Thinking of buying GW2

[Shaede]

I just don't get it. It doesn't seem like you're having fun if you constantly race for some virtual things. But, if you are not having fun, then why are you playing in the first place? Do you just want to fill your free time with virtual work? I simply don't understand the purpose of it all.

How could you possibly know enough to base assumptions of what anyone else finds fun? Especially when you are pretty much talking about a game that has over 7 million players. So...they all are just doing something they hate?

Your argument also fails to realize that achieving on it's own is fun. So what if the road there (grinding rep or doing dailies) is not fun if at the end when you receive what you were after you feel accomplished? How is grinding out a specific set of dungeon gear in GW2 any different? Oh ..that's right they don't have reputations...rather they just have unique currencies linked to each dungeon. How is that any different?

Why do you think people get titles like 'Loremaster' or 'The Insane'? I doubt they had fun doing every single quest as if it were the holy grail of gaming, and I doubt they had complete bliss grinding all those different reps...However I am pretty confident they feel accomplished and happy when they finally achieve that goal. That's how games work. The way you describe it kind of feels like you are telling us we shouldn't have any goals or anything..we should just run around giggling 'la di da di da' having "fun" because there are pretty colors in front of our face.

[Lane]

I got Loremaster in vanilla WoW, which I personally consider quite an accomplishment.

Also, fun fact, I acquired three Wintersaber mounts before Azeroth flying. One of which I obtained on my druid who didn't have a mount at all, I just used travel form. People claimed that was the worst rep grind in the game (I do not agree). Two I got for myself, one I got for my bf (that shows you how little that 'grind' bothered me).

Collecting used to be fun for me, but that was back before temporary content. GW2 isn't the only one guilty of this. Rift is really what (begrudgingly) 'cured' me of my collections because I simply couldn't keep up with their world events every 6-8 weeks. Not only getting enough currency to buy all the pets & mounts, but also the inevitable RNG ones they threw into the rift events. It was just too much and turned into one of the main reasons I quit (from sheer burnout). I suppose that's why WoW never bothered me, it's all permanent. I can just jump in and continue toward goals whenever I want to without fear of it being removed from the game.

Edit: Most of the time. They did remove the Plagued Protodrake before I could get it.

[Deleted]

Skyrim & Witcher 2 had me thinking the other night. Anywhere you go, you`d hear background voices, birds, mobs & water splashing etc. They`re very immersive.
Months since I`ve played gw2, but I only recall the odd voice or three & nothing from any nearby mobs/critters/deer unless they were fighting.
Does the water even make a sound (or the tree when it falls & no one is near to hear it? ;p)

There is alot of ambient sounds in GW2, even snow falling from trees.

Would be awesome if they could add loud thunder / Heavy rain. Don't know why they dont have that since the snowstorms are quite noticeable

[Ratyrel]

I got Loremaster in vanilla WoW, which I personally consider quite an accomplishment.

Also, fun fact, I acquired three Wintersaber mounts before Azeroth flying. One of which I obtained on my druid who didn't have a mount at all, I just used travel form. People claimed that was the worst rep grind in the game (I do not agree). Two I got for myself, one I got for my bf (that shows you how little that 'grind' bothered me).

Collecting used to be fun for me, but that was back before temporary content. GW2 isn't the only one guilty of this. Rift is really what (begrudgingly) 'cured' me of my collections because I simply couldn't keep up with their world events every 6-8 weeks. Not only getting enough currency to buy all the pets & mounts, but also the inevitable RNG ones they threw into the rift events. It was just too much and turned into one of the main reasons I quit (from sheer burnout). I suppose that's why WoW never bothered me, it's all permanent. I can just jump in and continue toward goals whenever I want to without fear of it being removed from the game.

Edit: Most of the time. They did remove the Plagued Protodrake before I could get it.

I very much agree with your feeling. Temporary content should be recurring and removing content should be a very very rare occurrence in my book. Persistent world and all.

[May90]

I'm somewhere over 3,000 hours /played. :P

As for the rest, I post more about GW2 than I actually play it these days. And, yes, it is inevitable I will be moving onto another game, not only because all reports point to GW2 not having an expansion but also because my bf hates GW2 and we'd like to find an MMO we can play together (something we haven't been successful at for any length of time since I quit WoW).

Well, I think, if you've managed to play this game for 3,000 hours at all, it certainly is a great game for you! I consider any game I've spent more than 200 hours on to be extraordinary great.
I don't think any game you've spent SO much time would interest you much any more, no matter what new content they add.

How could you possibly know enough to base assumptions of what anyone else finds fun? Especially when you are pretty much talking about a game that has over 7 million players. So...they all are just doing something they hate?

I understand I can only say it all from my own perspective. And, yes, I believe a lot of WoW players play despite their boredom and hatred towards the game, that is clearly seen by the amount of toxicity on their official forums and in the game itself. Happy people don't feel any need to shit at what they do.

People don't always do what they like. They often do what they think they like because they have nothing to compare to, but, tell me, would anyone who does what he/she really likes have so much toxicity towards what he/she does as many WoW players do? Now, I'm not talking only about WoW players. SWTOR players, GW2 players, SC2 players - many of them have this angry attitude towards games they play. And, I believe, it is not so much the game as the way one plays it that leads to a certain attitude.

Your argument also fails to realize that achieving on it's own is fun. So what if the road there (grinding rep or doing dailies) is not fun if at the end when you receive what you were after you feel accomplished? How is grinding out a specific set of dungeon gear in GW2 any different? Oh ..that's right they don't have reputations...rather they just have unique currencies linked to each dungeon. How is that any different?

Grinding is the same, whether it be WoW, SWTOR, GW2, LoL, Hearthstone or whatever. The question is, do you want to grind? Yes, you certainly receive something in the end, and it can even be worth it. But do you really want to spend your free time, doing mundane work for 99% of the time, just to have a feeling of satisfaction for the rest 1%? Surely, all people are different, but I prefer to have fun 100% of the time, rather than 1%, and so far I haven't met anyone who would say otherwise.

Why do you think people get titles like 'Loremaster' or 'The Insane'? I doubt they had fun doing every single quest as if it were the holy grail of gaming, and I doubt they had complete bliss grinding all those different reps...However I am pretty confident they feel accomplished and happy when they finally achieve that goal. That's how games work. The way you describe it kind of feels like you are telling us we shouldn't have any goals or anything..we should just run around giggling 'la di da di da' having "fun" because there are pretty colors in front of our face.

Yeah. They feel happy for a few minutes after they've achieved something, and then return to this achieving routine working towards something else in a very boring way again.

You know, I've done all the mission achievements in both SC2 campaigns. But I did them not just for the sake of it. I did that because the goals themselves led to a very interesting gameplay. Destroying 50 buildings in "The Dig" mission was a lot of fun as a process, where I had to figure out what strategy to pick, how to execute it, how to save resources for both defenses of my base and special op group scouting for the buildings locations... I didn't care about the "achievement" itself, it is in my account and I haven't looked at it ever since. But the process of getting it was fun.
Now, in HotS there is an achievement, something like, "Deal a total of 10,000 damage with Kerrigan's ability 'Leviathan'". I didn't even think of getting this achievement, because the process is a dumb grind.

So, I believe, these "achievements" are deception. In the end, you have a lot of hours spent for nothing and a few virtual pieces of something or achievements in your account. It is all fine, until you ask yourself a question: "What is the purpose of it all?". Then you get frustrated and ragequit the game. This happens all over around, and if it hasn't happened to one yet, it will surely happen in a while. Because job with pseudo-reward never ends well. Hell, people ragequit real jobs that give them a lot of real money simply because they get burnt out doing something they don't really like. Imagine how more often it will happen for jobs for which you get nothing real at all!

[Wryn]

I understand I can only say it all from my own perspective. And, yes, I believe a lot of WoW players play despite their boredom and hatred towards the game, that is clearly seen by the amount of toxicity on their official forums and in the game itself. Happy people don't feel any need to shit at what they do.

Very often it's constructive criticism instead of toxicity - I see this a lot in the official GW2 forum, too.

Grinding is the same, whether it be WoW, SWTOR, GW2, LoL, Hearthstone or whatever. The question is, do you want to grind? Yes, you certainly receive something in the end, and it can even be worth it. But do you really want to spend your free time, doing mundane work for 99% of the time, just to have a feeling of satisfaction for the rest 1%? Surely, all people are different, but I prefer to have fun 100% of the time, rather than 1%, and so far I haven't met anyone who would say otherwise.

Do I really want to grind? Yes, mostly. I love getting achievements (in WoW/Rift; don't care much about achievements in GW2) and I also love getting reputations at max.
I do not like the grind in GW2 for legendaries, ascended items and/or crafting items in general. The drop rate for T6 mats is just awful in my opinion, so I don't bother (got artificer to 450 and stopped. Expensive and boring - again: my opinion).
But that doesn't mean I start doing grinding in any game as soon as I am home from work. Sometimes I'm in the mood for digging around in WoW to finish some archaeology sets, but I don't do it, if I don't want although maybe I would get 10 achievement points for it.
And I get a feeling of satisfaction whenever I look what I've done so far in game XY. It makes me happy and never felt mundane. At least I can't remember something that felt mundane to me in the mmo's I play/have played. ^^

Yeah. They feel happy for a few minutes after they've achieved something, and then return to this achieving routine working towards something else in a very boring way again.

No, sorry. There are things I accomplished long time ago, which makes me still happy. Not only a few minutes.

So, I believe, these "achievements" are deception. In the end, you have a lot of hours spent for nothing and a few virtual pieces of something or achievements in your account. It is all fine, until you ask yourself a question: "What is the purpose of it all?". Then you get frustrated and ragequit the game. This happens all over around, and if it hasn't happened to one yet, it will surely happen in a while. Because job with pseudo-reward never ends well. Hell, people ragequit real jobs that give them a lot of real money simply because they get burnt out doing something they don't really like. Imagine how more often it will happen for jobs for which you get nothing real at all!

I have never asked myself "what is the purpose of it all?". But if I do I guess the answer would be: fun.
WoW/Rift/GW2 isn't a job to me - I play often, yes I do. But if I'm not in the mood for grinding, playing, standing around in <insert city here> I don't do it.
So the question never occured to me and probably never will.

[PeachesAndCream]

You shouldn't buy this game if you can't play at a good framerate close to max settings, I tried playing at low settings it really takes away a lot of the experience.

[Ealyssa]

I got Loremaster in vanilla WoW, which I personally consider quite an accomplishment.

Protip : achievement didn't exist in vanilla...

[draykorinee]

Protip : achievement didn't exist in vanilla...

Agreed, bit I'm pretty sure you were able to get loremaster the day achievements arrived ergo she may have done all the quests in vanilla but got the achieve later, i dunno.

[Karizee]

Protip : achievement didn't exist in vanilla...

This amuses me

[Arlee]

heh, the structure is broken, not the rabbit people. I meant the Asura, I just couldn't recall the races name. They sort of look like hairless rabbit people.

I've always thought of them more as hairless mouse people

I very much agree with your feeling. Temporary content should be recurring and removing content should be a very very rare occurrence in my book. Persistent world and all.

I very much disagree with this. I like the world changing and not staying the same. It makes more sense to have something happen and if it was a big enough deal it leaves a mark on the world. Just having the same content happening over and over all the time gets super boring really quick. I don't mind like festivals and stuff happening every year, but I also think changing them a bit year to year is a good thing in the long run. I like that Kessex Hills has been changed because of an event that happened, and it makes sense that we aren't still fighting in the tower. As much as I generally dislike change it is good in MMOs.

[Lane]

Agreed, bit I'm pretty sure you were able to get loremaster the day achievements arrived ergo she may have done all the quests in vanilla but got the achieve later, i dunno.

Yeah, I realized this error later. I meant to say pre-Cataclysm revamp, when 1-60 was still "vanilla". Whenever they added achievements (I honestly don't remember -- edit: it appears it was 10/15/08) I was already most of the way done with Loremaster, so it wasn't that difficult to finish up what was needed. (And, if I recall correctly -- edit: I did :P, there was only one achievement for each continent, it wasn't broken down by zone like it was post-Cataclysm, so figuring out what you missed was interesting. )

I did very little end game in real, pre-BC vanilla, most of my time was spent exploring every corner of the map. I miss those days. Azeroth was so completely fascinating to me even if there were no quests whatsoever I didn't care. Everything was mysterious, and new, and there was no Wowhead or Thottbot at the time so if you killed something you had no idea what it was going to drop, or what any given fishing hole was going to yield.

[Svifnymr]

I've always thought of them more as hairless mouse people

Skritt are hivemind rat people, asura are piranha teethed mouse people.

I very much disagree with this. I like the world changing and not staying the same.(SNIP) As much as I generally dislike change it is good in MMOs.

That's about how I feel too. I let WoW become "work" for me, GW2 is a world to play in. I'm happy that it changes and generally find the refinements they've made to the system to improve the flow.

- - - Updated - - -

There is alot of ambient sounds in GW2, even snow falling from trees.

Would be awesome if they could add loud thunder / Heavy rain. Don't know why they dont have that since the snowstorms are quite noticeable

The game needs more weather. There is thunderlike noises when the champ wurm near Meatoberfest is up.

[Valeron]

The game needs more weather. There is thunderlike noises when the champ wurm near Meatoberfest is up.

definitely. would also like to see the times of day sync'd across all of the zones

[Faustas]

I bought it yesterday...and I love it so much! I got 600+ days played on wow and I felt burned out, was so bored that I wanted to try some other mmo and I got GW2. Playing norn necro. For my surprise I really like gameplay of gw. WoW felt like second job for me, but in gw I feel excided again, so many new things, so much stuff to do and explore, its really fun and good feeling to be a noob again this game looks really good and fun to play, would recommend 10/10

[Gray_Matter]

Leveling isn't hard. However, at level 20 I always ran into a dead spot where I didn't have any new content to level with.

The other players suggested crafting, PvP, and grinding those map events. Crafting was too expensive, I don't like PvP, and grinding is so 2004.

Crafting only gets expensive at the top. You can easily gain 10-20 levels by just doing the first 125 odd levels of each of the crafts.

[Deleted]

The game needs more weather. There is thunderlike noises when the champ wurm near Meatoberfest is up.

Hm have to check that out, love the sound of thunder

definitely. would also like to see the times of day sync'd across all of the zones

Hmmm didnt they do this already? For main servers at least I think.

and bigger difference between night and day would be nice (aka darker nights)

[draykorinee]

I bought it yesterday...and I love it so much! I got 600+ days played on wow and I felt burned out, was so bored that I wanted to try some other mmo and I got GW2. Playing norn necro. For my surprise I really like gameplay of gw. WoW felt like second job for me, but in gw I feel excided again, so many new things, so much stuff to do and explore, its really fun and good feeling to be a noob again this game looks really good and fun to play, would recommend 10/10

It's your first day, give it a month but that initial feeling of a new world and new game really helps, with something like swtor i didn't get that feeling. Unfortunately that feeling aint enough.

[Arlee]

Skritt are hivemind rat people, asura are piranha teethed mouse people.

True!

and bigger difference between night and day would be nice (aka darker nights)

Yes... Like the night you see in that ice fractal would be awesome

[May90]

OK, I finally got to play this game for a few hours. I must say, it is probably RPG with the best first impression I've ever had. Had no idea I would ever say it about MMO, but, yeah, I think, this is the game I've been waiting for since 1998, when I first heard about Ultima Online and had a few ideas in my head about how it could be further improved. Yes, I know, a few hours is nothing, but the last RPG I got such a great first impression of was, I think, Mass Effect back in 2008.

However, I have a few issues that somewhat poison the experience for me. First of all, my FPS is quite low, ~30 with all settings somewhere between low and medium - but, well, that was expected, with such laptop. The game still looks amazing, so it's not really the issue, although I guess WvW will be near unplayable. But I was never really interested in PvP anyway. I had to set shaders on medium which is much worse than on high, but I somewhat negated this difference by tweaking SweetFX appropriately with next to none FPS drop.
Second, and this really bugs me. Camera rotation is SO SLOW!!! I moved the slider to the maximum, and my mouse is also set to the maximum precision, and yet I cannot turn fast enough to really feel free in my controls. I've read a lot of threads, and it seems I'm by far not the only one with this issue. Since there has been a lot of complaints about this since 2012 and nothing has been done yet (and there are no mods fixing this), I guess, I'll just have to get used to it.
Finally, no configuration files? Really? I've always loved editing config files, trying out different tweaks and such. But the whole game is contained in 3 files, and the file including configurations setup (gw2.dat) is over 18 Gb and there is just no way I can tweak it. Well, it is more of a personal preference, but it annoys me a little.

I hated SWTOR, TERA, Rift and Neverwinter from the very first second. I could stand the first few hours in WoW, but then got terribly bored. But never, since Ultima Online, were my first hours so exciting in MMO as this time. I think I know what to play while waiting for Dragon Age 3! :-)