So now that you've had time to gather your thoughts...

[Meledelion]

GW2 is remarkable in that it brought a lot of old or existing MMO concepts together in a modern context; casual, action orientated, streamlined gameplay which is non-punitive.

Exactly, and this is what is so "renovating".
I like GW2 due to the selection they made being close(r) to the selection I would make. Sure there are things I would(n't) have picked from other games but this is the closest fit.

This is also what it comes down to for everyone trying to decide whether or not a(ny) game is "worth it". Do your research,make a +/- list for the game you're quitting/no longer interested in and do the same for the game you're interested in playing.

Now add values to each point. EG: "I like the friends I have in game X", that to me is 3/10, "tier gears" that's 0/10, "Raids" 7/10,... and so on naturally the game you're wanting to quit/quit should be below 5/10. If the other game isn't 5/10 don't bother.
(it's better to look at mechanics than friends etc but I had to give examples )

[Zilong]

im beyond taking the time -snip-.

Sure doesn't look like it. We are aware of the issues regardless of your finger pointing or not. And regardless of our view or not with good/bads it's a matter of personal preference as well. Which you seem to need to argue about. All the "facts" you point are for the most part a cranky poster versus the PR, I mean how much does marketing affect people? I know what they said, I see what they did and I know what can/can't be real. The only difference here is that you seemed to have believed what they said and got mad to see the reality. I know you didn't believe and I understand a lot of people were treating the game as the fourth coming of golden puppy. The game has launch people saw reality and that's it, the ones who actually bought the whole marketing fluffyness were disappointed and moved on, you on the other hand remain here screaming to the ones who, no matter reality/marketing or whatever else still enjoy the game. You only speak harsh truths in a fantasy world which is just disgusting to watch and read.

Diminishing Returns haven't been a problem since forever and yet you keep bringing it up. Cash shop can be bought with in-game gold. I could counter precisely every point you shit out of your mouth. No it wasn't a guideline, just marketing. Your conception about how grindy and how gated content are is just to show how you don't know much of what you talk. Sure it was "surprising" but it's true that it didn't change the game in anything pretty much to anyone (Much more like "OMG WHAT NOW?" and complains whether to real true changes in-game), I will agree with you on half of that once we are maybe 12 months from now and I see that it's going the same path.

I don't care if you care. But saddly the Gw1 vet such as yourself only proves one thing with all this. The fact that you are the one that ends up looking like the kiddy... Honestly I too thought myself that gw2 could be a bit more like gw1 but that didn't stop me from liking the game as it is.

I think on that video what sets them apart is the great song on the back, trully. It just enhances the grandeur of the game, must be what made people go nuts on it.

Anyhow. It's you opinion and more than once we heard it. For that we won't ban you really, but it's so far from facts that it's not even cute anymore.

[Lane]

The lack of punishing down-scaling comes in here. To me if you downscale to lvl 40 you should lose all major traits etc I realize that this increases difficulty since all of a sudden you're no longer "tuned" the way you were but your skill should make up for it now. Same for skills. If you're playing in a < lvl 30zone your elite shouldn't be active etc.

It could also be a means of appeasing those who don't like being down leveled. At least you still have your traits, elite skills, and from what I've seen having exotics+ in lower level zones does make a big difference.

The only "content" wow brings are raids, if you're going to sell wow to a friend of yours who doesn't know it what is your argument? Mine was "dude there's these big boss fights where you go in with 24 other people and you have to avoid stuff etc to kill, yada yada yadaaa". I doubt you'd tell them "well you can go gather plants and then you can make them into potions which you can then sell on the ah so you get money, yada yada yadaaa". People might find that part fun but that's not a key-factor.

Raids were never a selling point of mine whenever I suggested WoW to anyone. I also only raided maybe a total of 1-2 years at best (not consecutively) out of the 6 that I played. However, I'm an unabashed altoholic (had 85s on both factions) and a world explorer, so for me it wasn't too difficult to find other things to do.

[sacrypheyes]

GW2 is remarkable in that it brought a lot of old or existing MMO concepts together in a modern context; casual, action orientated, streamlined gameplay which is non-punitive.

kinda reminds me what was said of wow (though it actually applies to most bliz games : picking a lot of good concepts elsewhere, usually little to no innovation + good packaging/marketing ) when vanilla came out.

[Fencers]

kinda reminds me what was said of wow (though it actually applies to most bliz games : picking a lot of good concepts elsewhere, usually little to no innovation + good packaging/marketing ) when vanilla came out.

The part about good packaging and marketing is true. WoW did also streamline abstract/obtuse systems of older MMOs into far more accessible variants. That is the great innovation [such as it was] of Warcraft, it brought MMOs to a truly mass market*.

Also the speed of Warcraft was a revelation at the time. The game [WoW] moved and reacted at a pace simply unprecedented in the genre.

Don't think Anarchy Online or Vanguard would have ever brought MMOs to the mainstream as Blizzard did. ;p

I do see GW2 as a logical extension of MMOs aimed at the mass market however. If WoW is the start of "new" MMOs, GW2 might be in retrospect the start of new "new" MMOs.

Time will tell.


* Not saying WoW is my type of game- it isn't. Meh if other people enjoy it/don't care. Credit where it is due and all that stuff.

[Targetter]

For me GW2 is the perfect MMO, just to jump in for an hour after dinner.

I usually just do the daily during the week, and play more during the weekend.
I like the idea behind the dialy quest, you complete it by playing the game, killing random mobs, doing events, doing the storymode and in the end lots of Karma.

The downscaling can be anoying, but to be honest, when you are a level 30 being downleveled to level 5 and you have masterworks gear, you never get killed.

The main reason however is that I can play it with my girlfriend and never hopelessly outlevel her thanks to downscaling in the zones. We tried to play WoW together, but I always outleveled her because she plays less then me, and she said that she felt like a burden on my enjoyment of the game.

[Lane]

The main reason however is that I can play it with my girlfriend and never hopelessly outlevel her thanks to downscaling in the zones. We tried to play WoW together, but I always outleveled her because she plays less then me, and she said that she felt like a burden on my enjoyment of the game.

This is the same situation for me too. My bf works 50-60 hours a week sometimes and doesn't have the same amount of free time I do to play, so in previous games we've had to always keep a dedicated pair of characters to play together or else I'll end up leaving him in the dust. In GW2 we can play whoever we want together. Since we're both altoholics that's actually a big deal for us.

[Drakhar]

Diminishing Returns haven't been a problem since forever and yet you keep bringing it up.

Hmmm we must not be playing the same game. Are we talking about GW1 or something? The Guild Wars where they actually removed DR instead of buffing it every patch?

[Meledelion]

Hmmm we must not be playing the same game. Are we talking about GW1 or something? The Guild Wars where they actually removed DR instead of buffing it every patch?

They removed DR in gw1? When did they do this afaik AFC is still active...

[Drakhar]

They removed DR in gw1? When did they do this afaik AFC is still active...

CBA to find it, I remember they patched out the DR (it used to give you a warning message to boot!) from entering/exiting a zone too many times in a short period of time. I don't even think farming minos/griffons/whatever near the desert outposts was even all that profitable at that point, but that's where I remember people abusing it and bitching about DR. Goddamn wammos.

[melodramocracy]

Also the speed of Warcraft was a revelation at the time. The game [WoW] moved and reacted at a pace simply unprecedented in the genre.

I'd wager that anyone who played Asheron's Call would argue this point. It wasn't nearly as graphically interesting as WoW, but the game play, movement speed, etc, were all a good deal faster. No idea how it is these days however.

[FREDREX]

I really dont recomend this game,bored me to death, i am an ex-wow player, and a future rift one , and my idea of MMORPG is not exploring and doing solo missions, for that i have one of the best games ever Dragon Age Origins.

Here are some points i really hate of GW2, this is only my point of view

-No mounts, sure we have waypoints, but i dont really want to pay and or see a loading screen..., btw every region has to be loaded.

-Dungeons are boring abd there is no raid, allmost all bosses are humanoids, there is no trinity sistem so the whole sistem is quite chaotic, and there is no loot incentive, all is cosmethic.

-Few many creatures, there is no variety.

-So few skills.

-Quest sistem is the same thing whit another style, you still have to gather X, to kill X, to scort that, the only diference is you dont have to talk to to a questgiver.

-This a cassual MMORPG, simlified stats, no much character progression.

-The AH is too weird for me, i love the old sistem

Good things are excelent graphics and perfect customization of your char

[sacrypheyes]

most of your cons tell us how you're the type that jumped into the hype wagon without even trying to know where you were going and then complaining about the destination.

also :
-mounts have nothing to do with having loading screens between each zones
-the lack of more challenging content is something i do agree on, but the no trinity system is anything but a con as it allows to set up groups so much faster
-we must not play the same game or you limited yourself to your first race starter zone
-do you refer to the number of skills you can put in your skill bar or the total number of skills you can choose from? if it's the former, i'd say you don't really need 100+ keybinds to make a good game (see LoL), if it's the latter, i'd more or less agree but it's to be expected to get more as xpacs will come out
-quests will always be quests, this is something that cannot change much no matter the game. main differences though are players are not put in some sort of competition against each other but rather have them work together, also that with the removal of mob tagging which is such trivial detail but helps a lot too.
-moar stats don't always make a greater game, and atm there is no need for more. as for character progression, once again a matter of perspective, if you expected to steamroll everything once you got full ascended/exotics and got yourself your legendary, then obviously you picked the wrong game. gear helps but is not mandatory to clear most of the game content.
-TP being "weird" to you being a con is what seems weird to me.

[Cthulthe]

I never post on mmo-champion but I thought I might give my opinion on GW2, and the reason I havn't logged in to the game for a couple of months. Imma apologize in advance for this long ass, boring post. I've just been thinking alot about vidya gayms and how they're designed lately. I'm not saying that GW2 is flawed. I am just trying to explain why I disagree with certain design choices.

I think that WoW and games that follow the same formula are addicting due to one simple fact; the gear/level treadmill. Blizzard's got some sharp phsycologists. They know just how to get you worked up for that carrot just out of arm's reach, and how to make you repeat the same activity over and over again (dungeon farming, questing etc.) in order to get said carrot. I think that this is the basic business model, and after several years of WoWing I kinda feel cheated. The spell probably still works on me, though, and I bet I'd enjoy the fake-enjoyment of WoW again and again, being the manipunable dumbdumb I am. Sometimes being manipulated is okay!

Before I played WoW, I used to play the HELL out of a game called Star Wars Galaxies (before the notorious NGE patch). It was a sand-boxy type of MMO. You can argue that the combat sucked and the controls were bad, but what made that game VERY special to me was the fact that it relied on player created content rather than developer created content. What I mean by this is that there simply were no tiers of gear, linear leveling, scripted quests/dungeons etc. At launch, the game world, consisting of nine or so VAST and alien planets, was completely devoid of civilization except for cities required by SW lore (Mos Eisley etc). In place was an incredibly fleshed-out system for players and/or guilds to acquire plots of land and start building cities from scratch. No zoning in or out. The player cities were there whether you wanted them to or not. Everything in the game was crafted by players. Weapons, armor, clothing, housing, vehicles etc. Being part of a guild with a thriving city gave crafters the opportunity to set up vendors. Business alliances rose and collapsed. Guilds waged all-out war on each other or tied connections all around the galaxy to strengthen their reputation (no BGs in this game). The game was based around player interactiong without players having an ulterior motive of getting from point A to B gear- or levelwise. I did not hang out with my guild because they could help me get the "top tier gear", but because they were crucial to my social survivability, reputation and safety if I actually wanted to be someone of social importance in the game world. It's mind-blowing how invested people were in their characters.

This is what made SWG so addictive to me, and this is what, in my opinion, games like WoW lack. In it's place is the gear/leveling treadmill. It is a simple A to B grind, but due to it's manipulative nature it can be very addictive.

Now to Guild Wars 2, lol. The game has great production values and is nicely crafted and packaged, but as game I feel that GW2 lacks in both the departments I've talked about. The gear/leveling part has already been discussed to lenght here, so I wont go into that.

The game feels strangely mechanical and static to me. I feel almost a little bit cheated by all the talk of the amazing dynamic events-system. Dynamic events, which in reality are simply branching questlines that repeat infinately no matter the consequences of the previous run-through. This is not a flaw, it is by design. But I recall big talk about innovation and dynamic story-telling. Yet it's the same-old to me. I have always felt that the main purpose of a video game is not to blatantly tell a story, but to get the player actively involved in telling a story without the player feeling forced into or even noticing the transition. Killing X mobs 'til there are no more mobs to get the next cutscene is just lazy game design, in my opinion. This is what I credit games like SWG and EVE online for, even though they might be overly complicated or too hardcore or unfriendly towards casual play (atleast they don't manipulate you with cheap trickery of the mind, like WoW). Intense drama has played/plays out in those games each and every day, without the need of voice actors, cutscenes and A to B questing. I know GW2 never set out to be SWG or EVE online, but the game disappointed me based on the promises during promition nonetheless.