Away 5 years; My impression of GW2 as a MMORPG

I played for about a week with a friend when the game first came out and bought the ultimate edition. I got to the mid teen levels.I liked the game a lot but when my friend didn't want to play anymore I stopped playing, I also got busy with other stuff and stopped playing games for a long time in general.I came back this week, after having been wanting to try playing again for quite a while.

I've played in the past to a significant degree Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Vanguard, City of Heroes/Villains (which is how I heard about guild wars), Tabula Rasa, and Darkfall. I've tried many others, but never actually kept playing them. I never really wanted to play most of the newer MMORPGs. Just grind fests where the game itself isn't that fun. What I liked about Asheron's call was the exploration and open world and somewhat more active combat. With CoH it was the character creation more than anything else. With Vanguard it was the open world, exploration, and crafting, but it was incomplete. With Tabula Rasa it was the very active combat and large scale battle events. AO and DAoC I never liked much.

So far I am enjoying the game for all the reasons I did originally. This is an MMORPG that respects my time and the desired playstyle we want to use to advance. It doesn't feel like it ever forces me to play a certain way, and doesn't feel like it's loaded with timesinks I wish I could just bypass. Because this is my first playthrough, and because I can PvP with everything unlocked at any time, I am in no rush to zip through the storyline content. If anything I'm outleveling this stuff before I can experience it all. However, if I ever did want to skip past the leveling up to get to higher end content, there are lots of ways to speed things up, and it seems starting with different races gives different content to experience.

I like the exploration aspect of guild wars. It's not quite Vanguard or Asheron's Call, but I actually the map system highlighting most of the stuff of interest because it suits more my casual time constraints.The crafting is pretty good. Probably on par with vanguard.The combat is active with lots of movement, aiming, and abilities. I see some similarities with Tabula Rasa.The PvP battles are fun quick engagements. I haven't tried WvW yet but am very interested to. I haven't yet played a game where I though they did PvP really well that wasn't purpose built for it (like darkfall), but so far guild wars is looking good.But more importantly above all else, guild wars isn't a grind. It also doesn't waste my time. It's just mindless fun. It's designed to be very easy for me to just jump in, accomplish some things, and log out. Playing at a more casual level than I use to play games at.

I finally come back and have noticed some changes after getting an engineer to 34 and a thief to 24.

1. . Lots of goodies from birthday packs waiting for me.
2. For some reason my thief and my engineer were deleted and I couldn't recover them via support. So I recreated them
3. A lot less people in Queensdale. This is expected.
4. The people that are there, are generally higher levels scaled down, which makes it unfun to participate in events because they burn through the enemies so quickly compared with you and they are never under threat.
5. It's super easy to get gold level participation in every event. You use to have to work to contribute a lot to get that. Now I never get bronze or silver unless I basically do nothing.
6. No armor repair costs. Which seems an unnecessary change. Gear also seems to get damaged less often.
7. This Money seems easier to come by. You use to have make a choice about if you wanted to spend your coppers on fast travel or save it to buy new gear or repair your gear. Being able to sell my stuff on the market for way more than the vendor will give me may contribute to the feeling that money is easier to come by to the point where it becomes trivial.
8. Good gear at low levels is too easy to come by via purchase on the market for a small amount of money. This trivializes anything you would find in a lot of cases. It also gives you no reason to buy from NPC vendors or make your own. This might contribute to a sense of power creep at lower levels as well.
9. They nerfed my turrets. It really takes the wind out of their fun and usefulness when I can't activate their overcharge manually, or more than one during their lifetime. It is counter-intuitive to the design of a turret to make me break it down and wait to cast it for another overcharge. They are designed to stick around and be taken care of.

10. I am disappointed they took away the backpacks on engineer kits, without giving me the option to at least keep them. Especially at lower levels when I have nothing else that looks good to wear on the back.

    It took before level 34 before I finally ran into something I hate about the game. The "not so secret" jump puzzle was a giant waste of time and infuriatingly difficult. I looked at a video of how it was done and decided to stop wasting further time after having already wasted 2 hours. I can understand why the video was full of references to wanting to shoot the designer. You've taken a game that has clunky imprecise control and then punish people for not executing with perfection a jump by making them start all over. A tremednous waste of time that goes against the spirit of GW2 as doing everything possible to grant convenience to the player and respect their time.

@"Rise.8259" said:

6. No armor repair costs. Which seems an unnecessary change. Gear also seems to get damaged less often.

Gear is damaged exactly as often as when the game opened: every time you are defeated by a foe. (Plus a few special effects.) If you're seeing your gear damaged less often, that's because you're being defeated less often.

And the removal of armour repair costs was actually a good thing. One of the problems with the level scaling is that "hard" stuff like open-world bosses kills you just as dead when you're level 80 in a level 8 sub-map as it kills a level 8 character, but it costs you many times more to repair your armour as it does for that level 8 to repair his. The consequence was that high-level characters were tending to avoid low-level areas unless they were on a champion train zerging the zone to death. So they did the sane thing: many times zero is zero. (Leaving amour repair as a thing, though, is debatable. Up for grabs: what does it add to have armour getting damaged if it is free to repair it? Answers on a postcard.)

It took before level 34 before I finally ran into something I hate about the game. The "not so secret" jump puzzle was a giant waste of time and infuriatingly difficult. I looked at a video of how it was done and decided to stop wasting further time after having already wasted 2 hours. I can understand why the video was full of references to wanting to shoot the designer. You've taken a game that has clunky imprecise control and then punish people for not executing with perfection a jump by making them start all over. A tremednous waste of time that goes against the spirit of GW2 as doing everything possible to grant convenience to the player and respect their time.

I agree that NSS is frustratingly difficult, but...

Jumping control in GW2 isn't perfect, but it's less clunky and imprecise than you make it sound. Jumping control in SWTOR is infinitely worse. And if you want more precise control (it's useful in other JPs as well, except Portmatt's Lab) and you have Heart of Thorns, crank that thief to level 80 and take the Daredevil elite spec. It gives you access to a martial-arts style melee "hitting stick" mode for the Staff, and skill 5 is a manually aimed leap that you can use to tightly control where you go.(1) (It's also about twice as long as a normal "hit space" jump.)

And you only need to do it twice: once for the list-of-JPs achievement and once for the Master Diver achievement. Sorry. What I mean is that it is never the "Daily Jumping Puzzle", and there's nothing to be gained by doing it more than once in each mode for any other reason.

(1) Notably: the row of pipes once you get inside just at the beginning, before you get onto the main deck of the airship, and jumping down onto the pillar as you leave the airship's deck, but there are others later on, especially in the diving-goggles path.

It took before level 34 before I finally ran into something I hate about the game. The "not so secret" jump puzzle was a giant waste of time and infuriatingly difficult. I looked at a video of how it was done and decided to stop wasting further time after having already wasted 2 hours. I can understand why the video was full of references to wanting to shoot the designer. You've taken a game that has clunky imprecise control and then punish people for not executing with perfection a jump by making them start all over. A tremednous waste of time that goes against the spirit of GW2 as doing everything possible to grant convenience to the player and respect their time.

Okay, so... I get the frustration over this JP in particular... but "clunky, imprecise control" is far from accurate. This game has some of the most accurate and precise jumping of any MMO I have ever played, and there have been many. If you think this is bad, I pray you never have to get some of the holocrons in SW:ToR, or never try to climb literally anything in ESO. Not So Secret itself is fairly poorly designed from a JP perspective, with it never really being entirely clear where you're supposed to go and how you're supposed to get there (and the fact that there are ways to get to those places that are harder than others and require climbing on things that aren't actually platforms... because they're actually the wrong places to climb). It's not the only one either, Chalice of Tears takes the cake for worst JP my quite a bit, in fact, and THAT one has checkpoints.

Most of the JPs, on the other hand, have easy to follow paths with relatively straight forward jumping (The only difficulty being the variation between max distance jumps and short distance jumps in quick succession). It's worth noting that your character model size, and character race can effect how easy these puzzles are. The only time I ever believed the jumping to be "Imprecise" was playing as a charr cause their 4-legged run/jump makes it difficult to determine what part of the animation is under their feet when you land. As an asura I sped through most of the jump puzzles due to limited camera angle clipping because of small model size.

It's also important to note that jumping puzzles are mostly infuriatingly tough right until you learn the controls, so in a way they are a necessary step in learning the game's mechanics. Learn to jump at all, and you'll find both general movement and jumping puzzles much easier.

Lol, I don't mind JPs even if they take forever. I was actually in quite a similar situation as you OP. I pre-ordered the game, played a bit during the headstart, got a character to level 7, and then completely stopped playing the game until a few months ago. When I came back, once I reached Lion's Arch for the first time I decided I was going to do all 3 JPs in Lion's Arch before I continued the story. As an ele. No mounts, no gliding, and no mesmer portals. I tried to do Troll's Revenge first, and it literally took me around 5 hours to finish it. It's funny how even if you can get 3 out of 4 of the keys necessary to finish the JP, you start all the way from the beginning if you fall. Now I'm level 80 with 35 mastery points, but Troll's Revenge is still by far the hardest/longest JP I've done so far. I'm still going to do every single JP in the game though because I'm a bit of a completionist and I sort of like platforming.

@"jcH.7109" said:Lol, I don't mind JPs even if they take forever. I was actually in quite a similar situation as you OP. I pre-ordered the game, played a bit during the headstart, got a character to level 7, and then completely stopped playing the game until a few months ago. When I came back, once I reached Lion's Arch for the first time I decided I was going to do all 3 JPs in Lion's Arch before I continued the story. As an ele. No mounts, no gliding, and no mesmer portals. I tried to do Troll's Revenge first, and it literally took me around 5 hours to finish it. It's funny how even if you can get 3 out of 4 of the keys necessary to finish the JP, you start all the way from the beginning if you fall. Now I'm level 80 with 35 mastery points, but Troll's Revenge is still by far the hardest/longest JP I've done so far. I'm still going to do every single JP in the game though because I'm a bit of a completionist and I sort of like platforming.

My first experience with Troll's Revenge was similar, and then I was immediately disheartened by watching someone speed through the entire JP without mistakes in 15 minutes.... After that I learned some shortcuts involving classes with access to leaping gap closer skills, particularly ground targeted ones (it was still before gliding was implemented in Central Tyria). So while I'll probably never be able to do the whole thing the "proper" way from start to finish, the short-cuts without gliding were still enough to make it completable for me in about the same 15 minute time period. Now with griffon if I really feel like it I can do the whole thing in less than five, but that still takes the fun out of it a little.

@Steve The Cynic.3217 said:

@"Rise.8259" said:

6. No armor repair costs. Which seems an unnecessary change. Gear also seems to get damaged less often.

There is one other possibility. Getting ress'ed by someone with the Noblesse Oblige mastery will fully repair armor as well.

Jumping control in GW2 isn't perfect, but it's less clunky and imprecise than you make it sound. Jumping control in SWTOR is infinitely worse. And if you want more precise control (it's useful in other JPs as well, except Portmatt's Lab) and you have Heart of Thorns, crank that thief to level 80 and take the Daredevil elite spec. It gives you access to a martial-arts style melee "hitting stick" mode for the Staff, and skill 5 is a manually aimed leap that you can use to tightly control where you go.(1) (It's also about twice as long as a normal "hit space" jump.)

Engi with a rifle has a similar skill. Also available on the Experimental Rifle consumable, long CD and you need to be more careful with line of sight ...

Its probably one of the few jumping puzzles I truly hate too. Never had the patience to finish it after finishing all the others.

@Khisanth.2948 said:

@Steve The Cynic.3217 said:

@"Rise.8259" said:

6. No armor repair costs. Which seems an unnecessary change. Gear also seems to get damaged less often.

Yes, I forgot about that. Thanks.

Jumping control in GW2 isn't perfect, but it's less clunky and imprecise than you make it sound. Jumping control in SWTOR is infinitely worse. And if you want more precise control (it's useful in other JPs as well, except Portmatt's Lab) and you have Heart of Thorns, crank that thief to level 80 and take the Daredevil elite spec. It gives you access to a martial-arts style melee "hitting stick" mode for the Staff, and skill 5 is a manually aimed leap that you can use to tightly control where you go.(1) (It's also about twice as long as a normal "hit space" jump.)

Correct, and Dragonhunter's "Wings of Resolve" (second virtue class mechanic) does this as well when activated..

BUT.

Vault (Daredevil Staff 5) has essentially no cooldown unless you run out of initiative, and even then it's way less than the 18 or30 seconds for the alternatives.

Most of the commonly cited "difficult" jumping puzzles are usually because of difficulty in reading terrain. This even extends to the newer ones, which for the most part are better designed, as theres also sections in nearly every JP where its not 100% clear if you can reach a ledge or not, or if that slope you're aiming for has traction or not. Older JPs also made frequent use of tight spaces to mess with the Camera, and that practice was kind of unforgivable. Especially when you realize First Person view and Cam alignment settings wasn't around when the game launched.

Some JPs are also a lot easier with movement speed buffs, and not all classes used that equally in Core. But some JPs are harder with movement buffs; and things like small ledges or platforms smaller then you are more difficult to aim for. But out of everything, I know for sure the one thing that gets the most people frustrated is "set backs" that require 3 or more steps to reach the retry point. Theres a design principle in Platforming games where "iteration speed" has to be carefully measured in places where players tend to have high failure rates. If there are too many steps, takes too long, or is on the back end of a marathon, between the player and the difficult spot, players will lose focus and likely forgot some detail they learned on their last run. Time pressure obviously compounds this.

This is why careful placement of check points and safety nets are a big deal to platformers. After a difficult section, you don't want players to too easily fall and have to redo it just to get back to where they were. Not all JPs do this right. And a few of them have difficult sections that the designer didn't think was difficult during play testing. Despite how difficult the Trolls Revenge JP in LA is, there was an extremely high level of effort put into making sure that it reads well, and falling in most places won't set you back too far. Although, I actually find it harder to do now, because Gliding majorly changed how I perceive distance and reading gaps..... and have tried to glide in places where its obviously disabled.

NSS's biggest point of frustration is the long set back distance, and high probably of death by falling damage (forcing a complete restart).

Not so secret used to have much more precise controls when it was first released. Particularly with the forward launch pads (cogs). They never used to overshoot you, just launch you the exact correct distance. Now they always overshoot and you have to either position your camera to launch into a wall, or switch weps to stop your jump.

I guess something changed in the games coding which affected this in the 5 years its been out. I wish they would go and fix it slightly so its less frustrating.

Jump controls in the game is generally pretty good.

But all the jump pads in NSS is truly kitten kitten kitten! Especially if going after the Diving Gogles.

First of all thanks for the review. I thought it was pretty good over all.

The only real comment I have is about the Not So Secret Jumping puzzle. This is a hard puzzle to solo, but a great puzzle to do with a group of friends, particularly if you have two or three mesmers in that group. We've done it as a guild and it was a blast.

Not everything in the game needs to be soloable or easily soloable, it is an MMO after all. And some puzzles, not many but some, are much better with friends.

I agree that Not So Secret is a pain, but take some friends (preferably mesmers!) along and you can have a good laugh while falling. The friend who helped me out with it (the best mesmer in the world, I swear) ressed me and dropped portals for me so many times... Took us 2h but I got the diving goggles in the end \o/2h even though both of us were dropping all our alacrity skills on his mesmer so the portal cooldown would go faster xD Still a good laugh

@"Sojourner.4621" said:but "clunky, imprecise control" is far from accurate. This game has some of the most accurate and precise jumping of any MMO I have ever played, and there have been many.

Being the best of the loser's camp doesn't really justify it. Yeah it's good for a MMORPG, but that still means it's 2/10-avoid-at-all-costs terrible. It's The Slaughtering Grounds levels of bad. Even if it is far better than other MMOs.

I don't think you can decide whether or not it's a grind until you have your ascended armor or go for a legendary. Certainly level 34 is no indication. You can hit 34 in an afternoon.

Not So Secret is HATEFULDo not judge the game by it, I would say it's out of the GW2 difficulty standard

Tip: for Jumping Puzzles, be sure to equip a skill (or trait) that grants permanent movement speed bonus, almost all classes have one utility doing that - it helps immensely as you will gain additional jumping distance

@Carighan.6758 said:

@"Sojourner.4621" said:but "clunky, imprecise control" is far from accurate. This game has some of the most accurate and precise jumping of any MMO I have ever played, and there have been many.

That was my impression as well, comparing it's controls to other games that require similar levels of jumping skill yet give you far more fluid and predictable control.

Other MMORPGs, at least the ones I have played, never required you to use their dodgy control scheme to perform precise acrobatic feats. Asheron's Call had some basic jumping in some dungeons, but I don't remember jumping being a necessary quest component of any of the others.

However, the one unforgiveable aspect of it's design would be giving the player no way of saving their progress along the way, but continuing to force them to keep rejumping over the same material they already conquered as they struggle to learn the new material.

@Rise.8259 said:

@Carighan.6758 said:

@"Sojourner.4621" said:but "clunky, imprecise control" is far from accurate. This game has some of the most accurate and precise jumping of any MMO I have ever played, and there have been many.

With certain classes (Mesmer portals), or with certain items (Prototype Position Rewinder), you CAN save your progress along the way... Also, as I said, the 2/10 is HIGHLY inaccurate. The jumping in this is actually incredibly precise, though often times the HITBOX for what you are jumping ON is not. You have in air control and direct control over exactly where you are land... In what universe don't you? Are you somehow using keyboard turning instead of mouse look to complete JPs?

I am unsure why so many of you latched on to whining about how you think the jumping puzzles aren't crap when that was actually an insignificant footnote in my post which really covered more general impressions about the game.

Yeah. It dors kind of beg the question.

If armor repair is free, why does armor get damaged. Just cut out the middle man, no point in having an annoyance for the sake of having an annoyance

@Magek.4718 said:Yeah. It dors kind of beg the question.

If armor repair is free, why does armor get damaged. Just cut out the middle man, no point in having an annoyance for the sake of having an annoyance

Exactly. Why even bother.And those free armor repair kits I got somehow? Pointless waste of inventory space.

It also removes a potential money sink from the economy that keeps it flowing. Although with gold to gem conversion that may not be as necessary as it once was.

@Rise.8259 said:What I liked about Asheron's call was the exploration and open world and somewhat more active combat.

I miss that game. Just had to say that. :)

@Steve The Cynic.3217 said:Jumping control in GW2 isn't perfect, but it's less clunky and imprecise than you make it sound. Jumping control in SWTOR is infinitely worse.

QFT. I did enjoy the SWTOR jumping stuff as well, but those controls are definitely worse than here. I sometimes wonder if these imprecisions are a limitation of the engine or part of the design to add extra challenge. On the other hand, GW2 has far more insane jumping puzzles with jumps that are completely counter-intuitive or extremely tricky to make. So you could say that SWTOR doesn't need more sophisticated controls perhaps by comparison.

The one thing that freaks me out in GW2 in JPs is that sometimes when I move in a direction the game seems to think I'm double clicking to dodge and that unexpected roll off the tiny platform you're on can really ruin my day lol. (I have fear of heights which also affects me in game so JPs are quite a challenge for me).

@Gehenna.3625 said:

@Steve The Cynic.3217 said:Jumping control in GW2 isn't perfect, but it's less clunky and imprecise than you make it sound. Jumping control in SWTOR is infinitely worse.

I feel the same - I wish there could be an option to disable dodging altogether in JPs