Am I playing a MMO game or reading a book?

[Sobx.1758]

1 hour ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

And notice how the game at no point helps players in making better choices in any of those things. In example, in most other games the game itself will tell you which of the gear choices you get is better. In gw2 it requires in-depth knowledge of game systems and a lot of experience (or access to third-party sources that contain those). Without those, the question which stat selection is better is nowhere close to obvious, with some options being noob traps due to reasons that are not clearly apparent.

Not really, what you're describing here doesn't require some "indepth game knowledge", but rather basic understanding of language (english language, not so much gaming one), some logic and willingness to read pop-ups as you level up. At no point of the game someone actually reading those pop-ups as well as skill/trait/attribute desciripions should have reasonable doubts about which items (=attribute combinations and upgrade options) or skills/traits are responsible for dealing more dmg and which will make you more durable.

What else is the game supposed to do? Provide automatically updated meta builds to players that aren't willing to read descriptions anyways?

Edited October 4, 2021 by Sobx.1758

[Maikimaik.1974]

2 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

All of this however can be responsible for maybe one-third of the whole 10x difference between average and top players. The rest is traits, skill selection (including proper weapon selection), stat/rune/sigil selection on gear and boons that come from playing in a well-coordinated group

Again, all important builds are publicly available and require no skill to copy. There's nothing hardcore about that. In fact, what you're describing kind of indicates the opposite. 

If only one third of your dps is influenced by your actual skill, and the rest is entirely dictated by your gear, traits etc., the game would be beyond casual. That would mean that every single player who just simply searched online for the current meta build would be able to come very close to the dps of a highly skilled, experienced player. 

 

The fact that there's no gear spiral, making (almost) BiS gear accessible to literally everybody, is the literal definition of a casual friendly gear system. 

There is no built-in system to recommend better gear to you because there is no "better" gear once you've reached lvl 80. Every single stat combination has it's niche, and most builds have several alternative stat combinations you can use. 

 

3 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

This is btw why the idea of "stepping stones to raids" is never going to work. Because people are either at the bottom, and unable to climb on even the first steps

Why would people be unable to climb if their dps could increase by two thirds simply by switching out some traits and gear?

 

I'm so sorry, but your arguments have no internal logic and are all contradicting each other and themselves. 

[Vilin.8056]

I sometimes wonder how the game would survive without Snowcrow, Metabattle and Youtube.

I have seen players with 9th birthday character gift, multiple legendaries, lots of gemstore cosmetics, yet still socketing his armor and weapon full of rubie orbs. He had to go through emotional trauma everytime he enters an instanced game. Therefore all he ever did is Silverwaste.

Then there's the new player experience, suggesting an effective combat strategy often result that player needing repurchase his whole gear, feels of loss and wasted efforts always comes first before improvement comes into effect.

This game's overwhelmingly casual guild and casual community often does more drag than help as well, very often you stir a hornet's nest of "play what you like" crowd of equally confused players, simply by illustrating some basic configuration tips.

A lot of this frustration could have been avoid by providing a few in-game tutorials on attack type and synergies, even without having to go through the meta.

Edited October 4, 2021 by Vilin.8056

[Vayne.8563]

4 hours ago, Parthenos Polias.5683 said:

I can feel a kind of intergenerational divide here.
For me who started playing online games at the time when the Internet was still in its infancy, in my country, when we counted the minutes of phones and texts, when we couldn't download a game and where bookstores were almost the only source of guide solutions.

For an old player like me, it is always very surprising to come across players for whom it seems obvious, normal and expected, to have read the wiki or watch a tutorial before starting an activity in game.
The idea that it’s not normal to fail, to be bad, because you should have prepared before you started, always amazes me.

In fact, the generation that grew up with the Internet finds it normal that the first step in an activity is to learn about it on the Internet.
For me (and I suppose, some part of my generation) it is normal that the first step of an activity is failure and that we learn by the mechanics of fail and retry.

I find it more and more difficult to find that feeling ingame. Most players want to make the most of their playing time and this means getting informed upstream to be optimized.
That’s why I chose a guild with a high average age.
This is also why when I wanted to try bosses, without reading the wiki before, I always created the group by specifying in the search that it would be death & retry.

And very sincerely I advise everyone to try death & retry as much as possible, it can be very frustrating at first, but little by little, every time we succeed a little more, it's very rewarding and I do not tell you the essay that succeeds !
But yes, it will take longer than reading the wiki.

This is where I'm from as well. I don't run to the wiki every time I'm stuck for an hour. Back in the day, we made fun of people for buying hintbooks. Hell I even remember before hintbooks some companies had hintlines for their games you could phone up and get hints but you paid per minute.  Back then no self-respecting gamer would be caught dead buying a hint book.

 

But times have changed and now, I'm less worried about getting some clue from somewhere. I tend to see it this way. If a collection or achievement gives me clues that are figureoutable (lol), I'll do the achievement as far as I can without looking anything up.  But if they just say find 30 things in this entire zone with no clues?  No time or energy for that. It's not a solvable puzzle and looking around for stuff blindly is no fun for me, so I'll look that up.  But I don't have to. Even in that situation I'll not look it up until I'm done playing the area and I've found as many as I can.

[Burial.1958]

A long time ago there where Guide Books for games. 

[ASP.8093]

3 minutes ago, Grebcol.5984 said:

A long time ago there where Guide Books for games. 

And they were terrible — like, to a comedic extent. Since you can't, like, revise a printed book on-the-fly and publishers really needed to get them on shelves ASAP to keep up with new games, the guides tended to be wrong or incomplete and full of absolutely terrible advice.

… Also, let's pause for a sec to appreciate that anet hosts a nice, fast, clean wiki instead of the lumpy ad-riddled mess that you get stuck with if a game's primary resource is hosted on wikia or fandom dot com.

Edited October 5, 2021 by ASP.8093

[Burial.1958]

Just now, ASP.8093 said:

And they were terrible — like, to a comedic extent.

 

… Also, let's pause for a sec to appreciate that anet hosts a nice, fast, clean wiki instead of the lumpy ad-riddled mess that you get stuck with if a game's primary resource is hosted on wikia or fandom dot com.

 Nah not all of them. Back then u had to buy one because there was no Internet.

[Doggie.3184]

Like most companies; why pay money for something when players will do it for them for free?

I mean Bethesda literally lives off of fans fixing their game for them for example, including their MMO.

Edited October 5, 2021 by Doggie.3184

[Tiviana.2650]

Okay let me be clear i dont have a problem with the gw2wiki i think its great. my issues are not about builds or gearing or raid boss mechanics, those i totally expect to have to read up on. its about all the little things in this game that get overlooked and frustrate people because they didnt know and really no way to find out unless someone tells them. I missed a lot of things because there is nothing in game that points them out. my one example is the fact you can change stats on ascended gear...the only way I learned about that was not from a tutorial in game...but some guild members talking in guild chat about swapping stats on their gear. I was shocked I was making different sets for different builds!  its little things like that. People that dont know this game backwards and forwards spend a ton of time reading the wiki alt tabbed instead of playing for these kinds of things. The whole mystic forge thing I never knew anything about it, I didnt know about ectos, I didnt know about minis , I didnt know you could remove runes and infusions without destroying the item..this and more even now. Sometimes its a very expensive lesson to learn, that makes me sad i spent all that gold and mats for nothing.

Edited October 5, 2021 by Tiviana.2650

[nosleepdemon.1368]

OP u die becoz baddy hit u clang and ur health go prrrrrrrrft

[Astralporing.1957]

8 hours ago, Maikimaik.1974 said:

Again, all important builds are publicly available and require no skill to copy. There's nothing hardcore about that.

The willingness to go out to third-party sources to research those builds is already a hardcore mindset. Most players don't do that. Most players do not even go to forums, much less to some third-party sites the mere existence of which they'd have to first learn from others (or from some other out-of-game sources). Notice, how that is the very issue brought up in this thread.

Notice, that this does mean that even the most casual poster on this forum is already more "hardcore" than a large part of GW2 playerbase.

Quote

If only one third of your dps is influenced by your actual skill, and the rest is entirely dictated by your gear, traits etc., the game would be beyond casual. That would mean that every single player who just simply searched online for the current meta build would be able to come very close to the dps of a highly skilled, experienced player. 

Very close? No. But yes, they'd probably be able to cross into the 5-digit DPS range. Most players are not in that range. What does that tell you?

Quote

The fact that there's no gear spiral, making (almost) BiS gear accessible to literally everybody, is the literal definition of a casual friendly gear system. 

You are speaking about gear tiers. I am speaking about differences between gear stats. There's nothing in the game telling the player that Berserkers are vastly better choice than Soldiers, for example (in fact, some of the things game does - like the gear you obtain after using level 80 boost - seem to suggest otherwise). There's nothing in the game telling you that in PvE the worth of defensive stats is close to zero. Notice, btw, how popular the belief in superiority of Celestial stats is even among the many forum goers, even if it's mostly useful in only some niche cases (practically none of them pve), and even then is actually inferior to a good selection of more specialized 3/4-stat gear.

Quote

There is no built-in system to recommend better gear to you because there is no "better" gear once you've reached lvl 80. Every single stat combination has it's niche, and most builds have several alternative stat combinations you can use. 

Riiiight. Except almost all of those niches are PvP. And the alternative stat combinations you speak of? They all utilize the same few stat sets, ignoring like 90% of the remaining ones. And the game does not tell you how niche each stat set is, and what content it is good for (and for what it is not).

There definitely are "better" and "worse" gear choices even among the same gear tier and level.

(Btw: and there are stat choices that are practically never used even in niche cases. When was the last time you used Zealots for something, for example?)

Quote

Why would people be unable to climb if their dps could increase by two thirds simply by switching out some traits and gear?

Oh, you can climb. Just not step by step - because, notice how there's absolutely no need for anything covering that gap in the middle between before and after that jump. The moment you cross the threshold of looking outside the game and researching the builds to find what is good and what not, you can already make the jump straight to raids, with no need for intermediate content at all. Without crossing that threshold however, all that intermediate content will also be beyond your reach.

Edited October 5, 2021 by Astralporing.1957

[ProtoGunner.4953]

Complex games, you have to get into. No one expects to understand Europa Universalis or Stellaris. These games are complex and RPGs or MMOs always had a lot to understand. And for the rest: git gud. I started to - more or less seriously - play WvW for the  first time since 2012 and now I am on a quite comfortable level and competitive and know the nooks and crannies etc. It just takes some dedication. If you don't want to: play a casual game or don't play at all.

[trunks.5249]

On 10/3/2021 at 9:22 PM, Danjorus.2671 said:

Bad at open world? people tell you to read a guide,watch a video,

Bad at raid?people tell you to read a guide,watch a video, join a discord and train,play for 100+ hours before you are able to play with them

Bad at dungeons and fractals?people tell you to read a guide, watch a video,join a discord and train or people just leave the group after saying you suck.

Bad at WvW?people tell you to read a guide, watch a video. join a discord and train.

Bad at pvp? people tell you to read a guide, watch a video, join a discord and train.

Does getting killed over and over and over again without understanding why despite reading the entire UI that you have feels good? if not, read a guide

 

Remember when arenanet posted a link to snowcrows and a lot of people on twitter bashed them or how mightyteapot say most resources are outside of the game?

Is there a need to read a guide every time a new player wants to play the game? Can't he or she learn through in game tutorial or in game guides?

 

You know, i actually just want to play the game like fortnite, LoL,new world,WoW,FFXIV,dota 2 instead of having to join discords and searching all over for an updated guide for a game where there isn't enough content on social media platforms.

well to be  fair. when it comes to pvp it is best to watch a video so you can see whats going on and how things work on a map. that and its a good way to see what your class is capable of. there are tons of fantastic pvp videos on youtube

Edited October 5, 2021 by trunks.5249

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Some of these 'suggestions' or 'laments' seem more suited to a single-player game.  This is, in fact, an MMO, where players can utilize the knowledge of their Guildmates/friends/co-players/even strangers to obtain information. 

Also, some of the purported 'missing information' is, indeed, in-game.  It seems some tool-tips/item descriptions/level-up tutorial information is being overlooked. 

[Zergs.9715]

Oh snap, OP! You got so many edgy clap backs like it's Twitter! 😆

[Elricht Kaltwind.8796]

How do I know what you're doing? 🤔

[Crackmonster.2790]

Hold my hand, and give me dumbed down content where i can just enter and faceroll. I'm a millenial !!

This game is not even in the complicated catagory. It's just got so many things.

Edited October 5, 2021 by Crackmonster.2790

[Naxos.2503]

17 hours ago, Parthenos Polias.5683 said:

I can feel a kind of intergenerational divide here.
For me who started playing online games at the time when the Internet was still in its infancy, in my country, when we counted the minutes of phones and texts, when we couldn't download a game and where bookstores were almost the only source of guide solutions.

For an old player like me, it is always very surprising to come across players for whom it seems obvious, normal and expected, to have read the wiki or watch a tutorial before starting an activity in game.
The idea that it’s not normal to fail, to be bad, because you should have prepared before you started, always amazes me.

In fact, the generation that grew up with the Internet finds it normal that the first step in an activity is to learn about it on the Internet.
For me (and I suppose, some part of my generation) it is normal that the first step of an activity is failure and that we learn by the mechanics of fail and retry.

I find it more and more difficult to find that feeling ingame. Most players want to make the most of their playing time and this means getting informed upstream to be optimized.
That’s why I chose a guild with a high average age.
This is also why when I wanted to try bosses, without reading the wiki before, I always created the group by specifying in the search that it would be death & retry.

And very sincerely I advise everyone to try death & retry as much as possible, it can be very frustrating at first, but little by little, every time we succeed a little more, it's very rewarding and I do not tell you the essay that succeeds !
But yes, it will take longer than reading the wiki.

Hey ! It's refreshing to find someone with that kind of feeling ! 

I agree wholeheartedly with the whole sentiment there. I'm part of those who feel it is Much more fun and rewarding to try and experiment, even if it means taking longer. That's why I spend most of my time creating and tweaking builds (not all of them efficients, but most of them fun). The only part of the game where I Couldn't do that, predictibly was raids. Mostly because most raiders tend to expect that immediate knowledge to be acquired through guides and scrupulous respect of the meta. That's in large part the reason I dont take part in raids often, even with friends.

Pretty much every other area of the game does allow me to play like that though, which is why I still stick to gw2 after 8 years :D. I'm not too bothered by my inability to play raid, it just mean for me that endgame was sooner than raid was.

[kharmin.7683]

1 hour ago, Crackmonster.2790 said:

Hold my hand, and give me dumbed down content where i can just enter and faceroll. I'm a millenial !!

This game is not even in the complicated catagory. It's just got so many things.

That, and/or the need for instant gratification that seems to be more common with that generation.

[ASP.8093]

5 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

The willingness to go out to third-party sources to research those builds is already a hardcore mindset. Most players don't do that.

Players aren't fools. The average video game player has grown up with stuff like Gamefaqs. They've also — and this is important — played a bunch of different games.

Think about the people actually doing stuff in the game every day. Do you really think most people riding a Skyscale or brandishing a Legendary Weapon haven't looked at the wiki? Do you think the people who religiously do the big timed metas just blunder into them without either the timer page or a guild organizer to manage their schedule?

[Touchme.1097]

I feel as if ArenaNet needed to expand their number of employees to improve the development of GW2. The company has experienced a huge number of layoffs recently and it's clear to me their employees are struggling with the amount of work that needs to be done. If I was the Head of NCsoft I would invest more on GW2 development being this game a big chuck of their revenue with very good prospects.

[voltaicbore.8012]

On 10/3/2021 at 9:22 PM, Danjorus.2671 said:

Bad at open world? people tell you to read a guide,watch a video,

Bad at raid?people tell you to read a guide,watch a video, join a discord and train,play for 100+ hours before you are able to play with them

Bad at dungeons and fractals?people tell you to read a guide, watch a video,join a discord and train or people just leave the group after saying you suck.

Bad at WvW?people tell you to read a guide, watch a video. join a discord and train.

Bad at pvp? people tell you to read a guide, watch a video, join a discord and train.

Does getting killed over and over and over again without understanding why despite reading the entire UI that you have feels good? if not, read a guide

 

Remember when arenanet posted a link to snowcrows and a lot of people on twitter bashed them or how mightyteapot say most resources are outside of the game?

Is there a need to read a guide every time a new player wants to play the game? Can't he or she learn through in game tutorial or in game guides?

 

You know, i actually just want to play the game like fortnite, LoL,new world,WoW,FFXIV,dota 2 instead of having to join discords and searching all over for an updated guide for a game where there isn't enough content on social media platforms.

Yes, you're playing an MMO. No, you do not need a guide to be decent at or even excel in the areas you mentioned. None of the things you mentioned require an out-of-game-guide to reach competency with. As others have mentioned, those guides (including the excellent wiki) were compiled by players. Guess how they got that information? GASP - by playing the game and paying attention to what the game itself tells you!

I played this game for years before opening the wiki for the first time. I still don't read any guides outside of that. Not only do I enjoy my time in game, I know enough to guide newer players in all content that I run with them. This game throws important information in your face all the time, and hides very little from players outside of certain collections and achievements.

I think the real issue is the freedom the game provides with various endgame choices. It's not so much that the information isn't in the game, but that the game doesn't force players into certain pre-set priorities, so people feel adrift and don't even know where to look.

[kharmin.7683]

14 minutes ago, Touchme.1097 said:

I feel as if ArenaNet needed to expand their number of employees to improve the development of GW2. The company has experienced a huge number of layoffs recently and it's clear to me their employees are struggling with the amount of work that needs to be done. If I was the Head of NCsoft I would invest more on GW2 development being this game a big chuck of their revenue with very good prospects.

Once again, the layoffs had nothing to do with GW2.  I really wish people would get that straight.  As for NCSoft investing more, well I'm sure many if not all of us would welcome that.  I would argue that GW2 is a big chunk of their revenue, though.

[Maikimaik.1974]

6 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

The willingness to go out to third-party sources to research those builds is already a hardcore mindset. Most players don't do that. Most players do not even go to forums, much less to some third-party sites the mere existence of which they'd have to first learn from others (or from some other out-of-game sources). Notice, how that is the very issue brought up in this thread.

Notice, that this does mean that even the most casual poster on this forum is already more "hardcore" than a large part of GW2 playerbase.

I can now see where you're coming from, although I still disagree with your assumption that builds make that big of a difference, unless you're running a completely nonsensical build. I don't think you have to be a hardcore player though to figure out that using traits that strengthen weapons you don't even use isn't a good choice.

 

I've used completely self made and suboptimal builds for years until I started looking into meta builds, rotations etc. Hell, I've played a soulbeast for years without an actual rotation or ever entering beastmode.

And I was still perfectly able to do open world content, do well in mid-tier fractals and was even able to do relatively fine in ranked pvp. I'm also just straight up not a good player, at least not compared to other players who've played this game for a similar amount of time.

This proves to me that this game is in fact casual friendly, because there's virtually no content I cannot do, even at my level of subpar skill.

[Gibson.4036]

The place I'd see some room for improvement isn't so much builds or gearing, it's in enemy mechanics. Fair warning, I'm a casual player and clueless about a lot of things, though I do read the forums a lot and wiki things as needed.

In some places the game does a great job of teaching you mechanics you're going to need to understand. Here, take, this broken crystal and throw it at a force field. Good job. Do it again. Okay, now here's a boss that's gonna throw up that force field and little crystals lying everywhere.

There are other places, however, that I've been lost until I read a wiki article. 

Unstable magic abilities were one. It would have been nice if these were somehow introduced in living story chapters to teach us what is going on. Out in the world, in the middle of fighting a bounty, I don't see how people have time to mouse over tiny symbols to read up on what the mechanic entails and how to counter it. Some are super clear, some aren't so much. As someone who doesn't repeatedly do the same bounties, it took the wiki to even know that they are randomly assigned rather than intrinsic to each bounty.

Another was crystal scabs in the dragonfall meta and menders and retaliate. The blob of players is attacking away at the scab, some people are dying, and for a newcomer it's a confusing mess. Did something in the story leading up to Dragonfall teach us about this? If so, I missed it. Thankfully the wiki cleared it up.

Edited October 5, 2021 by Gibson.4036