Issues with GW2

[Jim Hunter]

Point being that when the EotN PvE skills were truly implemented, I'm talking maybe 3+ months later once the dust had settled, was it really that bad?I could still pretty much PuG anywhere I wanted.Again I think people are really over-exaggerating and over-hypothesizing the repercussions entailed here.

The problem is unless they realize this change was a mistake instead of things evening out in a few months the way they did in EotN we will just see them introducing a new dungeon with a new set of armor to grind for. Which leads to the same problem of people being funneled into the newest content rather than having a good reason to enjoy the existing content.

As crazy as it sounds I didn't stop playing because I'm sick of the game or I'm mad. I would really like to check out the new content but I think the new direction they are taking will ultimately ruin the game if not kill it completely. I'm hoping the negative reaction they are receiving will be enough they rethink what they have done or at the very least give us some honest answers.

It is completely ridiculous that the thread on the official forums is sitting around 10,000 responses and they are still waiting to hear from someone at A-Net. This is why I am not playing, it seems the only way to get their attention is through their wallet so if enough people take a break maybe they can take a few minutes to give a straight answer on why they are throwing their manifesto out the window and what we can expect from the future of the game.

I love this game and I don't think it's to late to get this train back on track but this will only happen if people make them. Otherwise we will just be looking at another failure like so many of the recent MMO's.

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This is not quite truth, Vets and Champs are not dropping anything even white trash, maybe a bug but they are not dropping anything right now as we speak.

Even if they do is that more of an incentive than getting the same gold as well as the tokens you need for the latest gear in the new dungeon?

This is why cosmetics in GW1 worked so well. Most rare cosmetics were dungeon specific and if a new dungeon came out it was just another skin so you didn't feel pressured to get it.

[Fey]

And I say that having the exotic gear I have will allow me to do pretty much every dungeon in the game for now and the foreseeable future. You yourself know well how WoW was and how not having specific gear locked you out of content. In Rift, even the dungeon finder says you need X-focus or you can't queue for this dungeon. This isn't that.

That has nothing to do with grinding though. Progressing through raids is not grinding. The "Gear grind" is what you do to get into raids. The raids themselves aren't a grind until you have everything on farm status.

GW2 has the same token farming grind minus the content that you get to do after said grind.

[Hechicera]

I'm disheartened by the patch direction but for one reason not really mentioned yet. I'm a very experienced MMO player that has played both progression MMOs and GW1 the length of its release. I'm not a content devourer anymore, having fallen off that wagon somewhere in EQ1's first few expansions and I'm too old to get back on it. I'm a sandbox player that makes my own goals. I spend well on games too. I think I represent a lot of the infrequent posters, who do log in in a bursty pattern (if I have a goal I'll play the game a lot, then may not until another goal occurs to me). Some of the goals are achiever in nature, and some not! I'm also representative of the non-posting segment that does financially support a game. I have no 80s yet, though one character is close. Before you think that denotes me as casual, I do have every class over 40.

This game was the most fun when the servers were being reset at least every other day, and the Trading House was still broken. And, as I kept playing and those two things changed, I began to realize that, for me, they were large contributors in why the game was fun.

- There are serious bugs still in much of the content. Bugs that mean you do not progress in that goal until a server reset, or patch.
- There are serious bugs in many classes. If you play a class that works well, great! I play them all. I also like all play styles, and swapping them. Try this and you will hit bug after bug after bug.
- Many classes are still not quite functional, or builds for certain roles have never been never functional.
- When they do fix something, they usually break it in new ways or break more stuff (Mesmers! Ranger traps).
- The best way to get many things now is to just buy them off the AH, why craft, why farm, why really do a lot of the content? By addressing bots more (and ANet seems to be) this may be the one area they are working on to let the game remain fun for me.

I have friends & family to play with. I also play alone some too. I, or we, will play until we get hit with a bug. If I get hit with too many I log off, unhappy. I won't log back on for a while. My sandbox goal was thwarted, I need to see a fix or come up with a new goal.

Grinding isn't fun, so I'll just avoid that. Though "infinite dungeon" does sound fun. However, I can't seem to consume any reasonable length of content anymore without get smacked with bugs and logging off, unhappy and without spending any gems. I'm back out of MMOs, playing modable PC games where I can fix a bug (or grab another modder's fix) and move on. I think f2p does compete for us in this market. For me GW2 is failing there, even though I'm either not opposed or can ignore content choices in their patch.

I can't mod GW2 to fix broken class mechanics, quests or skills. I must depend on ANet for that. I'm very flexible in content choices. I just want the content to work well enough to be enjoyable, and I feel like I am being failed. I am tolerant of launch hiccups to a degree, but ... they are adding new shiny stuff and leaving all the core bugs (and introducing new ones!) instead. If it continues that will be the deal breaker for me. I just want to log in and have fun. Bugs kill my fun .. dead.

[Vayne]

I think there's something people are missing. The bigger the world, the more need to funnel people into content and areas. That's what Rift does also. That's why these events exist.

They get players playing together.

Centaur wants the entire map to be relavant and it is. List yesterday there were tons of people where they were being directed. What you can't have is a fully open world and in that world, thousands of players going where they want, and expecting to have enough people in each area. People WILL have to be channeled, or there won't be enough people in the open world to do content. There won't be enough people to make groups.

When the game goes live, it's not a problem. Everyone is in the same zones. At level cap it IS a problem.

So we all go to the locations for this patch and there are tons of people who go there.

I think the big mistake is having one location instead of three, which causes the lag everyone has experienced.

[Jim Hunter]

I think there's something people are missing. The bigger the world, the more need to funnel people into content and areas. That's what Rift does also. That's why these events exist.

Yes that's what rift does and look at the state of that game now. They could easily make the big events in each zone rewarding enough to draw groups to do it. The same goes for existing dungeons. Instead they have made it so there is 1 thing to do if you want to stay current with your stats.

[Vayne]

Yes that's what rift does and look at the state of that game now. They could easily make the big events in each zone rewarding enough to draw groups to do it. The same goes for existing dungeons. Instead they have made it so there is 1 thing to do if you want to stay current with your stats.

I think the problem here is the mentality...want to stay current with your stats. If you make the game about stats, it's about stats. My game was never about stats. And that's really the whole point.

A difference that makes no difference is no difference. In Guild Wars 1, there were +30 health upgrades you could add to weapons and +29. The odds are, if you used the +29 once you'd pretty much be just as survivable as if you used the +30. If you're depending on that 1 point to save you, you were dead anyway 99% of the time. It wasn't a big deal.

But people wanted the +30 because it was max. And fair enough if it's easy to get.

Gear with either be easy to get or harder to get, and it will give you or not give you a stat increase based on that. But if it doesn't stop you from doing content..and since people are complaining particularly that PVe content is too easy, well...shrugs.

It won't affect SPvP at all, and WvW it might occassionally affect a 1v1 battle, everything being equal. However, in my experience, things simply aren't equal. It doesn't happen. Skill levels aren't equal, specs aren't equal, professions aren't equal.

And Anet said straight from the beginning that it was never their intention to "balance" WvW.

[Greyfeld]

If all you're going to do is herd your playerbase around into specific areas, then you've effectively nullified any reason to have built a wide, open world to begin with.

This last patch really annoyed the hell out of me. Putting aside the ascension gear (which doesn't bother me nearly so much as Anet's complete 180 they've apparently pulled with their design philosophy), the utter lack of class fixes and balancing in a supposed "balance patch" makes me lose any desire to continue playing. My main is a ranger who has class features that I'm waiting on fixes for; I also have a necromancer that I'd love to play, but I feel like I'm playing a broken character while doing so. But no, we get a long list of tooltip fixes and nerfs disguised as "consistency fixes" (I don't care what the patch notes say, when you nuke the crap out of an elite skill's only utility, it's a nerf).

And then, come to find out there are only two people working on skill and class balance. It's like a damned slap in the face.

But what finally did it for me was yesterday's event. I decided to hop on just before noon and give the event a try, maybe try Fractals of the Mist a couple times, just to find out what the buzz is about. Then I spend the next half hour watching my ranger fire her auto-attack at 1/3 normal speed and being completely unable to use any other abilities, followed immediately by the dungeon portal being broken.

At this point, I just feel like Anet is more worried about pumping out stuff that will keep gem sales flowing, rather than actually dedicating staff to fixing issues and making sure patches don't go out completely freaking broken. And frankly, I got enough of that sort of selfish, detached development garbage when I played SWTOR for three months.

[Jim Hunter]

@ Vayne

No my problem is the majority of the player base will be focused on 1 dungeon rather than spread out through the game. I spend a lot of time soloing content because I play off hours from most of my friends. I have some other friends that I could join up with for more PvE content but 3 months later I'm still waiting for guesting. Even if I pick up another guild on my server my schedule tends to be erratic so I've gotten used to pugging.

If I cared about better stats I would be all about this patch. What I care about is where this road leads and what it will do to the game. As much as I would like to see the new content I would rather do my part in making a stand now in the hopes that enough people will do the same and A-Net will change their minds.

[Fey]

And Anet said straight from the beginning that it was never their intention to "balance" WvW.

I'm just gonna throw this out there so people stop bitching about new items affecting WvW.

3-Faction PvP works because it's unbalanced. That's the whole point. You're not supposed to watch it carefully and make sure each faction is getting the correct amount of everything, you just give them an area to run around, kill and lay waste to eachother and watch it happen.

The imbalance is what makes it fun and what makes it work. Adding more to that imbalance isn't going to change anything.

[Vayne]

@ Vayne

No my problem is the majority of the player base will be focused on 1 dungeon rather than spread out through the game. I spend a lot of time soloing content because I play off hours from most of my friends. I have some other friends that I could join up with for more PvE content but 3 months later I'm still waiting for guesting. Even if I pick up another guild on my server my schedule tends to be erratic so I've gotten used to pugging.

If I cared about better stats I would be all about this patch. What I care about is where this road leads and what it will do to the game. As much as I would like to see the new content I would rather do my part in making a stand now in the hopes that enough people will do the same and A-Net will change their minds.

I don't think the majority of the playerbase will be playing this dungeon though. It's something to do. It's 9 short repeatable maps that people will enjoy and then grow tired of. It's not going to long term affect anything else. I've done 11 of them already and it's fun. But will I stay there? Will this prevent people from playing WvW? I dont' see that happening.

Will it affect the populations in Orr? Probably not as much as the new island.

But you can't control the game population anyway. It's really best to find a group of friends and play with them, and make your own social circle, even in off hours. Join a secondary Oceanic guild if that's when you play most. Find some friends on at that time and play.

Because inevitably, waiting for people to be around in the world in a world this large, isn't going to work unless you hang out in a few popular locations, and those locations are going to change with the updates. That's how it is in all MMOs.