The norm: Another former/current WoW player now residing in Tyria

[Manga4life]

Like many of the people here I'm a former/current WoW player who decided to check out GW2 because of the hype and I really must say......I'm enjoying it! My first character is only a level 13 but I'm enjoying the dynamic events, the spooky doors that release bosses, the personal story, and I just now downed the Mad King with a group of 4 other players in what was an epic multi-level battle that took a LONG time to complete. Just sick.

I'm kind of suffering through the same "What will I do at level 80" feeling that others are because I want to experience all of the major bosses multiple times and not just once and since bosses like Shadow Behemoth have to be triggered I'm afraid I'll get bored just sitting around waiting for someone who happens to be on that stage. They need to put him on a timer or spawn him randomly, same for all of the "meta bosses" so that way we always have a sick boss to fight. Any which way, the bosses I have fought, including the amazing Mad King, have been absolutely phenomenal and I'm looking forward to more of this kind of epic encounters.

[Vayne]

Hi there and welcome to the forums.

I disagree with the idea of making bosses random or putting them on timers. There are plenty of games out there that already do that. The idea in Guild Wars 2 is that the world is a "iiving-breathing" world, which means events don't just appear, they appear for reasons.

If you take away the chains that cause things to happen, you'd ruin the fun of people like me. The problem is, not everyone wants constant boss fights and in fact, constant boss fights would bore me. If I wanted that I could go back to Rift where zone wide events happen over and over and over again, until I want to beat someone.

What makes these bosses cool is that they're not always there, so when you do fight them, it's much cooler.

There's a lot of cool stuff in this game beyond just boss fights if you take the time to discover it. But a lot of it involves having a different mind set.

[Manga4life]

Hi there and welcome to the forums.

I disagree with the idea of making bosses random or putting them on timers. There are plenty of games out there that already do that. The idea in Guild Wars 2 is that the world is a "iiving-breathing" world, which means events don't just appear, they appear for reasons.

If you take away the chains that cause things to happen, you'd ruin the fun of people like me. The problem is, not everyone wants constant boss fights and in fact, constant boss fights would bore me. If I wanted that I could go back to Rift where zone wide events happen over and over and over again, until I want to beat someone.

What makes these bosses cool is that they're not always there, so when you do fight them, it's much cooler.

There's a lot of cool stuff in this game beyond just boss fights if you take the time to discover it. But a lot of it involves having a different mind set.

The problem with that is that if lower level people aren't playing or if the game dies out and not many people are active than these events will never happen leaving players who never have a chance to experience the content or having only experienced it once or twice will have nothing to do. I know the game is very PVP heavy in end-game, and I plan on doing a little of that, but sometimes I want to just encounter a few bad-ass bosses and then log off. I'm afraid that eventually GW2's player base will fizzle out and bosses such as Shadow Behemoth will just kind of fizzle away without being seen for weeks if not months. There is no fun in that.

I can tell by your post history that you're the big defender of the game here on the forums, and that's cool, but if there is nothing to do than to roam the land and hope to find events with other players around than eventually that gets boring. Battling bosses and getting loot and experiencing epic fights is why most people play these types of games, not to walk around the world talking to NPC's.

[Karou]

It sounds like you'd love the big dragon fights when you level up to the zones where those appear, and those actually do run on a pretty predictable schedule. There are 3 of them. Here's one site that lists arrival times by server:

http://guildwarstemple.com/dragontimer/

You won't get to them for a while yet, but it's something to look forward to. A lot of people love these fights and try to hit the dragons up as often as possible, particularly since there are chests available on completion. They always have pre-events to start them off, as well, which are a good source of karma and loot.

[Oenanthe]

As another current WoW and GW2 player, let me welcome you to Tyria, and hopefully you won't be disappointed. I will say this is a very different game to WoW with a very different player base and you might have to tailor your expectations to that.

WoW, to me, concentrates too much on end game and Blizzard seems to have targeted the whole game to getting to level 90 as quickly as possible and then, according to a lot of people, the real game begins. GW2 is not like that, I hope that there is plenty to do at level 80, I've yet to get there, but, as you have no doubt already found out you get bumped up to 80 for events and pvp (or at least WvWvW which is as far as my pvp has got), so you can afford to take your time and enjoy the content and still take part in seasonal events, (I won't be headless horseman hunting this year, my hunter has only reached 86, I'm spending too much time on my panda and in Tyria).

I doubt that GW2 will die off too much, I have heard that there was always a steady player base for GW1, even though some of us gave up and only came back when GW2 was released. If servers do go quiet and events aren't triggering, I hope that ANet, unlike Blizzard. will do something about it, at the moment there are free world transfers while the populations settles down, maybe they will put it back in for dead realms, if those start to occur. (I used to play WoW on Sporragar EU realm which is well known, to EU WoW players as a dead realm now, paying to transfer characters to a higher population world, was really frustrating). ANet do appear to have listened to a lot of the complaints about WoW and made the changes that were being called for in that game, hopefully they are listening to this one.

ANet have promised lots of content and the amount put in for Halloween, less than 2 months after release, is a promising start.

Two months after release and GW2 is still showing a lot of potential, it isn't perfect, I guess I have realised no game is, it hasn't made me abandon WoW, which I had hoped it might, but I do think its a great game, as long as you aren't a dedicated raider that has to be on for 6 hours every evening, then both games can complement each other. As to its longevity, I'll be able to judge that more in 2 years rather than 2 months. Hopefully we will all still be playing and can discuss it again then.

[Anacrusis]

I don't want to disappoint you, but there is Less to do at level 80 as there is leveling up. After you hit 80, yiu can farm for gold, WvW, spvp, or run dungeons. You can do all that while leveling and you get to explore new zones. this is why everyone makes alts. The good thing is yiu can try different lower level zones on your alts. That said, this game is fantastic and I'm enjoying leveling my alt. I've played gw2 many more hours than swtor or Tera and I'm not bored yet. I suggest taking your time and enjoying yiurself while leveling. No need to rush. My iPad can't spell the word you.

[Vayne]

Of course there's less to do at level 80 than leveling up. That's the same as every MMO that's come down the road in forever. As the game ages, more end game content comes out, but I can't remember any MMO that didn't have people on the forums complaining about not enough to do at level cap, including SWToR, Rift, and several others.

But I still go back to earlier zones with my level 80, because you need 100% zone completion if you want to get a legendary weapon. And while I'm in those zones I often experience things I never saw the first time through them.

[Fey]

but I can't remember any MMO that didn't have people on the forums complaining about not enough to do at level cap, including SWToR, Rift, and several others.

Actually, WoW was the opposite at the very start. Everyone complained that content took too long. 6-hour Scholomance runs, 3 hour Upper Black Rock Spire runs, 4 hour Undead Stratholme, 3 hour live Stratholme, endless farming in random 30-40 instances for crap gear that had +resistance on it. Sitting in town for 1-2 hours trying to get into a 2 hour Black Rock Depths group so you could unlock Molten Core. Taking the various paths of Dire Maul for amazing gold value and BoE's to sell so you could get enchants or buy epic pieces your set was lacking. Being stuck in a Scholo/UBRS/UD-Strath run with no one that had a key to open it or a Rogue to lockpick the gates.

There was sooo much crap you had to do and it took for-freaking-ever. But it kept people playing.

[Vayne]

Actually, WoW was the opposite at the very start. Everyone complained that content took too long. 6-hour Scholomance runs, 3 hour Upper Black Rock Spire runs, 4 hour Undead Stratholme, 3 hour live Stratholme, endless farming in random 30-40 instances for crap gear that had +resistance on it. Sitting in town for 1-2 hours trying to get into a 2 hour Black Rock Depths group so you could unlock Molten Core. Taking the various paths of Dire Maul for amazing gold value and BoE's to sell so you could get enchants or buy epic pieces your set was lacking. Being stuck in a Scholo/UBRS/UD-Strath run with no one that had a key to open it or a Rogue to lockpick the gates.

There was sooo much crap you had to do and it took for-freaking-ever. But it kept people playing.

See that's the difference in the way we think. I don't think that's more to do. I think that's less to do that's just harder, which means it's less to do. If you make something hard enough that people have to keep breaking their head against it, then sure, you can have less content and people will keep repeating it. The problem for me is that repeating content is not the same as having stuff to do.

I don't farm. I don't do dungeon runs. I don't do a lot of the things that you see as content. I see them as time sinks, which is certainly what they were in WoW.

It takes far less time to make raids and dungeons than it does to build a world, particularly if you can keep people in those dungeons and raids for weeks at a time, and use lockout timers so they can't go through them any faster than you dictate.

You call it content. I call it a racket.

[Fey]

You call it content. I call it a racket.

Content is bosses to kill. Scholomance alone had 11 bosses lol. Eleven. That is more than your standard first tier of any expansion nowadays. With the exception of tank and spank bosses, most of them had their own unique mechanics, even the minor ones. I could count out all of them, including Molten Core and Ony, but I don't really feel like that's necessary.

In GW2, not only are there less fights to learn, most of them only have a gimmick without a real strategy. Not only are they easier and shallow, but you can opt to completely skip them or only farm the ones that you want tokens from. While I enjoy that there's that option, because 'eff honor of the waves, ultimately it makes the game feel that much shorter.

In vanilla WoW, you couldn't skip anything. You could do the dungeons in whatever order you wish and you could opt to spend more time in the ones you liked because more often than not you needed several things from each. But not being able to skip them gives people stuff to do.

3 tiers later, when TBC came out they dumbed it down and made it a lot easier. The result was more people getting into progression, but progression didn't last as long. Now in GW2 with no reason to run anything, groups are already scarce. It'd be one thing if the game required you to have a dedicated group to beat things, but the fact that you can pug everything yet there are very few groups is already a sign of decline.