Kathkere.3068

I played through the original story back in 2013 on my first character, and I was initially positive but started caring less towards the end. Zhaitan wasn't a very interesting villain. Even so, since then I've actually completed the story two more times, and I'm on my way to beat it a fourth time. Why? Well, I think GW2 has a decent enough start. The quests related to the character creation feel meaningful, and the way the story branches makes it feel like you have some manner of agency. It's the only time the story allows for minute levels of roleplay. I've tried to play through the story of the expansions and I got maybe halfway through Heart of Thorns, and it's not necessarily the story that is bad -- but the characters you're forced to be friends with and the complete lack of any meaningful agency, that is what is so bad. I enjoyed exploring the Verdant Brink and learning of the various things you encounter in the world, but I absolutely detested the Living World Story. ... I also find the name to be in complete contradiction of itself. "Living World". It may have been a Living World back in 2013-2014, but now it is wholly an instanced world where you won't encounter any other players unless you happen to bring them along (and they'll only be along as spectators, being completely ignored by the unfolding events). I firmly believe that this is not the way to tell stories in MMORPGs! Even if it has become a norm for the genre since ~2012. It feels like the way ArenaNet has chosen to tell their story actively diminishes the world they've built. Consider mounts. Mounts in GW2 are great, especially when compared to the archaic mounts of World of Warcraft. Yet the manner in which you unlock your mount was likely far more meaningful in original World of Warcraft than it was in GW2. Getting enough gold to afford a mount was a struggle in and of itself, and there was no quest telling you to do it. You yourself wanted to do it. You had likely seen other players on mounts, and maybe you had seen the mount vendors with various mounts on display and thought "ooh, I'd love to have that Timber Wolf!". In GW2 you unlock your first mount by doing a Living World quest. As I wrote above, I've not completed HoT yet ... so I skipped through the story and just hopped into the Path of Fire and did the first story mission, utterly confused to what was going on for the sole purpose of unlocking my mount. I did not really have a choice either, I could only get the raptor and if I wanted some other skin I would have to visit the non-diegetic in-game store. Imagine, instead, if when Path of Fire launched ArenaNet planted some mount vendors in various places on the map. Maybe they would allow us a bit more freedom with our first mount -- maybe we could pick between a raptor or a roadrunner (one of the skins you can buy) or something else. I don't begrudge ArenaNet for wanting to sell some unique stuff on their cash shop, but they could have offered some choice to the player. They could have combined this with the world -- like the Charr selling raptors and some other race selling roadrunners (forgive the complete brainstorm). Anyways, this post is getting long enough and in my experience people tend not to read long posts, so I'll stop myself here. It has been an interesting and fun topic to read.

I second this. I'm currently still maining Mirage on my Mesmer but I'm interested in the playstyle of Virtuoso. But the permanent daggers floating in the air really kills it for me. Have it be shown in combat only or when we have our weapons drawn, please!

On this we agree! My friends have told me as much as well. I'm just not accustomed to kicking people. I don't like having to do it, but that's a personal problem and a threshold I have to learn to cross. I just lament having to cross it in the first place. As for whining on the forums... I feel like that's what forums are for, partly? If you check my history you'll see that I haven't been whining that much at all, but when I read the original post (and the responses) in this thread I felt like I wanted to share my experience as someone who's been in a similar situation. But for story dungeons you rarely even need a full group, do you? When I ran Honour of the Waves we were just 3; two at max level and me trotting along at level 70-something as best I could. The group was advertised towards beginners, which is why I joined it, but the two players weren't communicative at all. They said "GJ" at the end and that was pretty much it. I've not actually done any of the paths, might be that they are more difficult and that they actually require full groups. I still don't think it's a valid defense to say that "people don't want to waste their own time, ergo it's okay for them to join groups that are clearly not advertised towards them". But you are right, I should be more liberal with kicking people I don't think respect what I'm requesting.

I think I've answered this already. I don't mind waiting. Saying that it is impossible to find a group of newcomers / relaxed players is hyperbolic and something that I've already proven false in my first post in this thread. I have had two good dungeon runs with chill teams consisting of primarily new players. The answer to your question whether I want a group fast or if I want to wait to play with the people I'm advertising for and should be obvious. No I don't. You're drawing very strange conclusions. I'll refer back to the anecdote I've brought up several times already -- in my first successful group we were 4 new players and one veteran, and she did not rush. She allowed us to take charge and was very communicative without spoiling every little thing on the way. So no, I do not group veterans with people who rush. Why? Why can't people just read the bloody advertisement? You yourself have expressed frustration over the fact that people don't read what experienced players tells them. Well, I have that exact same frustration. If only people could bother to read, eh? I have not been avoiding that part. One reason to run the dungeons is for the story content they contain. That's not something a veteran is going to care much about because the story is also ancient, but it's new to new people. You can experience the story by running with "rush groups", but it is way more fun to run with others who are also new. I'm repeating a point I made earlier, but finding those people is made a lot more difficult when people don't respect the advertisement message. Nice chest-thumping. You do realize I'm not the original poster, right? I shared my experience, and after having read the responses I generated I am no longer surprised why I had such a difficult time finding decent groups. Not that it really matters -- my goal was to run each dungeon once for the story and I have done so now. I've merely continued the debate for the sake of principle. I would not have thought it so hard to convince others that disrespecting what a group is requesting is a bad thing.

I never said that. I said that there's more room for ambiguity. Someone might have played the game for a month and be better at it than someone who has been playing for years. "New" players and "bad" players are often conflated, unfairly so. I also don't think a player should be condemned for being inexperienced, but I definitely agree that it is poor behaviour to not listen when experienced players give advice. People have mixed interests. The vast majority, I'm sure, are just playing these dungeons to get their rewards. They don't play them for the experience -- the dungeon itself. When I returned to the game I wanted to experience the dungeons as I had never done them in the past. As such I wanted to play with people who weren't driven by rewards. I may not have done many dungeons in this game but I have played dungeons in other games and it's the same story wherever you go. I actively try to avoid these "normal" people by making advetisements that should dissuade experienced players, but it doesn't seem to work all that well in Guild Wars 2. Maybe because people can just join with the click of a button.

I'm not defending those players, although I do believe that there's more room for ambiguity in your case than there is in mine. When it comes to dungeons I have not seen anyone advertise towards experienced players (not saying it doesn't happen, just that I haven't seen it). The usual advertisements consists of simple esoteric phrases, such as "Story" for simple story mode or "P1/P2/P3" for the various paths. I've never seen someone advertise "P1 experienced players only". Also, when is a new player no longer new? Everyone will be new to this type of content, no one steps into it with pre-existing experience. And this is a universal problem for modern MMOs -- World of Warcraft, for instance, is notorious for its toxic playerbase when it comes to the treatment of new players and the non-existent tolerance for mistakes. At least in GW2 this problem could be alleviated quite easily if people simply read the advertisements and respected what was requested. If you just want to get the dungeon done for the day then don't join a group that is asking for a relaxed/chill group. You may think that chill refers to simply running the dungeon without problems, and that could be considered chill from a certain point of view but for a new or inexperienced player these quick runs are naught but stressful, and it is not fun. And this is just toxic behaviour. It's blatantly disrespectful. If you infringe on other peoples' enjoyment for the sake of your own convenience then you're selfish. Again, I don't mind that experienced players join my groups even when I advertise towards players similar to me, so long as the experienced player is respectful and consider the fact that it is the first time I run the dungeon. Such players exist, but it's harder to find them when so many people don't give a kitten about the recruitment message because they just want to get their dailies done (or w/e other reason they have to keep grinding dungeons).

No. One person asked "go?" and when I told them I'd rather wait for a full group they started regardless. I didn't leave immediately. I actually tried to engage them in conversation but neither of them said a word back. That is why I left. It's not like I let them down -- they didn't need me, they were max level and I was level 45 or something. Why they decided to join my group I can't say. Respect what people do, you say. So when I write an elaborate message for the ideal recruit and people kitten on that, I should respect them? If this is the mentality that permeate the game then I can understand why it's hard to find nice people to play with in dungeons. I think we have very different definitions of what "chill" means.

Let's pretend there are two groups listed for a dungeon. Group A is advertised as: "Story". Group B is advertised as: "First time running story mode so looking for chill people to experience it with!" If you are a max level player who wants to run the dungeon as fast as possible then which group do you join? The answer is Group A. Now let's pretend that Group A doesn't exist. What do you do? Do you join group B? The answer should be a clear no. You make your own damned group and advertise it as "Story". You don't have to join the group that is explicitly looking for people to experience the story with unless you're also willing to take things slower in order to help them get a decent experience. It is not "domination" on the part of the recruiter, it is bloody common decency on the part of the potential recruit. If you disagree then work me through your logic. What would you suggest a newcomer should do if they want to experience the dungeon? Invent a time machine and go back to 2012?

What are you even on about. I can't comprehend how you came to that conclusion. When I create groups I do so by explicitly stating the goal of the run. I advertise to new people, ideally level appropriate, but I do welcome anyone so long as they're chill. In that one run where we got a max level to join us, she certainly didn't have a problem to follow our pace in spite of being max level.

I'm not exactly a new player. I started playing at the beginning of 2013 but in my first journey to max level I didn't run a single dungeon. Then I've had an on-and-off relationship with GW2 and over the years I've ran like 2-3 dungeons. I returned in november last year and I decided to level a new character and experience all the story dungeons that I had previously missed, and my experience has been... mixed. First of all: joining a group that just says "story" is a recipe for disaster if you want chill gameplay and experience the story. People will rush and there's not much you can do about that. My first two dungeon groups were advertised as such and both were disappointing, so I decided to create my own groups with a more elaborate message, highlighting the fact that I was looking for people either new or chill. First time around was great, I got into a group where 4 of us had never done it before and one player that was at max level. But she played a healer and simply backed us up, letting us discover the place, and she was invested in the lore and had something to comment about everything. Remarkable success, I'd say! The second time around... not so much. I created an elaborate message and two people soon joined. One of them didn't even say hi. The other one did say hi, shortly followed by "go?". I told them that I wanted to wait for a full group but they entered all the same. So after a while I told them I'd hop out as they weren't the players I was looking for, and that I probably wasn't the player they were looking for either. Only... when I quit the group I saw that my group was still listed with my recruitment message. It made me upset, to be honest. Those people were not new to the game and they were not chill in the slightest. And this was largely my experience on the way to max level. I found two nice groups in total, even when I had elaborate messages. The last dungeon I ran someone else had a message that read like this: "Story Beginners Welcome". I joined that group and found a couple of anti-social people who knew the dungeon in and out and just rushed through it. So even when you are deliberately looking for relaxed people it can still be a struggle and I don't get it. Why do people insist on joining groups that are advertised towards chill people when all they want to do is "go go go" and rush through the content? /rant

I think ArenaNet keeps a finger on the pulse of what its main competitors are up to. Would this change have happened if Blizzard didn't begin to retroactively "clean" their games? We have no way of knowing, but Blizzard certainly brought attention to a perceived issue and it is not unreasonable to draw the conclusion that what's being going on in that company caused the domino effect that made ArenaNet take this decision. Or maybe ArenaNet would have taken this decision regardless -- but why? Has there been enough complaints to warrant a change such as this? I genuinely don't know as I haven't frequented these forums enough over the years. Regardless of what the truth is I think ArenaNet made a good decision here. It's a small change with no long-term impact and nothing was lost.

I can certainly understand the perspective of how "this is a trend" if we're looking at the industry as a whole. I find it extremely silly that Blizzard felt the need to cover up Jaina's portrait in Hearthstone, and I actually think that that sort of retroactive "fixing" sends the wrong message. With that said, I've never really been a fan of overly skimpy outfits in roleplaying games. If I play a warrior I want them to look the part regardless of gender. My female warriors don't need to have an exposed abdomen and cleavage. I've always viewed that as something immersion breaking. For medium armor and light armor I'm more forgiving, and as a fashion choice I think an exposed midrift can look quite cool! But Guild Wars 2 does go a bit overboard, or perhaps take too many creative liberties with certain outfits. Many outfits, I feel, are completely ruined for female characters due to "over-skimpification" (example: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sneakthief_armor). So all-in-all, I much approve of the changes to the starting armor for light armor users.

I agree with this. I love the idea of visual progress of an area but they went overboard with the redesign of Lion's Arch. I think the old Lion's Arch looked much more interesting and was more interesting to explore than this new themepark, as you aptly call it. I don't think there's anything that can be done about it now, though. Damage has been done and now we have to live with it. A retcon or an instanced pocket dimension wouldn't be very satisfying in my view.

I'll bandwagon on your thread and share some of my thoughts as a returning player as well! I do share some of your grievances. Particlarly about the amount of crafting materials. It has always bothered me and it kept me from even trying to engage in crafting. Last time I played I did actually level a profession to max level but it felt like I had to look every ingredient up on the GW2 wiki. I don't think the crafting system is good in that respect. I don't really feel as though it's intuitive. But I can live with it! My #1 grievance in this game has to do with keybinds. First of all, I dislike that I can't move the abilities around on my weapons, although I understand why it is this way and I could forgive it... but I can't forgive that they do not allow you to have separate keybinds for different characters. Especially considering how different classes "F1" abilities can be! I used to main a guardian and my keybinds wholly revolves around that character and specialization. I am now levelling a mesmer and I've not wanted to adapt the keybinds yet in case I want to play my guardian again. So I am playing worse than I would have, had I been allowed to change the bindings without affecting my guardian. I also feel like there's a lot of clutter in the game. This may largely be a L2P issue, but as someone uninitiated it can be very hard to understand what's going on. In World of Warcraft the classes and what they can do is quite intuitive, and you will learn early on the "main dangers" of the classes. A mage's frost nova, a warrior's charge, a rogue's stealth etc. In GW2 it feels like most classes can gain access to most things through specializations and utilities. What a class can and can't do there's no way to intuit when you're relatively new to the game, although I'm sure veterans will be able to distinguish what someone can do based on their choice of weapons and passive buffs. My point is: the skill floor is incredibly high in this game. Much more so than other games, I'd say. With this all said, there are many things I really like about GW2. Things that, when I play other MMORPGs, I often think "why couldn't these games do these things like GW2 does?". For example, the horizontal scaling in pvp. It is fantastic. GW2s approach to expansions is also fantastic. The overall flow of the game -- traversing the world and exploring new places -- it's great! But I think I would actually have preferred a "dumber" design when it comes to crafting and combat. I prefer the "easy to learn, difficult to master" approach. I don't think GW2 is easy to learn.

"Butt capes/flaps are awesome and I would wear one in real life if I hadn't stood out from the crowd so much doing so.Admittedly, there are a lot of them..! (not irl, but in the game)" - Myself, 2020. Source: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/73181-what-would-it-take-to-remove-buttcapes/?tab=comments#comment-1147530

Why would you feel "inferior" for liking the story? I'm sure one can criticize the story of GW2 objectively through one narrative theory or other, but at the end of the day if you get enjoyment from the story then that enjoyment is legitimate.

I'm not one to race towards a goal either and I too like to stop and smell the roses, but you are correct in that people are different. Personally I need a reason to talk to people, else I won't. Which is why the design of GW2's content made me talk to absolutely no one aside from the people I already knew going into the game. It gets kinda awkward whenever you try to strike a conversation with a stranger as you don't really have anything to talk about. When I tried Classic World of Warcraft I was afraid that all talk about the social nature of early WoW had been hyperbolic and that we, as a playerbase, had since moved far beyond that. But in my experience with Classic World of Warcraft I did actually start talking more to others. Communication became a lot more relaxed, in comparison to modern MMORPGs. SWTOR was also different. There's a quote from a developer Q&A of SWTOR from before the game was released and it's a quote I really like. They were asked if PVP content was going to be cross server, to which the developers responded: No. We believe that fostering rivalries and memorable encounters with recognizable players are important in building a good PvP community on a server. We suspect cross-server queuing compromises these key tenets.(source: http://www.swtor.com/info/news/news-article/20110916) I liked that answer when I first read it but I liked it even more over time as it proved to be absolutely true. In World of Warcraft, rivalries would spark in World PVP as that is where you would find and fight familiar faces (and these encounters would often trigger banter on the online forums from the participants). In contrast, in the instanced battlegrounds you would be grouped up with a bunch of strangers taken from an enormous pool of players, and among those who spoke they were mostly toxic. I never befriended anyone in all my years playing instanced PVP in World of Warcraft. Meanwhile, in SWTOR, I made friendships that still lasts to this day even though we don't play together. It wasn't necessarily that I was speaking during a game of PVP, but I proved to be a solid player and I wasn't toxic. Similarly minded people would band together over time. It was truly a wonderful experience, and it would never had happened had SWTOR had cross server PVP. I envy you for finding GW2 to be a platform that makes socialization easy! That has not been my experience in the slightest, unfortunately.

Very relatable post. I started playing in early 2013 and I levelled my first character to max level. Then interest kind of fizzled out as I didn't really know what to do and the people I played with moved back to older MMOs. Then I would return around the beginning of the living world and I truly enjoyed the living world at first, but I was always very alone and the game itself did not really encourage communication, and I'm not one to blindly join a random guild in the hopes of making friends. People might argue that this is a personal problem, and it is, but I think it's worth looking at what early WoW (and Classic WoW), as well as what SWTOR did that caused people to actively talk to strangers in the game. In early WoW and in SWTOR I never had to apply to a guild, I was always invited by people I got to know by playing with them first. But I digress. I returned to GW2 again for about one-two months ago with the intent of actually learning sPvP. When I went from WoW to SWTOR the familiarity of the game mechanics made it easy for me to pick up on how to play SWTOR and, as such, I was good at it from the get-go. This was not the case in GW2. Whenever I tried I felt bombarded with information and I couldn't tell why I was dying. I was a complete and utter scrub and the learning curve seemed too daunting, so I kind of gave up on trying. What's different this time around is that I've accepted the fact that I am a scrub, and so I've managed to enjoy sPvP. I've climbed from the bottom of silver up to bottom of gold, which feels like a personal achievement. However, other areas of the game still eludes me. I managed to finally level up a crafting profession to 500 and I found the whole experience to be unnecessarily complicated. There are a billion different resources in GW2 and I don't think it's indicative of good game design if you have to /wiki every single one of them to know what they do. The same goes with currencies... so many currencies. So yeah... I'm having fun with sPvP right now and I hope it'll last... because the MMORPG-scene right now is really, really dry. :(

Butt capes/flaps are awesome and I would wear one in real life if I hadn't stood out from the crowd so much doing so.Admittedly, there are a lot of them..! (not irl, but in the game)

My issue with the hammer is that it feels so clunky. Including the Symbol of Protection into the weapon chain feels off. Skill 5 feels extremely gimmicky and could easily be replaced by something else. In my opinion, what I would like to see is:1: a weapon chain that has a consistent attack timer on all 3 attacks. Remove the Symbol of Protection.2: Remove skill 5 entirely and replace it by a ranged ability (900 range perhaps) that spawns a Symbol of Protection in addition to doing something else, be it AoE damage or incur a 1 second daze to the targets struck or something. Imagine a Thor-like animation, raising the hammer and calling down wrath from the sky. Although number 5 could pretty much be anything and I'd be satisfied, I was just playing let's pretend with my wishes. As long as the weapon chain remains the way it is I don't think I'll ever be able to enjoy 2H Hammer. It's just too clunky.

It would be nice if you could have more than one character tab open. I find it very bothersome that you have to swap tab when you fiddle with your spec if you want to see how certain talents affects your stats. Having everything be in one window is a bit cumbersome!

That's fair, but personally it's not my cup of tea. Also, I was speaking in broader, more general terms when it comes to narrative power creep in MMORPGs. I disagree that you need a doomsday plot to keep things interesting, though I'll concede that a different path might be too late/not feasible for GW2. The problem is that the narrative puts us in this "leader" role. It inherently creates a massive chasm of ludonarrative dissonance as reason dictates that we can't all be the leader of this pact. An MMORPG ought to utilize the world for telling the narrative. For instance, rather than having it be the player leading faction X to victory against faction Y, the narrative could simply be this: faction X won against faction Y, and throughout this conflict the player could choose to help out faction X. In an MMORPG the player should be a small part of a greater whole, not the greater whole.

Except for better stories and deeper RPG immersion... I agree with this one. For years I've struggled to truly get into GW2. I've always thought that ArenaNet's model was superior to any other MMO on the market; no subscription fee, no gear disparity in PVP, no increased level cap/item levels... GW2 looks stellar and the controls are super slick in comparison to other MMOs. However, I'll agree that the game does fall short when it comes to story and, not necessarily RPG immersion, but narrative immersion. Full disclaimer: I've actually not played through all the story content so I'm basing this on what I've seen from the original game and from the first few bits of Heart of Thorns. GW2 doesn't split their player base into two factions which, in itself, is a good thing! However, the narrative tends to feel very black and white. We are all the good guys fighting the big bad, all the time. The PVP takes place in an area with little to no lore (from what I've been able to find in the game); when you ask a mist warrior what the mist war is, he basically says "it's a war that's going on in the mists". PVP is fun, but the narrative context is extremely weak. There's no narrative consequence to losing a battle. It's just a battle for the sake of battle. In contrast, PVP in WoW and SWTOR gets a bit more exciting. I'd argue that this is especially the case in SWTOR as that game doesn't have any cross servers, so rivalries and bickering between the factions tend to crop up, which is a wonderful thing to see in an MMORPG. I also don't really like the "Living World" story content. The name is not very apt as all the story content takes place in a prescripted instance that separates you from the actual living world; the one you share with all the other players. SWTOR did the same thing, but I'd argue that SWTOR had higher quality to their storytelling. No, when it comes to narrative I think the original World of Warcraft actually did the best job. Consider events like the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj where your whole server got involved. This created a near infinite amount of mini narratives for each player that was involved. The player in the original WoW was not the main protagonist, they were one tiny cog in a much greater machinery. In GW2 and SWTOR we're being told by the game that we're the most important character in the game and that kind of goes against the key tenets of an MMORPG.

An alternative solution could be:Sword of the JustHammer of the WiseBow of the Truthful Not saying that my suggestion is superior to that of the OPs, but it's important to consider alternatives. The most important thing, however, is that this glaring issue gets fixed ASAP!

But then you get into a loop of never ending apocalypses; the "narrative power creep" I mentioned. I think it's very much possible to "reset" the narrative. World of Warcraft did as much with their Mists of Pandaria expansion. You had just defeated Deathwing The Destroyer and what followed was a story about Horde and Alliance colonization in a mystical new land. I thought it was a very refreshing change of pace, although that expansion would derail a bit as well towards the end as well.