EPTOn March 21 2013 00:04 Miragee wrote:
Very good post! Sign it.
Show nested quote +
On March 11 2013 12:58 DefMatrixUltra wrote:
[1] Yes, this is me - along with many others. Except the "other game" for me was the original Guild Wars. And I've gotta say I couldn't be more disappointed.
[2] It amuses me in a sad way to see this phrase thrown about everywhere. The game doesn't start until you get to max level. That means completely different things to different people.
For someone that plays WoW, it probably means that the goal in the game is to get max level and then do raids/grind etc. The raids and high-level grinding are, in this instance, considered the "real" game (even though leveling can take a month or more for a casual player).
But for me, and pretty much everyone that played the original Guild Wars, it means something completely different. There is no concept like raiding in Guild Wars. There's quite simply PVE and PVP. The only thing that's different at all is the "dungeon" concept where you go to a special "difficult" realm. Much later on they added boss-like creatures, but at first it was just "PVE but harder".
In the original "vanilla" game (Prophecies), you'd hit max level (20) about halfway through the story/campaign. The story was not like in GW2, it was inseparable from the geographic progression. And you never spent long at the same level. This made the concept of gear treadmill practically impossible.
In all the later expansions, you could read reach max level in a few hours. In fact, getting to max level was more like a tutorial than anything else. Having the entire rest of the game be at max level was nice for a lot of reasons. For one thing, you can buy max level weapons and armor from vendors for pennies - and it's not level-adjusted or level-restricted so you could even buy it on a low-level character (this was extremely common). You're never on the hunt for gear because you have maxed stats. The only things to shell out gold for were cosmetic considerations. The same exact stats but with different, neat skins. The only things you had to buy from other players were weapon mods (or you could just get so-called collector weapons from NPCs with the mods you want) and runes (the only true thing to grind for to be competitive).
The game starts at max level. That means something very different when you can hit max level in a few hours and get a complete set of maxed-out gear (from vendors) even if you were poor. Aside from saving up money to buy runes, you never have to spend an instant thinking about or wishing for phat lootz. In fact, the gear treadmill is primarily something that exists in the minds of players. It is a kind of psychological pressure that plays on human beings' natural completionism and sense of efficiency. If every single time you have a combat you think "my sword is doing 5 less damage than it could be doing" or "I'm taking 5% more damage than I could be taking" it can warp the experience of playing the game into something very negative. This is what grinding generally means - doing some repetitive action that is supposed to be an efficient way to plug the holes in your character. But in Guild Wars, this is barely even possible.
Now let's look at GW2 in comparison. Even if you know what you're doing, it takes quite a while to level a character. For the vast majority of people, it does make sense to even buy intermediate weapons along the way. How do you get maxed out gear? Well you can spend ages inefficiently gathering materials and training up professions to construct the weapons you want or you can (much more cheaply and quickly) buy them off the market from other players. The issue here is that maxed weapons are quite expensive. I spent 90% of my time in GW2 manipulating prices on expensive items for profit so I never had a problem with money. But the vast majority of people - the people that are just playing the damned game (and not the market interface) - are dreadfully poor in comparison to the price of maxed gear.
This is the polar opposite situation of Guild Wars where you can go to a vendor and get maxed gear (although it might not look shiny) for extremely cheap. Now you have a game full of people with that psychological pressure. No matter how slight it is, it's there, and it serves only to make the game experience negative. ANet's promise of removing the gear treadmill from the concept of MMOs was a straight up lie. From the perspective of a Guild Wars player, they injected the gear treadmill straight into the heart of the fucking game.
What about the game itself? There is nothing to do when you hit max level. There is no form of progression to make. Even in Prophecies, where you spent the longest time by far not at max level, you still spent a huge amount of the natural progression of the game at max level.
This is where the amazing thing about Guild Wars comes in. The PVP in Guild Wars is fucking awesome - even the terrible Random Arenas is an awesome experience in comparison to anything GW2 has to offer. I spent multiple years playing Team Arenas and GVG - I met my wife playing the PVP in this game. It really is incredible. It has flaws and rough spots, but it rises above them with the sheer quality of experience.
GW2 PVP is a joke. It is not something that was ready for release - it was alpha content at best. I can't be bothered to catch myself up on the current state of affairs of things, but I've got some complaints on this front.
+ Show Spoiler [Various PVP Complaints] +
When the game came out, the Necromancer class should have had an "Under Construction" sign on it. It was riddled with bugs and broken interactions which pretty much made the class incomplete. All the cool combinations with skill descriptions and attributes were a fantasy waiting to be fulfilled. Unfortunately, I stopped waiting after 2 or 3 months.
Minions had no method of being controlled whatsoever and were either extremely overpowered (if they did what you wanted) or utterly useless (sometimes they even stood still and didn't attack anyone) - the biggest sign this class was an afterthought with little design work put into it. Speaking of afterthoughts, the pet system with the ranger class is probably the biggest disappointment of any of the classes. Imagine if you had an organ in your body which only served to cause pain, but then whoever put you together decided to graft it directly onto your heart so you couldn't get rid of it. The ranger class was a unique and wonderful class for clever individuals in Guild Wars but an awkward, samey class in GW2.
As far as WvW goes, there wasn't any one big thing wrong with it (apart from the occasional blatant hacker stealing the orb), but the design of many of the systems was very questionable. There was little place for small, coordinated squads. The workhorse of the map was whoever had the biggest army. The binary nature (i.e. lack of granularity) of capping seemed very destructive. Tear down the walls of a fortress and cap it, and voila it's 100% rebuilt. If it had stayed broken and mangled, it would allow for small squads to recap it if the big dumb army moved on. It would require more coordinated logistics efforts to stay and rebuild before moving along. It seems a strange decision to make people walk for 10 minutes after dying in order to get to a fight - I think having cappable spawn points would have been more interesting, especially as something to fight over and around.
The worst complaints I have for the so-called Structured PVP. Matchmaking. I'm struggling to remember at this point, but the actual SPVP was 5v5. There was another mode, maybe 8v8. For some reason, the 8v8 mode, which as far as I can tell was an intentionally bad clusterfuck of rush-fighting, had a rating system (or at least, those who knew better about it than me claimed it did). This means you would get rated on a per-match basis and matched up against others of your rating. The actual real supposed-to-be-balanced this-is-our-ESPORTS-lynchpin 5v5 apparently had no rating system whatsoever. You may think, "well that's a problem for new players trying it out because they'll inevitably get their shit pushed in by better players" and you'd be right - but that isn't the worst problem.
The worst problem is putting together a serious effort - 5 players with a competitive mindset collaborating on builds, strategy, and communication - and constantly crushing 5 random noobs. Some of you out there might protest and say that the organized team is having lots of fun, but that is a myth rooted in the strange idea that winning in itself is fun. It isn't. It is much worse of an experience to crush team after team of uncoordinated noobs. Why is that? Because for the coordinated team there is nothing left. If you can't ever get a real challenge, there is no point. At least the noobs who were crushed have the illusion that the game is meaningful because they can get better.
"Well you should be doing tournaments, you cranky old sod!" My experience with tournaments is the following:
1. Waiting.
2. Waiting.
3. Cool we won a tournament, but it didn't seem closely matched...
4. Waiting.
5. Won a tournament by a landslide but the 2nd place team got the prize?
6. Waiting.
7. "Your next tournament match is scheduled for 84 days." Ok.
The real pertinent issue is not the tournament system. It's the fact that SPVP was a broken mess that should never have left alpha testing. The game should have released with ladders, ratings, and observer mode - just like Guild Wars had for GVG. There was no excuse whatsoever for such a disastrous state of release PVP.
I googled "gw2 esports" to try to find any updated pertinent information about recent developments, and you know what I get? The most recent results are from fucking November 2012. Here's the top result https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/pvp/pvp/ESL-interested-in-GW2-e-sports .
"competitive and dedicated teams have already tried this aspect of GW2, only to whither away due to boredom, horrible management of spvp, and lack of balance in general."
Yeah. This man said it better and more succinctly than I did.
Let's talk about some other problems with SPVP. I couldn't play the actual game for more than an hour at a time because the FOV was giving me headaches. The FOV itself just standing still isn't bad, but in SPVP, you are constantly swinging the camera around and staring at the edges of the screen.
What was their response to people being physically affected by playing their game? Sorry, we can't compromise our art. I get the lamest, weakest response possible - but not just one. I get several of them in list form.
-If we allowed people change the FOV, their FPS would go down. Your headaches are an acceptable sacrifice.
-If we let people turn the FOV way up, there's a fish-eye effect which our artists think looks ugly. We wouldn't want anyone to see that so your headaches are an acceptable sacrifice.
-Our game was designed around people only being able to see 60 degrees in a cone. Turning up the FOV is an automatic win button so your headaches are an acceptable sacrifice.
-Trust me, it's not the FOV causing your headaches (even though I just made a list of excuses for not changing it), it's a camera acceleration issue.
This from a guy who plays Quake with 120 FOV. Fuck you, Jon Peeters. Do you know how many people believed your ignorant spiel and spread the "knowledge" across the internet, quoting you whenever some poor fucker mentioned he'd like to be able to play the game but can't? If I believed you were a decent human being who would lose sleep over having made the world a slightly shittier place than the way it was before you came along, I wouldn't hope and wish that you would suffer as a result of such blatantly intellectually lazy, senseless drivel.
Balance. I'm not gonna talk a lot about balance. Balance is a thing that is mostly discussed in theoretical terms in GW2. If you don't have a ladder system - if you don't have proper matchmaking - if you don't have basic fundamental shit then balance is a secondary or tertiary concern. But there were numerous problems with balance (most strikingly with Necromancers since the class was a half-complete mess). Further, ANet didn't ever seem to properly absorb feedback on this issue, going so far as to say l2p. I particularly like how Jon chose a counter-example to his explanation. He says players will eventually get better with Death Shroud and dominate with Necros, just like how Master Yi in League of Legends used to be OP until people figured out how to counter him. Logic.
Googled to see the latest activity going on and got this. Seems it's going in a downhill direction. Met my expectations exactly.
[3] There are two problems here. One is the stark presence of the gear treadmill. That small psychological pressure constantly nags at you to level up and to increase your stats. This will cause people to focus on leveling and stat-building more than they otherwise would. The second is a problem of expectations. Your whole post is founded on the idea that people's expectations are to blame for the problems present in GW2. The problem with this view is that literally every gaming community that GW2 players could have come from have preconceptions which GW2 does not meet - including the the original game.
Players coming from WoW and similar games have an expectation of end-game content (it doesn't help that the level 80 content is the worst content by a long shot). Players coming from Guild Wars have expectations about the absence of a gear treadmill. They also expect that the game assumes you will be max level super early. The problem with GW2 is that it plays on these wildly different preconceptions and doesn't deliver on either of them. WoW players are unhappy that there is "nothing to do at 80". Guild Wars players are unhappy that the game is a huge grind and that the gear treadmill is in full swing even after you reach max level.
If the game were given some other name, and it wasn't advertised explicitly to WoW players and Guild Wars players, then your point would be more valid.
[4] The game definitely does have lots of cool moments. The people who designed the world did a superlative job - there is no other MMO that has nearly as much an interesting and fleshed out geographical landscape as GW2. Unfortunately, these cool little bits aren't enough to hold the game up against the huge weight of its flaws and rough spots.
[5] If you're among the people that are happy with the game, I'm happy for you. Keep on playing it and liking it. Unfortunately, many of us came into the game with expectations (set by ANet themselves) that were not met and hoped to take advantage of systems that were not (and, from all indications, are not) mature enough to be considered release material.
/edit - spelling
On January 22 2013 21:11 thenewaol wrote:
I feel as though many people's disappointment in the game draws from a perspective taken from other games. [1]
People seem to have this "hit max level and then the real game starts" attitude, when I don't really think the developers intended it to be that way. [2]
There are plenty of posts where the op complains they hit 80 super fast and now have nothing to do, when they might have skipped seeing a lot of the world to get there. [3]
I started playing the game with a similar mindset of just getting to a higher level so I could get to the good part. Then a friend of mine (who was new to MMOs) started playing the game and decided he just wanted to explore instead. While there are some restrictions on where you can feasibly go, he played simply to enjoy romping around and having fun with what was happening around him. The levels were secondary, and were simply the natural result of playing the game. When we found the pirate ghost jump puzzle in lions arch, it totally blew my mind - not only was it an awesome piece of content, but it's something you probably wouldn't find if getting to 80 was your primary goal. [4]
IMO, the game doesn't seem designed for the people that want to raid a max level dungeon over and over for sweet gear with better stats. Instead, the game is for people who want to run around and play simply because it's fun for them. [5]
I feel as though many people's disappointment in the game draws from a perspective taken from other games. [1]
People seem to have this "hit max level and then the real game starts" attitude, when I don't really think the developers intended it to be that way. [2]
There are plenty of posts where the op complains they hit 80 super fast and now have nothing to do, when they might have skipped seeing a lot of the world to get there. [3]
I started playing the game with a similar mindset of just getting to a higher level so I could get to the good part. Then a friend of mine (who was new to MMOs) started playing the game and decided he just wanted to explore instead. While there are some restrictions on where you can feasibly go, he played simply to enjoy romping around and having fun with what was happening around him. The levels were secondary, and were simply the natural result of playing the game. When we found the pirate ghost jump puzzle in lions arch, it totally blew my mind - not only was it an awesome piece of content, but it's something you probably wouldn't find if getting to 80 was your primary goal. [4]
IMO, the game doesn't seem designed for the people that want to raid a max level dungeon over and over for sweet gear with better stats. Instead, the game is for people who want to run around and play simply because it's fun for them. [5]
[1] Yes, this is me - along with many others. Except the "other game" for me was the original Guild Wars. And I've gotta say I couldn't be more disappointed.
[2] It amuses me in a sad way to see this phrase thrown about everywhere. The game doesn't start until you get to max level. That means completely different things to different people.
For someone that plays WoW, it probably means that the goal in the game is to get max level and then do raids/grind etc. The raids and high-level grinding are, in this instance, considered the "real" game (even though leveling can take a month or more for a casual player).
But for me, and pretty much everyone that played the original Guild Wars, it means something completely different. There is no concept like raiding in Guild Wars. There's quite simply PVE and PVP. The only thing that's different at all is the "dungeon" concept where you go to a special "difficult" realm. Much later on they added boss-like creatures, but at first it was just "PVE but harder".
In the original "vanilla" game (Prophecies), you'd hit max level (20) about halfway through the story/campaign. The story was not like in GW2, it was inseparable from the geographic progression. And you never spent long at the same level. This made the concept of gear treadmill practically impossible.
In all the later expansions, you could read reach max level in a few hours. In fact, getting to max level was more like a tutorial than anything else. Having the entire rest of the game be at max level was nice for a lot of reasons. For one thing, you can buy max level weapons and armor from vendors for pennies - and it's not level-adjusted or level-restricted so you could even buy it on a low-level character (this was extremely common). You're never on the hunt for gear because you have maxed stats. The only things to shell out gold for were cosmetic considerations. The same exact stats but with different, neat skins. The only things you had to buy from other players were weapon mods (or you could just get so-called collector weapons from NPCs with the mods you want) and runes (the only true thing to grind for to be competitive).
The game starts at max level. That means something very different when you can hit max level in a few hours and get a complete set of maxed-out gear (from vendors) even if you were poor. Aside from saving up money to buy runes, you never have to spend an instant thinking about or wishing for phat lootz. In fact, the gear treadmill is primarily something that exists in the minds of players. It is a kind of psychological pressure that plays on human beings' natural completionism and sense of efficiency. If every single time you have a combat you think "my sword is doing 5 less damage than it could be doing" or "I'm taking 5% more damage than I could be taking" it can warp the experience of playing the game into something very negative. This is what grinding generally means - doing some repetitive action that is supposed to be an efficient way to plug the holes in your character. But in Guild Wars, this is barely even possible.
Now let's look at GW2 in comparison. Even if you know what you're doing, it takes quite a while to level a character. For the vast majority of people, it does make sense to even buy intermediate weapons along the way. How do you get maxed out gear? Well you can spend ages inefficiently gathering materials and training up professions to construct the weapons you want or you can (much more cheaply and quickly) buy them off the market from other players. The issue here is that maxed weapons are quite expensive. I spent 90% of my time in GW2 manipulating prices on expensive items for profit so I never had a problem with money. But the vast majority of people - the people that are just playing the damned game (and not the market interface) - are dreadfully poor in comparison to the price of maxed gear.
This is the polar opposite situation of Guild Wars where you can go to a vendor and get maxed gear (although it might not look shiny) for extremely cheap. Now you have a game full of people with that psychological pressure. No matter how slight it is, it's there, and it serves only to make the game experience negative. ANet's promise of removing the gear treadmill from the concept of MMOs was a straight up lie. From the perspective of a Guild Wars player, they injected the gear treadmill straight into the heart of the fucking game.
What about the game itself? There is nothing to do when you hit max level. There is no form of progression to make. Even in Prophecies, where you spent the longest time by far not at max level, you still spent a huge amount of the natural progression of the game at max level.
This is where the amazing thing about Guild Wars comes in. The PVP in Guild Wars is fucking awesome - even the terrible Random Arenas is an awesome experience in comparison to anything GW2 has to offer. I spent multiple years playing Team Arenas and GVG - I met my wife playing the PVP in this game. It really is incredible. It has flaws and rough spots, but it rises above them with the sheer quality of experience.
GW2 PVP is a joke. It is not something that was ready for release - it was alpha content at best. I can't be bothered to catch myself up on the current state of affairs of things, but I've got some complaints on this front.
+ Show Spoiler [Various PVP Complaints] +
When the game came out, the Necromancer class should have had an "Under Construction" sign on it. It was riddled with bugs and broken interactions which pretty much made the class incomplete. All the cool combinations with skill descriptions and attributes were a fantasy waiting to be fulfilled. Unfortunately, I stopped waiting after 2 or 3 months.
Minions had no method of being controlled whatsoever and were either extremely overpowered (if they did what you wanted) or utterly useless (sometimes they even stood still and didn't attack anyone) - the biggest sign this class was an afterthought with little design work put into it. Speaking of afterthoughts, the pet system with the ranger class is probably the biggest disappointment of any of the classes. Imagine if you had an organ in your body which only served to cause pain, but then whoever put you together decided to graft it directly onto your heart so you couldn't get rid of it. The ranger class was a unique and wonderful class for clever individuals in Guild Wars but an awkward, samey class in GW2.
As far as WvW goes, there wasn't any one big thing wrong with it (apart from the occasional blatant hacker stealing the orb), but the design of many of the systems was very questionable. There was little place for small, coordinated squads. The workhorse of the map was whoever had the biggest army. The binary nature (i.e. lack of granularity) of capping seemed very destructive. Tear down the walls of a fortress and cap it, and voila it's 100% rebuilt. If it had stayed broken and mangled, it would allow for small squads to recap it if the big dumb army moved on. It would require more coordinated logistics efforts to stay and rebuild before moving along. It seems a strange decision to make people walk for 10 minutes after dying in order to get to a fight - I think having cappable spawn points would have been more interesting, especially as something to fight over and around.
The worst complaints I have for the so-called Structured PVP. Matchmaking. I'm struggling to remember at this point, but the actual SPVP was 5v5. There was another mode, maybe 8v8. For some reason, the 8v8 mode, which as far as I can tell was an intentionally bad clusterfuck of rush-fighting, had a rating system (or at least, those who knew better about it than me claimed it did). This means you would get rated on a per-match basis and matched up against others of your rating. The actual real supposed-to-be-balanced this-is-our-ESPORTS-lynchpin 5v5 apparently had no rating system whatsoever. You may think, "well that's a problem for new players trying it out because they'll inevitably get their shit pushed in by better players" and you'd be right - but that isn't the worst problem.
The worst problem is putting together a serious effort - 5 players with a competitive mindset collaborating on builds, strategy, and communication - and constantly crushing 5 random noobs. Some of you out there might protest and say that the organized team is having lots of fun, but that is a myth rooted in the strange idea that winning in itself is fun. It isn't. It is much worse of an experience to crush team after team of uncoordinated noobs. Why is that? Because for the coordinated team there is nothing left. If you can't ever get a real challenge, there is no point. At least the noobs who were crushed have the illusion that the game is meaningful because they can get better.
"Well you should be doing tournaments, you cranky old sod!" My experience with tournaments is the following:
1. Waiting.
2. Waiting.
3. Cool we won a tournament, but it didn't seem closely matched...
4. Waiting.
5. Won a tournament by a landslide but the 2nd place team got the prize?
6. Waiting.
7. "Your next tournament match is scheduled for 84 days." Ok.
The real pertinent issue is not the tournament system. It's the fact that SPVP was a broken mess that should never have left alpha testing. The game should have released with ladders, ratings, and observer mode - just like Guild Wars had for GVG. There was no excuse whatsoever for such a disastrous state of release PVP.
I googled "gw2 esports" to try to find any updated pertinent information about recent developments, and you know what I get? The most recent results are from fucking November 2012. Here's the top result https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/pvp/pvp/ESL-interested-in-GW2-e-sports .
"competitive and dedicated teams have already tried this aspect of GW2, only to whither away due to boredom, horrible management of spvp, and lack of balance in general."
Yeah. This man said it better and more succinctly than I did.
Let's talk about some other problems with SPVP. I couldn't play the actual game for more than an hour at a time because the FOV was giving me headaches. The FOV itself just standing still isn't bad, but in SPVP, you are constantly swinging the camera around and staring at the edges of the screen.
What was their response to people being physically affected by playing their game? Sorry, we can't compromise our art. I get the lamest, weakest response possible - but not just one. I get several of them in list form.
-If we allowed people change the FOV, their FPS would go down. Your headaches are an acceptable sacrifice.
-If we let people turn the FOV way up, there's a fish-eye effect which our artists think looks ugly. We wouldn't want anyone to see that so your headaches are an acceptable sacrifice.
-Our game was designed around people only being able to see 60 degrees in a cone. Turning up the FOV is an automatic win button so your headaches are an acceptable sacrifice.
-Trust me, it's not the FOV causing your headaches (even though I just made a list of excuses for not changing it), it's a camera acceleration issue.
This from a guy who plays Quake with 120 FOV. Fuck you, Jon Peeters. Do you know how many people believed your ignorant spiel and spread the "knowledge" across the internet, quoting you whenever some poor fucker mentioned he'd like to be able to play the game but can't? If I believed you were a decent human being who would lose sleep over having made the world a slightly shittier place than the way it was before you came along, I wouldn't hope and wish that you would suffer as a result of such blatantly intellectually lazy, senseless drivel.
Balance. I'm not gonna talk a lot about balance. Balance is a thing that is mostly discussed in theoretical terms in GW2. If you don't have a ladder system - if you don't have proper matchmaking - if you don't have basic fundamental shit then balance is a secondary or tertiary concern. But there were numerous problems with balance (most strikingly with Necromancers since the class was a half-complete mess). Further, ANet didn't ever seem to properly absorb feedback on this issue, going so far as to say l2p. I particularly like how Jon chose a counter-example to his explanation. He says players will eventually get better with Death Shroud and dominate with Necros, just like how Master Yi in League of Legends used to be OP until people figured out how to counter him. Logic.
Googled to see the latest activity going on and got this. Seems it's going in a downhill direction. Met my expectations exactly.
[3] There are two problems here. One is the stark presence of the gear treadmill. That small psychological pressure constantly nags at you to level up and to increase your stats. This will cause people to focus on leveling and stat-building more than they otherwise would. The second is a problem of expectations. Your whole post is founded on the idea that people's expectations are to blame for the problems present in GW2. The problem with this view is that literally every gaming community that GW2 players could have come from have preconceptions which GW2 does not meet - including the the original game.
Players coming from WoW and similar games have an expectation of end-game content (it doesn't help that the level 80 content is the worst content by a long shot). Players coming from Guild Wars have expectations about the absence of a gear treadmill. They also expect that the game assumes you will be max level super early. The problem with GW2 is that it plays on these wildly different preconceptions and doesn't deliver on either of them. WoW players are unhappy that there is "nothing to do at 80". Guild Wars players are unhappy that the game is a huge grind and that the gear treadmill is in full swing even after you reach max level.
If the game were given some other name, and it wasn't advertised explicitly to WoW players and Guild Wars players, then your point would be more valid.
[4] The game definitely does have lots of cool moments. The people who designed the world did a superlative job - there is no other MMO that has nearly as much an interesting and fleshed out geographical landscape as GW2. Unfortunately, these cool little bits aren't enough to hold the game up against the huge weight of its flaws and rough spots.
[5] If you're among the people that are happy with the game, I'm happy for you. Keep on playing it and liking it. Unfortunately, many of us came into the game with expectations (set by ANet themselves) that were not met and hoped to take advantage of systems that were not (and, from all indications, are not) mature enough to be considered release material.
/edit - spelling
Very good post! Sign it.
I agree. I really don't like this hipster like approach to guildwars 2 "oh well it's just you don't understand why its good because you think you want this, this and this out of an MMO but really you want what guildwars 2 provides, your taste in games is just not sophisticated enough to realize this." I think the real truth is that its poorly designed. The conceptual ideas are great, and there some fascinating things to guild wars 2 which is unique, i did have a blast leveling for a while, but i got bored, like a lot of people. Essentially they failed to do what all MMO's fail to do except for the most successful ones, which is to get the core working properly and well. All these fancy lack of linear quests, and interactive group quests which have "real" effect on the game are all well and good, but the core game-play isn't fun enough to stand on its on, and the pvp was weak on release to put it politely, so yes, people looked for endgame content. Not because they thought that it was WoW and it wasn't, but because the game doesn't stand on its own without this kind of content. Raiding is an easy way to provide meaningful fun progression that you can sink your teeth into, which is constantly challenging, among other things. An MMO doesn't need this to work, but it does need a core feature which machetes this. PVP is one which they could have done, or perhaps like EVE where the metagame is their core feature. You need a constant reason to play, a flapship part about your game. Guildwars 2 tries to claim its leveling. This is just nonsense, sure they made leveling more fun than any other game but who wants to just level? People calling other games like wow a grind is quite ironic in some respects, at least you get to 80 then the game starts. In guild wars 2 you get to 80 and have to look forward too... well leveling, and gear grinding.
tyr's hand, best online gaming times ever
. 
