Soki

A major problem with GW2's Dynamic Event system is that there are a ton of events people just ~don't do~.
Every event in a given level tier gives the same Experience, Karma, and silver - no matter how much time it takes to complete.

Champion events are an obvious example - they are generally uninteresting scaled-up normal mobs that have more health and damage on their abilities (the same kinds the normal mobs do). These are generally labelled as Group Events.



I have an example to show, in the new area (meaning they had time to see which types of events were well-done, and which were skipped in the original areas - but they made this one like this anyway).
It has you kill 2 Veteran Karkas within a camp infested with smaller ones - and is not labelled as a Group Event.

(Video playing at 2x original speed)
It wasn't too challenging, but it took a long time; and gave the same reward as the event where you give the NPC 10 Karka Eggs acquired from interacting with nests.



This amount of time investment/challenge is not justified. It is the reason nobody goes out in the world, after FotM was released.
Is it really that hard for ANet to add neat little things like tokens from hard events, so that over time you can buy a weapon or armor set with a neat skin after doing them enough?

TO CONDENSE MY SENTIMENTS:
Good players are not rewarded for overcoming challenges – the majority of the game’s status symbols and cool items are gained from performing an easy task for an inordinate amount of time. This sums up my opinion, and why I think GW2 is not as good a game as it could be – but I implore you to read the rest of the post if you’re going to add to the discussion.



I believe that Guild Wars 2 was designed with the philosophy of urging players to spend money to buy Gems to convert to Gold – first and foremost; with every system in the game pushing players to spend money on the Gem store for gold.
Every single item that is even remotely neat or hard to get in this game is received from the Mystic Forge.
Not only does tossing a huge amount of trade materials into the forge remove flavor from the items you’re getting; but it empowers players who have a lot of RL capital to spend far more than it should.

The exotics for a fresh 80 are cheap enough – 12g maximum to deck yourself out, inclusive of exotic jewelry. This ignores runes and sigils.
After this, players go for cosmetic gear to transmute their stat-gear into. Here is where the tacky design starts up.
When you transmute gear’s appearence, you lose the actual item you’re transmuting. The two items fuse into one. That means that if you ever want to use that item’s skin again, you need to reacquire it.
After getting the item skins and transmuting your exotics to what you want, what do we, as players, have to strive for? Vanity items, like Mystic Weapons and other neat-looking gear from the Mystic Forge.

Mystic Weapons are Okay. They have a feasible grind attached to them. To make a Mystic weapon, it usually costs between 7 to 12 gold , which is entirely feasible. I wish it were more than a simple grind for gold, but hey, it's from the Mystic Forge. No big deal. ...Or it wouldn't be, if there were unique items to get that were ~not~ tied to the Mystic Forge (and thus, gold).

Check these recipes out:
http://wiki.guildwar...rge/Other_Items
Most of these unique equipments take an excessive, unfeasible amount of goldto get. No flavor. No quest. No challenge. No adventure. No journey. No ~fun~. Just grind. Plain, boring gold grind.
These equips don’t even have a unique sigil or rune.

With the way the market works, it’s nearly impossible for the average player to amass money at a decent rate without grinding, unless they convert bought gems to gold. Killing a champion in the world does not give you appropriate reward for the effort involved. Aside from this fact, Champions are generally pretty bland – just normal mobs with more health and damage. ~That’s it~.


As you can tell, I am very disappointed with how GW2 turned out – and have seen these sentiments mirrored by many other players. The game’s combat is fluid, and the gameplay is solid – but gameplay should be supported by strong systems that reward good players – and GW2’s economic and legendary/vanity item systems simply do not deliver on that. They reward spending real money on the gemstore and converting to gold; or grinding easy content until you drop.


As far as discussion goes, I’m interested to see what the broad community of GW2Guru forums think about the state of the game; and what they feel about my opinions on the underlying item-acquisition systems of GW2; independent of the gameplay.

Can we all agree on this, now?

Underwater mobs take forever to kill.
The dodges feel clunky.
Movement is too slow.
The variety of mobs underwater is too narrow - and most of them are a pain.
Underwater bosses are even less worth it than normal ones.
The map is awful at showing things at varying depths.

Overall, I wish they'd just give you water variants of your normal skills - speed up the movement a bit - and made dodges not take twice as long underwater.

The other night, I made a missclick when buying Karma goods. I doubleclicked the Karma NPC because he was swarmed by other interactables, but apparently my previous interact was just delayed--With my mouse over the part of the discussion that says "Show me your goods", it opened the Buy screen, I heard the familiar coin-clatter sound effect, and went "Aw, crap."

I had just bought Heavy boots for 42k Karma on my Thief.
My initial reaction was to try  to sell them back. No avail. Then to google for a way to resell Karma goods to the vendor. None.
I then went to the support site and opened a ticket. Here's my response:
http://i.imgur.com/IKHFR.png

"While I would like to replace your items, the Guild Wars Support Team is unable to replace individual items in the manner you are describing."

Yyyep.

These 4 features may seem small, but their absence is certainly noticeable.

Person-to-person trade is important in any MMO - particularly in one where the Auction system is under maintanance.

Inspecting to see what that cool-looking armor set is, how an ally is built, or what stats they're geared to is a big feature in MMOs. For any reason there could be to exclude it, there are two reasons -to- have it.

Dueling is a less important feature of an MMO, but it is still a fun one - particularly when you want to test out certain abilities, or try some quick 1v1 fun.
Allowing people to challenge eachother to duels in Heart of the Mists only would be acceptable, IMHO.

CoD Mail is a less important feature, if you have P2P trading - but not having either is crippling and, honestly, awful design.



I know this was a simple post - but these are the most common basic-complaints I've heard, and agree with.
I hope GW2 develops some polish in the coming months - sooner, rather than later - as the economy is losing out on important early growth, in this first week - and a bad start for an MMO can cripple it, particularly in its economy.