:37 PM, said:

Good God, man.

That would drive me crazy, doing the same thing for that many levels.

Arquenya, on 02 January 2013 - 11:40 PM, said:

Stealth isn't something a core idea of an entire combat model we know as the trinity revolves around.

1) Change what? It is fine right now. There IS no reliable way to gain and hold threat at the moment, only educated guesses that so far seem to work.

I don't see why Anet needs to go out of their way to make sure trinity style tanking cannot be possible at all.
But in the same vein, there is no good reason to make it any more viable than it is.

2) The underlying mechanics does not promote trinity style tanking at the moment. No one can be 100% certain exactly how threat works in the game, only speculations.

3) Yet we have claims that trinity style combat is what most people really want?

They just need better encounter design, smarter mobs, and more emphasis on the combos (combo fields and finishers). No need to put in a traditional trinity.

I've not seen a satisfactory model of the trinity either, though.

I've always played a tank in WoW and did indeed have a great time, but I very rarely felt that there was any inherient 'teamwork' going on. Class variety wasn't based on what we brought to the group, rather what made them us most suitable for the dungeons - things like, "a death knight is better for this boss" or "this is a better kiter". The rest was a mix-and-match of party buffs.

I've not seen much teamwork but more of a 'team race'. When something goes wrong, it's often because people stepped through fire and on AoEs, or because someone was undergeared and 'ran slow'.

Overall it seems like a matter of preference: Would you rather have every class do same thing in GW2, or always have the same group composition as seen in the 'trinity'?

Rickter, on 28 December 2012 - 12:41 AM, said:

Tanks in trinity MMOs are expected to lead, to know the fights better than anyone else in the group.

It is not merely a combat role, it is a heavy thankless responsibility that is thrown onto this single player in a group, which a comparatively low fraction of players want for their game experience.

The only players willing to take on this job on a committed basis were often also the ones with egos large enough to handle it.

Here, this expectation and pressure has been relieved, diffused and shared among every member of a group.
Here, a "tank" player no longer need to spec or learn widely different ways to play this same character in PvE and PvP, because PvE mechanics are no longer primarily based on this one single factor (Threat control) that does not work on human players in PvP settings.


If "tanks" aren't hard to find here in GW2, that would be precisely due to the fact that there is no trinity-based group combat.

That's what a vocal minority accomplishes.

People think the game is very bad, but in reality it's just a couple of people whining about a small part of the game.
Result is everybody forgets the good parts of the game.

But people that can remain objective and keep a distance from forums like this can give their opinion, and apparently some of these people think GW2 is GOTY.

So, I couldn't stop myself seeing what was possible with the notes we were given for bell choir. Turns out, since we got a dorian scale, things get a little trickier. Billie Jean is about the only well known song around that is written in the dorian mode. So, I pulled out a piano arrangement, adapted it to fit for handbells, stripped out all the notes that the Bell Choir can't play, and then started work.

Thanks to Arenanet for the awesome minigame that made this possible. Next time, maybe we can get a few more notes? Just throwing it out there...

Sorry but the puzzles wouldn't be fun if you can't giggle because of other people falling down.
The winterday puzzle even improved on that! Fall down? Go wait in the lobby and watch the more succesful guys strut on.

"Oh no, you're going too sloooow, those presents are going to blow up with you on it... See? See!? Hahahaha"

I love that!

Ghostwing, on 19 December 2012 - 02:50 AM, said:

I'm pretty sure you're wrong about the design and their intentions.

https://forum-en.gui...ge/3#post601441

MandraxUK, on 18 December 2012 - 02:11 PM, said:

I am sure you're right but listening to people will not give you the right idea either. Why? Because people say they want one thing but in fact want another. Data is a lot more accurate then you can imagine. This is a big issue no doubt but let see historically how things turned out.

You have players who claim they want horizontal content, they claim they hate vertical content with a passion yet through the life time of the game these same people refused to play any content outside of Orr (because of better rewards), the first moment better gear is released they flock to play it and once again refuse to do anything else.

How do you expect Arenanet to address such an issue? People are saying they want horizontal content and no vertical content. During halloween they added 30 new events across the world, the random spawning skritt event, 3 new jumping puzzles across the world. Did these so called horizontal loving players finally abandon Orr to experiance this new horizontal content? Absolutely not, the new events where added in lower level zone, there is not much reward so no reason to abandon Orr.

Fast forward to the lost shores, those same vertical hating people drop everything in Orr and rush to FoTM (content they claim to hate) and stay there.

So let see what are statistic telling us? People play highest rewarding content. Orr then FoTM. People dont care about horizontal content, when added few people actually sought it out.

Interview people will have told you what? Ohh we hate vertical content we just want horizontal content.

So what will happen if you follow what statistics are saying? you know that your next content will have to be more rewarding then the previous content or else these people will ignore it. (doing new content thats just as rewarding is unlikely to work as well. You'd have strategies formulated, groups experianced in tackling the current content, learning how to deal with the new content will result in a period of diminished returns)

So what happens if we follow what people are saying? we want horizontal content.They do that, add more events all over the world and then? people keep playing whatever rewards the most. a couple of months people get bored playing the same stuff over and over again and then quit.

Thing is there is a big contradiction here in my opinion. I just can understand how a truely horizontal player can be reward oriented. Reward is a purely vertical trait. The most rewarding content is at the end of the vertical progression corridor. The horizontal progression corridor has a ton of varying content spread all over the place. But there is no way to have every content be equally rewarding. The horizontal player keeps playing 1 - 15 content even at max level not because it rewards the most but because he enjoys the content. A horizontal player (in my opinion of course) is driven by the love for the game, the love of the activity at hand, the love of the enviroment, art, music whatever. But cant really be the love of the reward, That just makes it impossible to enjoy the width of content a horizontal game provides.

In my opinion what these people want is a short vertical progression, but vertical progression none the less. If they themselves seem not to know what they really want do you really think interviewing them will actually give you the answer?

Played nearly 3 hours last night with my brother, a serious rarity for me now that I have children, and we had a blast!

Bottom line is that we just did whatever we felt like, didn't sweat "progress" towards some ridiculous virtual goal, and mixed it up with different characters and events. In that 3 hours, we played four distinct game-modes, with 3 different characters each!

We started with an AC run, which was fun because we did a few things that we hadn't done before, rather than just speed-running it, and we had a few newer players to help along.

Then we went to EB to the jumping puzzle, which I'd never been to. It was a hoot. Didn't get far at all, but had some hilarious 3-way rivalries going with some FA & TC guys: yanking each other around and blasting each other off cliffs. Eventually, more TC showed up so we couldn't progress. Next time!

So the two of us ran around EB being obnoxious: taking camps, jacking yaks out from the middle of small zergs, stealing sentries, or drawing zergs to defend keeps from our two man "attacks". As a mark necro and focus mesmer, we eluded many zergs in some pretty epic chases. Didn't "accomplish" that much, but had some really fun cat and mouse going.

Finally, we dropped into tPvP, where we won our first tournament (we don't play much). We were mostly carried by a helluva thief player, but my brother and I had fun playing a psuedo-bunker-duo with strong team-fight builds. Our teammates were very nice people: didn't even complain when I bombed our first match (15 points maybe?)

So in 3 hours, we did a dungeon, ridiculous jumping puzzle + pvp, hit 'n' run WvW with some really fun chases (we had a group of 4 TC guys chasing us around for nearly 20 minutes), and a tPvP tournament. Never got boring, never felt grindy. We didn't really make much "progress", certainly not compared to focused grinding, but we had a lot of fun!

Much better than mindlessly trying to grind out some achievement, gear, or whatnot.

shatterer chest drops flame weapons included shield, complete 50+ maps with charrs... is random.

omar316, on 17 December 2012 - 05:17 AM, said:

LOL just because you dont like what I have to say you call it childish?  I informed again what Arenanet said over and over and over again before release.  The childish ones are the ones who bought a game and either didnt read/watch/listen to dev inteview or did and made the choice to ignore them and buy the game anyway.

Anyone asking for Raids/Gear treadmill/trinity now are just showing they didnt investigate the game before they bought it... or are now being blowhards whining for stuff that Arenanet said flat out NO TOO.

But yeah act like that little boy trying to play with the big boys...

@Duskwolf

Your last post is a perfect example of what we mean between negativity and criticism.

You've been saying the same thing for ages now, mainly how the AI is stupid, doesn't react to the situation etc.. how the combat feels like wow etc.. People have been pointing out why what you say isnt true. I have personally took the time showing you the AI in action through videos and marking out AI acting intelligently though out the fight. NPC crippling the right characters rather then spamming the conditions randomly, NPC dodging players, NPCs supporting each other, kiting etc... Yet you keep repeating your same line ignoring even plain evidence shown to you visually. Thats negativity, even though you say differently you just want to believe there are issues in the game even in areas where they're not. Every coin has 2 sides, its not just fans who can have a lack of objectivity sometimes.

Not to say you have absolutely no argument, you do, the game is indeed too easy and the reason its easy ironically is because its just the combat system is the opposite of WoW in that it tries to be completely gear independent. A PC dressed in common can do any content while in WoW there is content that if you dont have certain gear you cant ever finish because you couldn't have the necessary dps etc.. You refuse to see it but that doesnt change the fact gw2 combat system is primarily skill (player skill) based. Again the problem is they didnt want to cut out players who wanted to play casually so most of the content can indeed be navigated successfully if you even spam skill especially if you're in a group. That being said, just cause you can do something doesnt mean you should do it. Player effectively brings a lot of benefits like finish the fight in 1/2 the time, avoid dying a lot more and teach you your class so if you end up in a dire situation you'd know how to handle yourself. Yet you refuse to see all this simply because the game is easy.

anyhow you're entitled to your option of course nothing wrong with that. Dont expect to be considered a credible critic though if you just insist to see what you want to see and ignore any evidence that's been presented to you. An easy game doesn't mean automatically that it has a shallow combat system. In fact GW2 certainly does not.