What Does GW2 Mean to You in Comparison to Other MMOs?

[SkyCake.4216]

I would consider GW2 to be my favorite MMO  even though I'm not actively playing it right now. I consider GW2 to be, by far, the best open world PvE MMO on the market. To someone like me that doesn't really put a lot of importance or value in online achievements, that's important to me. I love following a commander tag. Maps like Drizzlewood Coast is such a good time to me. The build variety due to how gear works and open world being more lenient is fun. Jumping Puzzles are almost unique to GW2, but the few JPs you can fine in other MMOs pale relative to GW2. The friendly community helps. Like, having a snack/drink and just chilling in a meta map while talking to people is peak MMO gameplay to me. Probably because I grew up playing Star Wars Galaxies where I would legit login and then spend the entire day in a cantina on Tatooine just hanging out. 

 

I consider WoW to be the best for instanced content. FFXIV also has better instanced content in my opinion both in terms of quality and quantity. But, neither MMO has an open world like GW2. I'm playing FFXIV right now partly due to a friend wanting to play FFXIV and just waiting on EoD. I'm much more excited for End of Dragons than I am for Endwalker. 

[erapago.4387]

I just really like the combat system. I love how Zenimax is handling ESO's content pipeline and I love all the voice acting and quests in that other game, but the combat is so dull compared to Guild Wars 2.

[Follyfoot.2803]

9 hours ago, Ayrilana.1396 said:

Lack of things to do. There’s little to no progression in the game. Instanced content is either abandoned or severely neglected.  Over 90% of skins that get added to the game come out of the gem store. I simply have very little reason to play. 

Oh yeah, the game is a mess but it's something you get use to or just overlook after you have been playing a while, and it's true that if A-net don't get their finger out the game is going to fall over.  The game has been left to stagnate for years now with only nerf updates that they strangely call quality of life updates.  My guess is the players that play that class they nerf aren't feeling the quality very much.

The latest news from them is promising.  It's all down to whether or not they make it a real thing.

Edited July 5, 2021 by Follyfoot.2803

[Flasterko.4087]

Compared to other MMO: 

- I think GW2 have best combat system. 

- Gemstore is more like quality of life thing, game is still not ruined so you could use store to avoid tedious part. 

- I like how raids and pvp are not only group content to play. World bosses for me are great thing in this game for example. 

- Mounts. 

- I like how exploration here is rewarding. 

- Some jumping puzzles are the best. 

- Revive system I really find nice here. It was big change for me after playing MMO in which just certain classes can revive with special skill. 

[Fuchslein.8639]

You can always come back. I've never been a fan of subscription models, even less so when I started earning my own money and have on-off time.

Right now I'm playing a lot again and when I stop again it doesn't matter. I don't have to worry about anything. Client on, update, start playing.

[Shuyu.9407]

Well..I'm not a real GW2 player, per se. I have purchased all the contents and only come back to play through the story. I don't really like GW2 as a game. I don't take part in fractals or raids because one of the main reason for me to do this is to get good gears..GW2 have really crappy fashion sense and this is the reason that I don't play GW2 all the time. I have no gears that I'm willing to work for. Thought about making save the queen but then the animation was a bit weird so I scrapped that thought. When it comes to outfits..I can count on one hand the amount of outfits that I have to buy from cashshop that actually looks good while the rest are just not even worth thinking about.

 

GW2 armor/weapon aesthetics compared to games like FFXIV, Black Desert, Blade and Soul-the Next Up Coming Lost Ark..lose by a large margin. Skins are so important to me that I rather wear something that looks good instead of something that gives me good stats. For this case alone it makes me reluctant to play the game on a daily basis. I usually don't even come and comment on the thread but lately there's the new information on the new content and spec-like many..thats the reason why I'm here. But I'll be fair-no matter how much I despise the outfit style in this game it's not as bad as SWTOR..that game is all about gas masks and trench coats. I just simply have too much bias and was spoiled by japanese and korean gear designers.

 

SO WHAT does this game mean to me? It's a game with a nice story but crappy fashion.

[Fuchslein.8639]

19 minutes ago, Shuyu.9407 said:

Well..I'm not a real GW2 player, per se. I have purchased all the contents and only come back to play through the story. I don't really like GW2 as a game. I don't take part in fractals or raids because one of the main reason for me to do this is to get good gears..GW2 have really crappy fashion sense and this is the reason that I don't play GW2 all the time. I have no gears that I'm willing to work for. Thought about making save the queen but then the animation was a bit weird so I scrapped that thought. When it comes to outfits..I can count on one hand the amount of outfits that I have to buy from cashshop that actually looks good while the rest are just not even worth thinking about.

 

GW2 armor/weapon aesthetics compared to games like FFXIV, Black Desert, Blade and Soul-the Next Up Coming Lost Ark..lose by a large margin. Skins are so important to me that I rather wear something that looks good instead of something that gives me good stats. For this case alone it makes me reluctant to play the game on a daily basis. I usually don't even come and comment on the thread but lately there's the new information on the new content and spec-like many..thats the reason why I'm here. But I'll be fair-no matter how much I despise the outfit style in this game it's not as bad as SWTOR..that game is all about gas masks and trench coats. I just simply have too much bias and was spoiled by japanese and korean gear designers.

 

SO WHAT does this game mean to me? It's a game with a nice story but crappy fashion.

 

But you can transmute your'e gear with stuff you like, no need for statswap oo.

[Shuyu.9407]

1 hour ago, Fuchslein.8639 said:

 

But you can transmute your'e gear with stuff you like, no need for statswap oo.

but the majority of gears look crappy and the amount of outfits i have aren't many. it gets tiring to wear only 1-3 things on a daily basis. compared that to other games they just have better looking gears even at lower levels. if you look at lost ark gears..i can only honestly say that all the gears look nice but in gw2 i have to pay 600-800 gems to get a decent looking one. in black desert i spent thousands supporting the games mostly buying cosmetics and fixing up my apartment. this game don't really give me the option to to this because the aesthetics aren't the same. i can only come back to play through the story and do a few area quests but other than that i can't find a reason to come back for long.

 

pretty sure when i come back for end of dragons and tried out all the new specs i'll be gone again. it's totally different than what im doing for ffxiv and bdo. even now i'm queuing for raids in ffxiv while trading with my boat in bdo. i've played since 2017..probably a lot later than most veterans but i do try to stay in the game but the game is not made for people like me. so i can only come back to play through the story and every now and then i try to support the game by buying outfits that i actually like.

Edited July 5, 2021 by Shuyu.9407

[Ardenwolfe.8590]

It's my longest-played MMO to date. My only wish is that the developers quit listening to a certain segment that keeps demanding nerfs to classes in PvE play. Otherwise, it's also my favorite MMO to date too.

Edited July 6, 2021 by Ardenwolfe.8590

[Firebeard.1746]

There's a lot that this game gets right -> OW & gear progression are its biggest draws. It turns out to be a bit deceptive as it devolves into raid or die, which is a gross disappointment for me at the moment.

Why, you might ask?

without going into much detail, if you care about legendary armor if you're a gear progression completionist, it's raid or die. And raiding in this game isn't fun. Even if I could pull a static together to fairly casually collect the LI for all the armors over a couple years just focusing on the easier bosses and paying for carries on the harder ones, that just doesn't sound fun. If I had more time I'd math out playing a focused hour or so of raiding vs WvW and/or PVP a week and show the massive disparity in efficiency, but trust me it's there.

insult to injury is that the envoy armors took way more dev time than any others and for some reason anet thought it was a good idea to put the final form of the trinket legendary combination locked behind raiding. More raid or die. While I don't appreciate the armors because they're not very flashy when out of combat and I'd rather not have a piece of poop with its own solar system over my head, it's insane to me that raiders get TWO VERY special things when some of my most toxic experiences in this game have actually been around raiding. And even more trying to have rational discussion with its members in other places. I'm furious they get such special treatment literally being the biggest jerks in the community. My condolences to the raiders who aren't. I'm not talking about you and appreciate the few of you I've run with, but you're a magic pony and pretty kitten rare. I came to this game to get AWAY from that crap, not to be expected to bathe in it more.

I also heard a rumor that I haven't been able to verify that the devs said strikes are less engaging than raids and therefore aren't valuable. If that's the case, that's the most inept attempt at being data driven that I've ever seen. Strikes have never filled a niche, not even a close one to raids, so not giving them their own niche when doing that comparison is absolutely tone deaf. What they should really be comparing is the number of people still raiding after getting everything they need for the legendaries in raids vs those. doing strikes. I stopped doing strikes because they weren't valuable after I heard the legendary armory announcement. Heck, i've been more casually doing fractals than strikes and probably received more ascended gear/hour played than strikes. They have plenty of other problems too I could go into, but don't want to make this post any longer than I have already. But I played them fairly religiously before the LA announcement, hoping for a saner approach to larger group content from the devs, and now I feel like I was part of a twisted, rigged experiment, all meant to serve that little group of jerks I love so much and waste my time. I also don't understand why it would ever be a raiders vs. strike community mentality: what they really should have captured is aggregate involvement anyway, because they could easily mimic other MMOs with slightly different versions of the same content for both groups.

Even though SL has been mostly a bust, Blizzard has been iterating on its systems in contrast. The wowhead article I've read on Mythic+ says that players are incentivized to help others with lower keys because of valor points. Pushing my own key this week, it appears to be true. I've actually been practically carried and never gotten this much random help from the community before. I want to see how far I can go this season.

Also blizzard has been massively iterating on their open world content. It's still not GW2 parity, but they're trying to make it better.

The treadmill doesn't phase me anymore when Anet expects me to play 20-40hours a week of a single game mode in order to earn a legendary armor set in a decent amount of time and I don't enjoy raiding in this game. I can PuG much more easily in WoW even as a relatively popular DPS class in raids, which is a testament to how bad the pugging scene is here.

Also I'm looking forward to what D4 brings. I've been wanting to do more casual MMOs and seeing as how it won't have raids, I look forward to seeing what it brings with very similar systems to GW2.

 

 

Edited July 6, 2021 by Firebeard.1746

[Caeledh.5437]

Interesting question and something I've been thinking about recently.

 

Love

 

• Sylvari.
• World.
• Story.
• Business model. Mostly. ANet have dipped their toe in the dark side but not dived right in like some other developers.

 

Hate

 

• Elite specs, many of which instead of building on the appeal of the base profession and accordingly appealing to those who play it, cram unwelcome mechanics from other professions into it.
• Mastery Point system.  Forcing players to jump through all your little hoops just to progress is arrogant and stupid. Players enjoy different things about games and forcing them to play all the different parts of a game is not going to be fun for many of them. The Defiance MMO made the same mistake. It's a terrible model.
• Cooldowns... which makes most professions not great for me. They were bearable back in the base game's open world content but end-game content is just playing cooldown whack-a-mole with the UI and moving out of red circles. Super boring.
• Weird, janky, immersion breaking mechanics, like building inane stacks of x, y and z. Extra effects essentially randomly tacked onto abilities or functions (like dodging or weapon swapping) where they don't belong. Etc. etc.

 

I didn't and will never buy PoF because of its elite specs. Especially renegade. Had ANet delivered on and kept the promise of base revenant, I'd be enjoying the hell out of them.

 

Instead the game has been in more or less permanent pause mode for years.

 

Like I've amassed a supply of ascended armour crafting mats but not crafted any yet. Or even bothered crafting exotics. Cos I don't which if any of my characters I might be able to squeeze some joy out of. I've just done a few ascended weapons.

 

I suppose my only real hope at this point is thief. I'm bothering to finally level mine to 80 this event. Seeing as how I'm a major heal-bunny, if EOD's elite spec gives thief some cooldown free support options, it might make GW2 a viable MMO for me.

Edited July 6, 2021 by Caeledh.5437

[Harfang.1507]

WoW's golen age (imho late vanila + TBC) was the best time of my MMO life. Then RL changed and I took up GW2, quit for 3-4 years and came back to it. Half of what we take out of an MMO depends on what kind of time we can or will put into it, both in quality and quantity.

Why do I do GW2 now? It's not WoW, that I loved too much, it is cheap and has the better open world experience, especially the big metas. The player base is not split into two irreconciliable factions (not counting the countless time they de facto cooperated to save the world . . . ). Its story, no matter how ridiculously over the top, is clearly focused on one goal: end the elder dragon threat without destroying the world. Its oldest maps are still alive, inhabited, even if sparsely. The artwork is original, trying to be its own rather than imitating others.

What would I still get better in WoW? Instanced content is way superior. How to play a class is easier to grasp. The semi-cartoony art makes it better at humor, yet still making for powerful cutsences. (I'll take goblins over asura any day of the week.) And no nonstop chatter in story.

[Caeledh.5437]

12 minutes ago, Harfang.1507 said:

What would I still get better in WoW? Instanced content is way superior.

 

I can relate to this.

 

Especially as someone who enjoys and mostly played healer, GW2's instanced content is awful.

 

I haven't really enjoyed playing group content in any MMO since WOW and SWTOR, which is an unabashed WOW clone.

 

Many developers incorrectly attributed GW2's early success to their doing away with healers and copied that to varying extents.

[Raknar.4735]

One of the few MMORPGs that still uses „massively“ amounts of players in its endgame via new zones and meta events, instead of hyper focusing into smallscale, not so massively, instanced lobby content, like so many other (M)MORPGs do.

 

Imo best character animations and dye system around.

Best mount movement design of the genre.

Too many iron-six-pack-breastplates.

Misses lifeskill stuff to do.

Develops side-content for a small % of the playerbase too often that gets dropped due to the small % of players interacting with said content (Dungeons, raids etc.)

[Danikat.8537]

I can't believe I forgot this before: In addition to all the stuff I said earlier I really like the way this game's open-world is designed, specifically the fact that there's lots of hidden (or at least less obvious) stuff to find in addition to the clearly labelled points for map completion. It feels like it's worth exploring every corner because I never know when I might find a jumping puzzle or mini dungeon or a little cave somewhere with it's own event chain, or something like a skritt burglar chest, or an item which starts an achievement I didn't know about. I like exploring in all games, even ones which aren't designed for it so it's nice to find one where it feels like that's encouraged.

 

It's not unique to GW2 of course, but it's rarer than I'd like it to be, especially among the MMOs I've played.

 

9 hours ago, Shuyu.9407 said:

but the majority of gears look crappy and the amount of outfits i have aren't many. it gets tiring to wear only 1-3 things on a daily basis. compared that to other games they just have better looking gears even at lower levels. if you look at lost ark gears..i can only honestly say that all the gears look nice but in gw2 i have to pay 600-800 gems to get a decent looking one. in black desert i spent thousands supporting the games mostly buying cosmetics and fixing up my apartment. this game don't really give me the option to to this because the aesthetics aren't the same. i can only come back to play through the story and do a few area quests but other than that i can't find a reason to come back for long.

 

pretty sure when i come back for end of dragons and tried out all the new specs i'll be gone again. it's totally different than what im doing for ffxiv and bdo. even now i'm queuing for raids in ffxiv while trading with my boat in bdo. i've played since 2017..probably a lot later than most veterans but i do try to stay in the game but the game is not made for people like me. so i can only come back to play through the story and every now and then i try to support the game by buying outfits that i actually like.

Are you aware of the wardrobe in the bank which lets you preview all the available armour and weapon skins?

 

You can also use the Wiki's armour galleries: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Human_female_light_armor (there's links at the bottom for other races and armour weights).

 

GW2 has literally hundreds of skins you can unlock in the game (and I do mean individual armour skins, not the outfits sold in the gem store) but most of them come from specific places so you won't get them just from random drops, you have to go looking for them. Or do the achievements and check out the unique currency merchants just as part of playing the game, and you'll pick up skins as you go along.

[Firebeard.1746]

5 hours ago, Beleron.9347 said:

Strange that so many people who clearly dislike the game  still stick around the forums. Don't they have better things to do?

Maybe, just maybe there are things they love about it and hope will be fixed. Problems don't have to be permanent, and there are lots of grievances to be had, the major end game modes have not seen much iteration at all (WvW, raids + fractals, PVP). If Anet doesn't want to support those modes then they need to offer alternative rewards that are similar in OW content, which seems to be their major focus. I actually LOVE the OW content, but haven't really had the cycles to play it against other things I want to earn for my account/characters.

Edited July 6, 2021 by Firebeard.1746

[Mik.3401]

To me it’s a lore successor of one of the greatest games ever made(GW1) with amazing combat. Been plying on and off since beta and to me it is a good game to hop into without feeling too engaged in certain type of content (atm I just do pvp and almost none pve for instance).

[Danikat.8537]

3 hours ago, Firebeard.1746 said:

Maybe, just maybe there are things they love about it and hope will be fixed. Problems don't have to be permanent, and there are lots of grievances to be had, the major end game modes have not seen much iteration at all (WvW, raids + fractals, PVP). If Anet doesn't want to support those modes then they need to offer alternative rewards that are similar in OW content, which seems to be their major focus. I actually LOVE the OW content, but haven't really had the cycles to play it against other things I want to earn for my account/characters.

In some cases I can understand that. I lurked on the Elder Scrolls Online forum (although I never posted) and followed news about the game for almost a year waiting for something that would convince me it was worth getting the game and paying the subscription fee to play it. In the end the thing that did it was making the subscription optional, I bought the game as soon as that news was confirmed.

 

But some people seem to dislike things which have been a core part of Guild Wars since the first game came out, like the lack of horizontal vertical progression. After 16 years (9 of them specifically GW2) it's highly unlikely anything is going to change in that respect.

Edited July 6, 2021 by Danikat.8537
Correcting my terminology

[Arnox.5128]

12 hours ago, Danikat.8537 said:

But some people seem to dislike things which have been a core part of Guild Wars since the first game came out, like the lack of horizontal progression. After 16 years (9 of them specifically GW2) it's highly unlikely anything is going to change in that respect.

 

Yeah this is really important honestly. I get and accept that we will lose players if the vertical progression isn't added to. And they wouldn't be wrong for leaving.

 

HOWEVER

 

This is Guild Wars. This is not a vertical progression type of game. Never was, and hopefully never will be. GW fills a spot that surprisingly very few MMO devs have tried to fill. It is rather unique in this regard. To make GW into a vertically progressive game is a big mistake and it will lose a huge part of its identity if it does so, becoming yet another WoW clone that will probably fail completely within a couple years. GW has been not only been able to survive for this long but to thrive as well where countless other MMOs have crashed and burned around it, and that is because of the spot that it faithfully fills.

 

So, to all those who want that vertical progression, I'm sorry but this is not the game/MMO you are looking for, but if you haven't done so yet, we hope that you'll try it out anyway.

Edited July 6, 2021 by Arnox.5128

[Danikat.8537]

Minor but important correction: I meant a lack of vertical progression, not horizontal. (Which I think @Arnox.5128 understood.) Apparently I wasn't as awake as I thought earlier today.

 

Horizontal progression is what we've got - where you can reach the maximum level, best equipment, full set of skills unlocked etc. relatively quickly and after that progress is about gaining new options to use alongside/instead of the ones you've got rather than continuing to chase bigger numbers.

 

Vertical progression is the system many other MMOs use where either there's no actual level cap (but new levels get increasingly hard to reach) or the cap is regularly increased and new, stronger tiers of equipment, more powerful versions of skills etc. are added regularly which players then need to obtain if they want to complete new content or compete against other players.

 

There are pros and cons to both systems, I know some people who really enjoy continuously chasing bigger numbers and working towards the next thing which will make their character stronger, especially in games where that's required to be able to move on to new areas because it feels rewarding. But there's also a lot of people (like me) who really enjoy not having to worry about that and knowing that beyond a certain point they can stop thinking about upgrades and just do whatever interests them without having to meet access requirements.

 

What I don't think is possible is offering both options in the same game. If they add vertical progression then no one can ignore it and just keep doing the new content with their level 80 in exotics without having to level up further or get new equipment, so expecting or asking for that is requesting a fundamental change to the way the game is designed and one that is almost certainly not going to happen after so long without it.

[Arnox.5128]

9 hours ago, Danikat.8537 said:

Minor but important correction: I meant a lack of vertical progression, not horizontal. (Which I think @Arnox.5128 understood.) Apparently I wasn't as awake as I thought earlier today.

 

Oops. Yeah, wasn't thinking about it. lol