Dasviidonja

I'm probably going to get shot down for sharing this but:

The guy is more direct then I'd ever be in my videos but it really makes me feel better knowing there's somone out there genuinly invested in GW2 and is not afraid to show his rage at being let down by the promises that were made to us prior to this games release.
Just to set the record straight I don't agree on the endgame grind mentality of other MMO's as he does.
However I agree hand down there NEEDS to be some challening content put into this game.

I read the OP.  I know my opion won't help at all, but i have a feeling that WoW is as close to MMO perfection as anyone will ever get.  Now, thats not a bad thing, because all these other MMOs with "flaws" make for an interesting gaming experience.

You ever play FFXI?  Man, that game was HORRIBLE!  It was a pain to do anything and you always needed a group.  You had to have the holy trinity.  Needless to say, I didn't last more than 6 months in that game until WoW was released and i started playing WoW.

Now, off and on for the last few years, i can't believe it myself, but i MISS FFXI.  I miss the music, i miss the parties, i miss the weird Japanese inspired monsters that made no sense.  Every once in a great while, i fire it up, play for a day or two and realize the old glory and opportunity of FFXI is done and long dead.

The point is, flawed games can have this effect on people.  I don't want another WoW-experience.  I want something different.  Something that makes me fall in love with it like i did with FFXI and this game comes extremely, extremely close to that so i will definitely keep playing.

I'm sorry you are having tons of problems, but man, if it ain't doing it for ya, you'll be happier just moving on to something else.  Theres tons of MMOs out now.  Plenty to invest time into.  You just gotta roll with what ends up being your FFXI and just be ignorant-stupid-happy with it.

I don't think most WoW players chase the VP. I'm sure they approach it the same way many claim to approach GW2; as a virtual world to goof off in. To me, that's what makes the "play it your way" slogan such empty marketing; any MMO can suffice as a virtual world to goof off in.

This is like saying that the alpha wolf of a pack is the alpha because it howls, or that the queen of ahive is the queen because she eats honey (not royal jelly - ordinary honey). When WoW release, 100% of its direct competitors also used vertical progression, and now it's still used by the greater majority. If everyone else is doing it, it's not what puts you on top.

What gives WoW its position is a combination of the following:

1) It used a well-known franchise with a large starting fanbase, giving it a target audience that were near-guaranteed to take it up if they had any interest whatsoever in a vertical progression MMO.

2) For all their faults, Blizzard is near-unmatched in making highly polished, professional games with all the bells and whistles. Nine months after release Guild Wars 2 is still weighed down with well-known bugs (including traits that simply don't work), aggravating control issues, and complete lack of a viable group finding feature in a modern MMO - it's unlikely that Blizzard would have allowed such a state of affairs to last nearly so long.

3) While WoW has become the poster child for hopeless grind, gaming addiction, and other undesirable MMO traits, it's still a darn sight less vertical-progression-focused than what came before it. Compared to what else was on the market when it released, WoW actually differentiated itself by making a substantial move away from the mountainous vertical progression of its predecessors. This is how its seen as being more casual than it's predecessors... because it IS.

4) Size builds momentum. When you're the biggest in the market, that means it's going to be your game that people pick up because their friends already played it or simply because they've heard it's the biggest in the market.

These are the reasons why WoW is on top - and none of which have vertical progression in them.

If you look through the MMOs that have come even close to WoW's success, the overall trend you'll notice is that they set themselves distinctly apart from WoW. Not simply by having a strong licensed franchise of its own to start from or some gimmick that WoW can simply steal - they have some fundamental distinction that calls to players that are turned off by WoW's fundamental mode of operation. In the case of Guild Wars, this has always been a substantially reduced focus on vertical progression.

The result? Well, I noticed a few years back that whenever the Blizzard fanboys wanted to claim the superiority of WoW over some other MMO(-type) game, it was Guild Wars they kept coming back to. Why? Because in Western markets, it was the only credible and stable competitor for a fantasy MMO, keeping it on their radar rather than flaring up over a couple of months and disappearing like all the other MMOs that just tried to copy what worked for other MMOs. When Warhammer Online, D&D Onlne, LOTRO and scores of other vertical-progression-based MMOs were crushed beneath WoW's iron heel, it was Guild Wars that stubbornly persisted like a thorn slipping through a crack in the boot even in the face of near-abandonment by its own company.

Why? Because it didn't just try to copy WoW's success. It did something different, and in doing so, it claimed for its own a portion of the market that was dissatisfied with WoW, and part of the reason for that dissatisfaction is that not everyone likes vertical progression.

Seriously, if your claims were accurate, we wouldn't even be having this discussion because from what you're saying, everyone agrees that vertical progression is the best thing for an MMO. But we're disagreeing with you because many people think it's not the best thing for their MMO, and that's why their not playing WoW in the first place. If your game is going to be based off the same assumptions that WoW is, your game had better be so kittenly awesome that it's not only accepted by the people who try it as being better than WoW, but that it also overwhelms the massive incumbent advantage that WoW already has.

The truth is... it sounds like vertical progression, grinding (arbitrary term of difficulty) content to get all the (arbitrary term of quality) gear so you can move on to (arbitrary term of the next level of difficulty) content is your thing. There are lots of games on the market that supply that, including WoW. You're literally spoiled for choice.

Me? I get literally nothing from replacing my +4 Sword of Awesomesauce to +5 Sword of Greater Awesomesauce That Is Fundamentally Identical To The +4 Sword Of Awesomesauce Except With A Larger Number so that I can progress from fighting monsters that were balanced with the +4 SOA in mind to monsters that were balanced with the +5 SOGATIFITT+4SOAEWILN in mind. Instead, I gain my enjoyment from overcoming challenges with tactics (not just repeating things I've already mastered until my numbers get high enough) and by trying new ways of doing things using new builds and professions.

Vertical progression doesn't just do nothing for my enjoyment, it actively hinders it. Having a requirement to collect gear to support a new build because my old gear wasn't compatible with that build is, to me, a barrier to fun, not a contribution to it. Needing to repeat what might have been hundreds of hours of grind to get a character of a new profession up to a point where it can meet the challenges my first character can is a major barrier to fun, possibly even dealbreaker-level.

It may be pat, but it's true - it sounds like the WoW-style of game is what works for you. Play one of them. There are enough of them on the market. Stop trying to hog the entire market and let me have the game that works for me. Please.

And finally, because it bears repeating, if you take just one thing from this post it should be this:

If your claim that vertical progression was what everyone liked was true, nobody would be arguing to the contrary. The very fact that so many people are disagreeing with you demonstrates better than any specific argument that your claim is flawed.

If WoW is the only successful implementation then it is the outlier. Which means there's no guarantee the the next WoW-clone will achieve WoW-like results.

WoW took a foothold in this industry because it created its own market of casual gamers at a time when people associated MMO with hardcore gaming. It's the same thing Nintendo did with Wii.

The two most recent successful implementations of gaming created their own market because the developers understood the gaming market had reached saturation.

If GW2 was another threadmill WoW-clone, it would have fared much worse than now. As it is, GW2 is currently one of the top revenue-generators for NCSoft.

They made the right call.





I'm not using xfire to interpret how many people are playing the game. I'm using it to determine how many hours on average xfire gamers play GW2. If xfire is an application that appeals to hardcore gamers, then on average hardcore gamers play GW2 3+ hours daily. In comparison, hardcore gamers play WoW an average of 5+ hours daily.