What to do?

[Oenanthe]

Unfortunately Blizzard do seem to respond to what ever is being flamed about on the forum the most. This normally means that one class moans about how weak they are, so they get buffed, then everyone moans about how powerful that class is compared to theirs and another gets buffed while the original gets nerfed, normally to worse than it was to start with, and the flaming starts again. The forums also seem full of kids, who are the most vocal, and want everything 'now, now now' instead of understanding you have to earn things in these games.

I don't know if any one else here reads the WoW EU forum, but for years they were raving about wanting pandaren in the game, when they announced MoP, it was all rage quitting because of them introducing pandas.

Unfortunately you can't please everyone all the time, and those that are happy with the status quo tend to be quiet and so don't get noticed.

[zilliman]

When I said "customer feedback" I meant any form of feedback, which is the forums and customer support tickets. I have personally raised dozens of tickets and some of them were clearly for feedback. When you cancel your subscription they ask you why (multiple choice), and there are a dozen reasons you can choose from. All this is "feedback". Classic WoW may have originally come out of a design committee but from the first expansion onwards it is all about what players want. Maybe the ones that shout the loudest.

What you said about your son is very typical of WoW. On every new expansion you play for a while, then cancel your sub and wait for the next expansion. That is exactly what I have been doing since vanilla and so have many of my friends too.

To answer someone else: WoW's crafting is primitive compared to SWG, for example. It was just "something else to do" rather than being a core game design as was in SWG.

I cannot understand how you levelled GW2 in 4 days, that is really something. What do you do now that you are level 80?

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The biggest flaw with WoW is it leads you around by the nose and gives you no freedom at all. The longer WoW has been around the cruddier it has gotten for this one flaw in their quest design. Obviously people must like this since they keep taking more and more choice away from players, I guess it is being aimed at people like you who miss it. The best part of GW2 is you have freedom to play the way you want, I would hate to see them take any part of that away.

No, I do not like it at all. It's simply a "connect the dots" design, truly awful.

At a guess I think it may be in response to
(a) PvP crowd who can't be bothered with quests and want it done asap
(b) targeting lower aged players who would be put off by difficult quests

Today I will be downloading GW2 to see a bit more of the game.

[Bell]

I've quit WoW forever, and I absolutely love GW2. Regardless, WoW overall is just a better game. There's more story, there's more culture, there's a bigger world, there's the horde vs. alliance thing which really causes immersion... The problem though, is the nerf cycle. You work your ass off for the best gear and then 6 months later a patch comes out that allows any new chump to get the very same gear from 5-man facerolls. They slap those who work hard in the face. I got tired of putting up with it. Why bang your head against the wall for months to get rewards that some kid will get for nothing 6 months later? To me that is unacceptable.

I couldn't disagree more. When we talk about gear tiers, we also need to talk about the time of acquisition. By the time a previously max tier becomes available for the "kids", as you condescendingly dubbed them, there is normally already a new, superior tier ready to acquire for those that want to have the best gear. Therefore, for some time (if I remember WoW correctly, it usually took at least 3 months for new content (and new content almost always meant a new gear tier) to be released) you had the best gear, if you were one of the hardcore pro raiders that managed to finish the new content.

That the other, less skillful (or more likely just less determined) players get that gear tier at some point for normal heroic dungeons is only the natural way of MMOs' gear treadmills.
And by that time you'd normally be already working on the next best tier, while they'd work on the second or third best tier. Would they not make it that way, at some point new content would be useless to almost all players, but to a small elite group which managed to keep up with the gear treadmill. They would be just unable to participate in the new stuff that's coming out. Thus, most players would be greatly disenchanted with the game and not support it anymore. Therefore, WoW's approach to gear treadmill with the second or third best gear available at relatively low cost is the only viable one for a company if you have a game with vertical gear progression; Especially as the non-raiders normally far outweigh the raiders.

@OP and the quoted article:

I agree that the story is really relatively weak. Especially after what we've seen from SWToR last year. And I can also understand that you dislike the questing system (or rather the lack of it) in GW2. I like dynamic events, but I admit that they get a bit repetitive quite easily. But I really don't like that they decided to get rid of good old quests that tell you a story while being at it. I understand that there are normally some story arcs in every area, but they are very vaguely told and especially if you haven't played GW1 you very often don't get what the hell is going on around you. On the other hand I like that there are mostly more than just one way to finish a heart. But I'd have liked it better if they had added that freedom of choice to strings of normal quests that lead you through areas. But without the stringent lines post-Cata WoW had. Before that is was more like here where you could pick out the quests you liked and did them and didn't have to do all of one area in order to advance (Although then you'd probably had to throw in a dungeon once in a while to make up for the lost XP)

However, I understand that some don't like to be put on trails, which was a thing that even SWToR did wrong. It hampers replayability. But this problem could have been alleviated otherwise, like by creating multiple quest paths that conjoin at neuralgic points and that part again which could lead to multiple unique playthroughs.

I'm not a big fan of PVE in this or any game, except for story reasons. Therefore I can't really touch on the dungeon aspect as I have done virtually none of them. But they are there.

I also have to agree that crafting is often quite useless. On my first character I didn't have a working TP and when it finally worked I didn't have the required coin to advance my crafting really far. I'm not a grinder, so farming mats on purpose was out of the question for me. But by now I have 7 characters of various level ranges. And I have lots of low level materials on my bank that allow me to advance my crafting on the lower characters quite quickly and less cost intensive. But as for the usefulness: You won't get lavishly rich by crafting in this game. The trading post works in a way that keeps the prizes for normal non-precursor gear relatively low, thus making crafting somewhat useless because you can easily get what you want off the TP. The only thing you get from crafting is the satisfying feeling of having crafted item xy by yourself. But I would like to see a "made by" tag on the gear as WoW had it, for instance.

As for the fun in the game: it's more intrinsic in this game than in WoW. In WoW a large part of the fun comes from the item hunt. Here, even after the implementation of vertical gear progression (you shall be damned ANET!!!! ) the item hunt is not that much of a factor. Especially for those of us who play solely WvW. In this part of the game the only reward you get (apart from abysmally little coin to barely cover your expenses for siege equip) stems only from the game itself. From the strategies your raid tries out and the warm feeling in your guts when the strategy worked and you just utterly crushed the enemies forces. WvW is basically a huge game of trolling your enemies in every way possible. And to me that is very fun and basically the only reason I'm still playing the game

But if you dislike WvW or sPVP, which can also be great fun for pretty much the same reasons WvW is fun, I can totally understand that you probably don't like GW2 as much as others here do. For PVE, especially dungeon PVE, I think there are just other games out there that do that better. If you liked nice stories I'd suggest SWToR or the Secret World (which also has gone B2P now), if you like raiding or doing dungeons I'd suggest WoW or Rift, if you don't like the ones GW2 has (Although I heard that the fractals are found to be quite fun to the PVE faction of the playerbase)

[Peaveywolf]

Actually, Vanilla was different. There were lots of reasons to run various non-end game dungeons. Especially since dungeons used to cost money via hefty repair bills and expensive consumables. You couldn't just raid and then log off.

PvP used to be super hardcore as well. At first there was zero rewards and no BG's. You did it because you loved it (which a lot of us did) and once the honor system was added in, you were competing with everyone on your faction for ranks every week so you had to keep doing it if you wanted to gain ranks.

When I stop and think about it, classic WoW had more to do than GW2. There were a crap ton of really long immersive quest chains that you made you figure out how to finish them, that had a lot of story and lore attached. This was before things like quest tracker and WoWhead were around to guide you to them. Crafting was ridiculously important and difficult to level. It took a lot of time to get anything accomplished.

In GW2 I hit lvl 80 after about 4 days. I was fully geared the same week that I hit max level. Legendaries were made within the first month. To this day, there are only a very select few players that have even entered level 60 Naxxramas at level 60 let alone completed it. (which is now removed, those players will forever be the only ones to have done it)

By comparison to Vanilla WoW, GW2 is ridiculously easy. It didn't start to streamline and become simplified until Burning Crusade released.

Ahh, you get me wrong, I was comparing the vanilla WoW (That I loved) to what WoW has turned into. I found so much to do in vanilla, and I stayed around the areas longer, and revisited them all the time for the dungeons. It took me 6 months to level to 60 just because I was enjoying myself. After Burning crusade, it all went downhill for me. I also did Naxxramas at lvl 60 with my guild. Wiped a few times mind.

[Bell]

This is a very silly statement. I doubt even 1 million of the WoW players out there give any kind of feedback

While I think you are right in saying that not all of the WoW-players did give feedback and certainly the majority of the suggestions made don't get implemented, actually a lot of things that are now in the game were demanded on the forums, which I frequently read, when I played the game.

some demonstrative examples:

Before TBC, only the Bloodelves have been revealed as a new playable race: Players guessed what the Alliance race would be. MANY people wanted Pandas and Worgen. Both races are now in game.

People wanted paid server transfers: they are now in. When they were first in, it was PVP to PVE or PVE to PVE only. Lots of people wanted PVE to PVP Server transfers. They are now in, even faction changes are now in.

In fact, pretty much every convenience change that has been made to WoW has been demanded by the playerbase, or at least parts of it.

Also most of the new crafting skills and even dungeon finder etc. have been first proposed on the suggestions forums.

You can decide whether you like or dislike the direction the game took, but the change has always been driven by player feedback. Especially the "dumbing down" of raid difficulties happened only due to popular demand. They were seeing that 95% of the players didn't use the new content they were making. In an effort to appeal to those, they made endgame more accessible.

[Fey]

Ahh, you get me wrong, I was comparing the vanilla WoW (That I loved) to what WoW has turned into. I found so much to do in vanilla, and I stayed around the areas longer, and revisited them all the time for the dungeons. It took me 6 months to level to 60 just because I was enjoying myself. After Burning crusade, it all went downhill for me. I also did Naxxramas at lvl 60 with my guild. Wiped a few times mind.

Word.

[zilliman]

Ahh, you get me wrong, I was comparing the vanilla WoW (That I loved) to what WoW has turned into. I found so much to do in vanilla, and I stayed around the areas longer, and revisited them all the time for the dungeons. It took me 6 months to level to 60 just because I was enjoying myself. After Burning crusade, it all went downhill for me. I also did Naxxramas at lvl 60 with my guild. Wiped a few times mind.

Some of the new features are actually good, some are bad:

"Good changes":
Summoning stones outside dungeons so your party can assemble quicker.
Flying mounts
XXX% increase in the number of graveyards to minimise "corpse runs"
Threat indicator on mobs
Target of target
Click on frames (for healers mainly)
10 and 25 man raids (instead of 40 man)
LFG and LFR so all players can enjoy new content while "heroic" raids are reserved for dedicated guilds
Account bound pets and mounts (rather than character bound)
Account bound "legacy" weapons and armour

"Bad changes":
"Swipe" attacks, multiple "taunt" abilities and increased threat generation for tanks eliminating need for CC
Wipe out of all hybrid classes and giving all classes almost equal abilities
PvP class "balancing" affecting badly PvE players
Quest system consisting of very short quests and full indications on map discouraging any exploration
Portals to almost all areas minimising need for travel and breaking immersion

Off the top of my head

[Fey]

Anyone else think it's funny how a thread about "what to do" in GW2, turns into a "lets argue about WoW!". I can't wait for Titan to release, it's going to be hilarious.

[Peaveywolf]

Anyone else think it's funny how a thread about "what to do" in GW2, turns into a "lets argue about WoW!". I can't wait for Titan to release, it's going to be hilarious.

I wouldn't have said argument. The thing is, the OP wasn't really about what to do in GW2 in the first place, it was just to say that in his opinion WoW is better and has more to do. So it was always gonna go in the direction of vanilla vs everything after that.

[sidxus]

it might just be the race/class you picked that your not feeling, different races start developing their story/character motive till late story. also this games really benifits from the player role playing, it does have a lead story, but its main pont in you write your characters story and how they develope, your thief helps the locals regain they threasure, your guardian protects a trade route, your elemetalist masacres a dredge setlement or your warrior becomes a blacksmith, its all left to you to decide how your character developes rather than say go from person A - B. Its your story - if you don't like the character, make one that suits you better