st_clouds

I'm sorry, what?
You must have skimmed. Let me re-iterate:

The business model for GW2 is that people spend $$ on gems to get exclusive things.
A lot of the time though, due to how the TP, item droprates, and the global economy is set up, it limits an individual player's ability to generate a decent amount of gold for themselves - an amount where getting a Legendary in 4-5 months of normal play is feasible.

The TP is global for this very reason. Item droprates for things like Lodestones are low for this reason, too.
It's not "tinfoil hat syndrome". GW2's systems all point to removing a player's self-sufficiency, and shifting their reliance for most things they need to "do stuff" the game has to offer to the TP - whose global nature pushes those who got gold early buy investing all their starting gold into gems then converting back when they skyrocketed to build their success on flipping on the failure of players who didn't get into the system early.


If you respond, do so after reading the above.
Don't kneejerk and say something like "you're just a nasty h8er who wants GW2 to fail".
I don't. I want it to be a better game than the unpolished mess with potential it launched as. That's the only reason I still care to post about it. ^^


You're arguing against an attitude I don't have.
You're reading one thing, and your brain is auto-translating it to something that was not written.

Aside from that fact, generally when somebody's posting about "gamer entitlement" in the context that you're posting about it, they're so thoroughly mind*ed that they think a less-than-exemplary product filled with game-breaking bugs and utter lack of polish should get straight 10/10s across the board.

Complaining about the overall lack of polish in areas that weren't available in the BWE's, and about how the game takes the "withhold and pressure" approach to B2P revenue-generation, is wholly within my rights to do as somebody who bought the game - and if you think that isn't true, I'll refer you to your previous (shockingly irrelevent, in the way you used it) comment concerning North Korea.

If you can read, and have a functioning analytical mind, you should be able to read what those "nasty haters xD" are saying and extrapolate the truth from the rhetoric of what they're complaining about.

Overall, people who "hate" the game are just disappointed by the lack of polish in so many facets the game launched with - buggy or just plain incomplete or likely-not-playtested dungeons and 30+ areas, bighuge dragon bosses not being worth killing(until recently).

I think the biggest issue with the game, on a systemic level, is the focus on most other systems in removing the ability to be fully self-sufficient as a player; thus pushing people to the TP for all their needs - which serves ANet by keeping most players scrounging for coin, which creates heavy incentive for players to spend $$ on gems to convert.
It's been proven that enemies and zone-completes and chests are far more likely to drop equipment that is not for your armor class, and weapons that your profession cannot use, than something you can actually use.
The core gameplay of GW2 is excellent. Traits for classes like Elementalist or Rangers(and Engis now) could really take some more polish - but overall, the gameplay is a solid 7/10. The issues lie inherently with the systems built around the gameplay, and how they make the player feel slighted and encroached upon by the apparent revenue model of the game.
It's the implied pressure - not pressure itself.
SNIP


I have high hopes for GW2 in the coming year. It's a shame that it'll take at least that for the systemic issues to be resolved - but if GW2 had the polish and fluidity that WoW launched with, it would be my go-to game now.

There's obviously a lot of back-story here that's easy to miss.  Its easy to over-simplify and say, "eh, GW1 fans are just jaded and hateful because this isn't exactly like GW1."  However, that misses the mark, and to see how you have to go back to the founding of Anet and their original design philosophy.  The company was originally founded by three guys who had previously worked for Blizzard and helped design WoW.  They saw a lot of promise in the game, but thought there was a lot of trash in there too... Seemingly, they had fundamental disagreements with a time > skill philosophy, vertical progression, subscriptions fees, gear grind and treadmill as well as cartoonishly lacking graphics.  They set out to create something better, and after some trial and error and a good amount of ironing, they succeeded massively.  Guild Wars 1 was a revolution in so many ways its impact is still unclear... but due to the fact that WoW hit the scene first, it never got the attention it deserved, despite being extremely highly reviewed, having a fanatical fan-base and even winning game of the year status for the original.  

As time went on, 2 of the three founders of anet moved on, (or were forced out ... its not 100% clear) and NCSoft slowly exerted more control.  After all, they continues to pay for the operating costs of a game that accounted for a tiny amount of their sales while eventually funding a fairly large scale sequel as well.  When publishers get too involved, and the original design philosophy loses two thirds of its original vision, it CAN occur the other considerations, like profit and universal appeal, take center stage while quality and uniqueness get pushed back.  This, I believe, is the case of what happened to GW2.  Its not a new story, really... we see it all over American society (think about television programs for example... Firefly gets tossed out after 17 episodes, and how many seasons has "Dancing with the stars" been on?).

Where GW2 could have fixed the problems with GW1 and kept to the same core philosophy, we increasingly see evidence that the sole remaining founder now disgarees with that philosophy more and more.  We see the introduction of all the things that were originally considered to be bad design: time > skill, gear treadmills, meaningless grind; we see story take a back seat and systems which both built and required skill reduced to mostly random button mashing.  

When Lucas announced there would be a new Star Wars trilogy, (Episodes 1-3) people were incredibly excited.  But when it became clear sometime later that those movies were compromised financially motivated rubbish (more or less) how did that affect your feelings?  While Episode one really isn't completely horrible, doesn't anyone remember the Jar Jar Binks controversies?  What you see here is people who feel let down and even betrayed by designers who couldn't follow the most basic idea: if it anit broke, don't "fix" it.  GW1 was just a tiny little bit broke, (in ways that were largely fixable if given the time/resources) so they threw it out completely, build a fairly generic MMO with newish exciting combat and slapped the lore of GW1 on it to insures good starting sales.  Once they had sold the game to as many GW1 fans/vets as seemed likely, they slowly started to visibly go against the GW1 design philosophies.  You can't blame people feeling negative for what they feel is a classic bait-and-switch.

You seem to care. At the very least, you keep trying to dismiss me as "irrelevant" (your words).

Ya, clearly they only close overly abusive threads like this one:

https://forum-en.gui...-trying-out-GW1

I could find more, this one just happened to have got closed in the last couple minutes so it seemed appropriate.

Classic.

You remind me of the guy who was trying to convince me that GW2 is great because Anet is the first developer to actually care about their art direction, whatever that's supposed to mean, as if it was even true in the first place.

Being totally uncritical of the game suggests a disconnect from reality, on the same order as being totally critical of the game while still investing significant amounts of time into it.