What to do?

[zilliman]

I am an old time player of MMOs. I have played WoW the most, and SWG before that. I have also played most other MMOs in search of a better one.

I bought GW2 pre-release and played a while until level 14 maybe before I gave it up in boredom. Why boredom?

Things I did not like were:

I had no clear motives, I was "drifting on the map" without a semi-clear understanding of what I was trying to achieve or what an extra level might offer me. Quests were kind of haphazard and random. I was seriously missing rewards, targets.

WoW offers well defined, achievable, very rewarding targets for the new players.

WoW has huge maps which you can explore in every direction and where you can travel on foot, or on mount, you can fly or swim. A totally linear 3D world to explore. Each of the main areas of WoW are as big as other "MMO's" maps put together. If you are an explorer and like to level up doing quests WoW is very rewarding. And as you level up you get travel forms, mounts, flying mounts, making exploration all the better. You have also taxis that fly you over land, boats to take you over water, you have to quest on little islands, or near the shores, or near mountainous areas, desolate lans, volcanoes. Lots of variety.

Even if you are not exploring much, mounts is the greatest reward as you are levelling up. I remember we used to work our asses off to get our first mount back in the day of classic WOW. And higher levels meant better and faster mounts. With every expansion or patch there is always new mounts and pets introduced. GW2 does not even have mounts, as if some peope are religiously against them, and instead you have all those ridiculous portals to make travel a bit more manageable. I mean how silly this is. Noone is looking forward to a new portal as he explores and levels up.

Another reward is eligibility for new dungeons. In WOW you know that as you are questing and levelling up, you will be eligible to visit new dungeons, from a very long list that WoW offers. WoW dungeons alone are in a world of its own, in terms of size, complexity and rewards. You come out dressed in blue gear making your next area quests so much more easier. And with LFG it is all automatic, sit down on the PC, enter the LFG, go questing, and in a little while you are teleported to a dungeon.

Crafting is also rewarding in WoW. You can trade for mats usually at the AH, you can level up some profession and receive some rewards for doing it, all very straight forward. WOW is not like SWG in crafting but at least it offers some rewards for taking the time and effort. And it is achievable.

You have also factions which offer their own rewards, eg pets and mounts. If you are a hunter you can also go about collecting rare and exotic pets, then go back to the main town showing off. If you are a collector you can collect rare mounts.

I have friends that have 200 pets and 150 mounts. Just for my son, once we went around collecting mounts and we got 50. We had to work for many weeks to run some instances that dropped some rare ones as well as travelling all over the place to get them.

And finally you have raids, and there is some PvP. I am not a PvPer so cannot say much about it, but I know PvP is not huge in WOW, but then again I presume with the WoW subscriptions, the PvPers in WOW are probably more than in all other games together.

In GW2 I am not sure what there is to do - what has changed or added in the time I was away.

Questing was more like drifting around the map, without even looking at my level. Did not manage to make it into any dungeons, not sure if there are any.

Area events were a lot of random people all running in some similar direction and typically attacking some lonely guy at the end who had some ridiculous HP and was completely obscured by all those players. Or fighting some spawns that appeared for no reason and everyone was attacking everything. After a few times doing that I found it random and silly.

Crafting was unrewarding and mats were very hard to gather and required a lot of management, I seem to remember something like a bank where I had to put mats in, and I had to be at the right place too, all on foot.

Can you please tell me what the game offers rather than what the game lacks in (I know people prefer to complain on forums rather than praise)?

[Edward M. Grant]

The reward for playing games is meant to be: fun.

Most of the things you're complaining that the game lacks are things many of us don't regard as fun, such as being forced to take a specific route through the game or having to 'work' through the same content again and again for weeks to be 'rewarded' with some virtual toy.

I have a job. I don't need a virtual job on top of that.

[Vayne]

I guess you didn't like or do your personal story at all. See, there are two types of books or movies. The ones that start off with you being attacked by a dragon, and the ones that lead up to you being attacked by a dragon.

Lord of the Rings started off with Bilbo's Birthday party. You don't even learn about what's really going on until the group gets to Rivendell and everything is revealed in the Council of Elrond.

Guild Wars 2 gives you objectives in ways of personal story, but also in zones. If you're human, for example, there are wars with centaurs and bandits. I didn't need more encouragement than knowing that my race had enemies fighting against us. But if you want more of an in game thing, here's a list of what you look forward to at each level.

At level 5 you get your first skill point and you can unlock your first 1 point skill.

At level 7 you unlock weapon swapping on all professions except Elementalist an Engineer.

At level 10 you unlock a second skill slot.

At level 11 you get your first trait point.

At level 15 you get your first minor trait (assuming you've put all five trait points into one line, which almost everyone does).

At level 20 you get either a second minor trait (if you put trait points into a different line than the first five) or you can choose your first major trait (if you put all 10 points into one trait line). You also get your third skill slot unlocked.

The trait points and skill points continue to accrue as you level. You use them to continue to unlock either minor or major traits and this makes up a significant part of your build.

At level 30 you unlock your elite skill, which costs 10 points. Once you unlock two ten point elites, you can then purchase a 30 point elite skill, usually more powerful.

The personal story works in 10 level chapters as well. The first two chapters are more about you personally and your role in your society. However, at level 20 this changes and you start get involved in the story of the world...the fight against the dragons and the history of Destiny's Edge.

At level 30 you're called upon to join one of the three orders of Tyria, all of whom are trying to fight the dragon. Each order has a different idea of how the dragon should be fought.

The story continues but I won't say more than that, because I don't want to spoil it for people who want to experience it.

The problem with games like WoW and other MMOs is that they've led people around by the nose for so long that without being led around by the nose, people think there's nothing to do. They can't make their own entertainment. They have to be told go here and do this and you'll get this. And that's certainly one way to make a game....one way to tell a story. It's not the only, or even the best way.

One last bit of advice. Personal stories vary widely and maybe the human story doesn't appeal to someone but the norn or charr one does. Try a character from each race, and see if their personal stories are better for you than the ones you've seen.

Edit: Not looking at your level is the way to play Guild Wars 2 btw. You're so indoctrinated into looking at your level and thinking in terms of level that you think that's how MMOs should be played or have to be played. It's why new games like the Secret World did away with level, and why games like Skyrim are so popular. Very few people play Skyrim looking at their level. Or Dragon Age. Or the Witcher.

MMOs are notoriously bad, because they take you out of the fantasy world and make you think about levels and experience and numbers, but you actually lose the fantasy part of it. The world of Guild Wars 2 is as big or is even bigger than WoW at launch. Much bigger. It's many times bigger than games like Rift on launch. Since you only got to level 14, you never ever got out of the starting zone, which is the tutorial zone.

The very things you like about WoW are the very things that have killed the MMO genre for so many people who were there before WoW.

[zilliman]

The reward for playing games is meant to be: fun.

Most of the things you're complaining that the game lacks are things many of us don't regard as fun, such as being forced to take a specific route through the game or having to 'work' through the same content again and again for weeks to be 'rewarded' with some virtual toy.

I have a job. I don't need a virtual job on top of that.

Is GW2 so bad you can not even find one good thing to say about it after I listed a whole page of what WoW has to offer? All you did is to quote selectively and out of context. And not one good thing about GW2. You complain about "virtual toys"? Is GW2 not "virtual" then?

[zilliman]

@Vayne

Thanks for the elaborate reply.

I do not think I am "endocrinated" or whatever else you have called me. You see a major part of every game is entertainment, and there needs to be a good reward after you have spent some time in a game either levelling up or grinding for gear or whatever.

Diablo 3 screwed up because after a lot of effort players find nothing exciting in return because the loot is awful. Even at top level players do not feel as powerful as they were in Diablo2. Their "reward" is missing.

Now the rewards you have mentioned are skill points. But a "10% increased damage" or "your heal heals faster" is not really a reward. I do not go there looking at my skills tree thinking "wow, after 20 levels now my heal heals faster, wow". As a matter of fact WOW has now dispensed with overly complicated skill points, it seems people do not care that much. You cannot simply create a skill tree out of nothingness simply to proclaim "hey we have a complicated skill tree". The more skills you make the more criticism you will get for not getting it balanced or not getting it right. And then you will end up with crappy and uninteresting "skills" that do nothing to enhance the game, they are simple space fillers. But we digress. The point is that skill points are not rewards.

You say that WOW has made people needing to be led. That is not what I said or implied. I want the game to offer me rich content, I want to have multiple choices at each junction, to be able to choose how to progress. But I also want to have "targets" to aim for and to look forward to. Simply "your next target is to reach level 21" is not really a target.

You said that players must make their own entertainment ? Like how? Is this a huge cop-out for "our game has no much content, go find something to do" ??

Back to GW2 the point is when I was playing, there was not much fun or excitement or "reward" as I was levelling up.

I hated all the running around, just as I did in WoW, and then hated all those portals even more. If they had real balls and wanted no mounts then they should not have all those immersion breaking portals.

I saw the skill points and thought "is that a joke?" A bit more of this and a bit more of that, same old, same old.

Open world events? Just a crowd running around shooting at everything that moves without thinking. I remember I was laying down some healing beacons at the time and I also had some sort of a "sun" thingy that increased damage. Had no idea what was happening, no way to measure it. Imagine if you go into a fight that lasts 5 minutes, and you have no idea what contribution you made. Just press some random keys until whatever everyone was shooting at is dead. My "reward" there could have been something like "you were second best healer" but in all that chaos it would not even matter.

Surely there must be something else. So I tried crafting. I remember too fidly, not enough mats, no money to buy mats, could not understand the trading system... Yawn.

When I was playing SWG I was the second best weaponsmith on the server. When the other guy quit I was the best. People were coming to me to buy their weapons from all over. We built a town and placed a shuttle to improve commerce. Folks were waiting in my lobby to buy their weapons. I had factories making parts. I had harvesters mining the best metals as soon as they spawned.

In WoW we did a million things from levelling up, to getting our first mount, then hard dungeons, then raids, 40 man in those days. WoW does not have the crafting of SWG but has so many other things to keep you busy for ages.

You mentioned the maps size? WoW has the biggest. You mentioned "at launch"? A new player buys WoW now, not in 2004, and gets the whole set of all expansions and access to the biggest map ever with the dungeons alone having more acres than other games together.

I was not looking too much at my level in GW2. I was looking at rewards and a clear progression. I was expecting things to happen. I have done my grinding in other games, like SWG and WOW, I am not entertained by running around and being the same at level 10, 20, 30 and so on.

I would download the new GW2 patches and give it a go, see if there is anything new. But I just read this which is not encouraging, http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/12...-2-goes-wrong/

[Vayne]

Whether or not you said something about WoW ruining the gaming industry, what you said is indicative of the problem WoW has helped cause. There's plenty to do and plenty of reward...but you can't see them. And being indoctrinated doesn't mean you know you are. Surely if you play the same type of game (and most MMOs since WoW are WoW clones in some way or other), then you're going to get used to that style of game. That's what indoctrinated means.

Yet there are a lot of people, really an awful lot, who didn't get bored by level 14. They obviously found something to do that was entertaining or interesting to them. I think that the people who got bored by level 14 are a vast minority. This indicated to me that your complaints, valid for you, aren't valid for most people. There are far more people who complained about being bored at 80 than being bored at level 14.

You come here saying how WoW did this well and WoW did that well. The furtherest I ever got a character in WoW, which I felt was a completely pedestrian game, was level 28. I tried many races and professions, but my problem with the game is the exact opposite of your problem with Guild Wars 2. I felt the game led me around by the nose. Even Guild Wars 2 leads me around by the nose more than I want a game too. Skyrim was better at this.

It's the difference between a theme park MMO, which you apparently like, and a sandbox MMO, which other people like. Very often, people who like sandbox MMOs don't like WoW. It's a preference. It doesn't make WoW a good or better game. It makes WoW a different game. Not to say Guild Wars 2 is a sandbox, it's still a theme park with a sandboxy skin for lack of a better word. But it's an improvement for players like me.

See I come from the RPG world, not the MMO world and I've been waiting a long, long time for a game to be both an MMO AND an RPG. WoW got the MMO part down okay, but it didn't tick the RPG boxes for me. Perhaps it would have had I started playing it in vanilla. But following around stars and arrows all day, for rewards for quests is probably the most boring thing I can think of.

So you see, it's likely that Guild Wars 2 has stuff to do, but you just missed it, because other people have found it. Does this make you a bad guy? Not at all. But it does have everything to do with the games you "grew up in" as compared to the games I "grew up" in.

This game is closer to an RPG than it is to an MMO. Those who like RPGs have a chance at least of liking it more. When I suggested on this forum that more guidance and instruction was needed, there were people telling me that they wanted less hand-holding. It's just a different style of game.

So if you insist on entering this game as a tradiational MMO, and watching your level and getting that quest reward...well, there's nothing anyone can do for you. It's simply not the game for you.

On another note, I assume you know when you finished a heart, the heart quest giver becomes a karma vendor that gives you items as a reward. Different weapons or buffs or consumables, and that each heart giver has different things they offer. Because that's what would replace normal quest rewards in games like WoW.

[bokiz333]

It's not rocker surgery guys

It's simple. Are you the type of person that needs a stranger (dev) to set their goals and paths for them or are you the type of person to make your own goals, paths, fun? Its ok to be one or the other, you seem to be the first, so stay with WoW because it will give you what you want. Nothing wrong with that.

I think people that enjoy GW2 (GENERALLY SPEAKING, not a referendum) are more free thinkers and dont want a rigid set enviroment. That's why I don't PVE at all...I play WvW...because even when you server wins YOU GET NOTING. There is no reason to play WvW other than the reasons you give yourself. And I have them and I play every day for hours and have tons of fun. You don't seem to operate like that, and that's ok, find the game that gives you the framework you enjoy.

No need for a 7 page doctoral dissertation though.

[Vayne]

It's not rocker surgery guys

It's simple. Are you the type of person that needs a stranger (dev) to set their goals and paths for them or are you the type of person to make your own goals, paths, fun? Its ok to be one or the other, you seem to be the first, so stay with WoW because it will give you what you want. Nothing wrong with that.

I think people that enjoy GW2 (GENERALLY SPEAKING, not a referendum) are more free thinkers and dont want a rigid set enviroment. That's why I don't PVE at all...I play WvW...because even when you server wins YOU GET NOTING. There is no reason to play WvW other than the reasons you give yourself. And I have them and I play every day for hours and have tons of fun. You don't seem to operate like that, and that's ok, find the game that gives you the framework you enjoy.

No need for a 7 page doctoral dissertation though.

See, when I played Pen and Paper games, there was someone setting goals for me...it was the GM. The thing is, you could also set your own goals in addition to having the goals the GM set for you. That's how I play PvE anyway. I have goals that the game gives me, and then I have my own personal goals.

I enjoy WvW as well, but I couldn't keep doing it over and over again without breaking it up, not because I can't make my own goals, but because there's no actual story to it. It's just combat, over and over and over again. I need some story in my game, something to give my character a reason to do something. I suppose I could make a character bent on showing he was the greatest strategist of all time, or make a battle crazed norn who wanted to do nothing but kill the enemy and then that one character could be at home in WvW, but it's not enough for me.

Because I'm into the RPG end of the spectrum. I develop my character, which is very much an internal thing, and as a result, PVe becomes more interesting to me. Which of the three factions will this character pick and why. The game doesnt' really ask that. A lot of people just pick one cause they think it's fun, but my characters have reasons why they do things. It makes all the difference in the world.

So if you play a character, as one did in the old days of RPGs, then you can make your own goals/fun in PvE as well as anywhere else.

[MMOJumper]

It sounds to me you're just looking for us to convince you that you like something you don't, or that you're trying to convince the people here that what you like is better. If you don't enjoy the game, don't play it.

I love GW2. I enjoy it much more than I ever enjoyed playing WoW. WoW always just felt like a dumbed down version of the MMOs that came before it. It never felt like there was any actual skill involved in the gameplay, though it's an MMO, 99.99999% of them don't require any actual skill whatsoever. I played to the level cap before BC and stopped playing consistently for a long time after that. Once in a while I'd get the itch to revisit my old character and would pick it up again off and on for a couple of months at a time. Then picked it up fresh with cataclysm and took a new character to the level cap in the week that followed and never played it again after.

I'm not going to give you a list of things you should and shouldn't like because it's all subjective. In my opinion GW2 is the better game, even without eight years of content behind it. So far the general community is shaping up to be much better than any experiences I've ever had with the wow populous. I don't think I've heard one overused Chuck Norris joke, caught a racist argument in map chat, or seen a single character named Tylenol Pénís Jones running around.

Have fun tickling pandas!

[Vayne]

You also mentioned dungeons in your OP. I should have added, dungeons start at level 30 and then there's a new dungeon every ten levels until 80, when there are three dungeons. Not to mention the new Fractals of the Mists which are my favorite dungeons in the game.

The story mode dungeons unlock on the ten levels and the explorable mode dungeons unlock on the 5 levels, so you get the story mode of Ascalon Catacombs at level 30 and the explorable mode (all three of them) at level 35.

I still think the stages of the personal story though are a better way to judge your progress in the game and through your character than either leveling or unlocking dungeons.