Reldan
5241
I’ll check this out later, but I’m really glad to see them focusing on stuff that people really want in the game and making it easier for people to play together.
Only major missing feature I think is a LFD tool, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw that in the next couple months.
Gedd
5242
I’m pretty sure it was mentioned that they’re working on improving the current LFG tool in the near-term. They won’t call it a Dungeon Finder, mainly because they’re not limiting it to just dungeons, but they want to make it clear they won’t be porting folks inside the dungeon and back out to wherever they were.
I’m not sure why they’re so determined to make it clear on that last point. In a game where you can port to any waypoint instantly, you don’t need to get ported into dungeons.
Honestly (and this has probably been mentioned upthread), all they really need to do is build something like gw2lfg.com into the UI with just a few additional categories for non-dungeon stuff (like events, WvW, etc.) and they’d golden. Bonus points if it cleared the LFG request when the party entered the dungeon. My only complaint about gw2lfg.com is people who don’t clear out their listing when they finish forming up their group.
Maybe this will bring me back.
I know a lot of people believe GW2 to be the best thing since sliced bread as far as MMOs go, and while I agree that there are a lot of great design decisions in the game that shine as examples of “doing it right” there was one major problem I simply couldn’t overcome after 20+ levels…I was bored.
I played Guild Wars (the first one) for years. I purchased and played through every expansion including EotN. I played endgame content. And I loved it. Much of that time I played with a couple of friends and we knocked out each expansions storyline together. It was like a D&D night on the PC, every Thursday we’d take on new challenges and have a blast.
With Guild Wars 2 at first it was like every night was Thursday group night. The dynamic events created an atmosphere that made it feel like I had a dozen friends around me taking on challenges wherever they popped up, whenever I wanted. But soon it became apparent that these were not friends. Not only did they rarely speak to me, but they would flit off as soon as the random event was finished, never to be seen again. Soon I realized I was soloing in a crowd rather than playing in a group. The sameness of many of the events began to wear on me, and the overarching personal storyline was poorly written and uninteresting after the first dozen challenges. Guild Wars 2 became just a series of boxes to be checked off. Enter new area, uncover all Vistas, Hearts, Challenges, etc., take on events, move on. I wanted a game, I got a task list. Eventually I got so bored that I stopped logging in, right around the time the holiday events started adding more checkboxes to my task lists.
I never did try WvW, and I understand it’s a whole new layer to the game. But I really wanted to be able to enjoy GW2 for it’s base game, not have to make it into fantasy Team Fortress to find enjoyment. Perhpas the living story stuff will add the type of experience I desire, or maybe I just don’t “get it” and am playing the game all wrong and will discover the thrill anew if I go back to give it another shot. I hope so, because I really wanted to like GW2, but just couldn’t keep my interest alive long enough to even get a character halfway to max level.
Wolff
5244
Are you playing other mmos currently? Maybe you just need a break from the genre. I took almost a year away any have recently been enjoying gw2 again. For better or worse gw2 has ruined me for any other mmo out there that I’ve played.
Competition for mobs/nodes bleh. Face roll dungeons bleh. Gated content bleh.
Hey Slainte,
Just curious: what race were you playing? I’ve played through the first 20 levels of all the races and most of the personal story options that go along with and I found the experience pretty varied. I found the Sylvari stories to be the most coherent and satisfying as stories and the Norn stories to be unpleasantly laughable a lot of the time (if you pick Norn this time, I recommend you choose the “blacked out” option). Human story was often laughable but in a good way and the Asura was fun but all the different story options felt very samey. And I found the Charr stories to be by far the most intresting in terms of culture/lore/etc. And the starting areas for the different races have a pretty different flavor in my experience. Maybe you picked a race that didn’t work for you? Just a thought.
I would argue that the PvP content is every bit as much the “base game” for GW2 as the PvE content. It’s not really for me, but it’s not a sideline or an afterthought. (I kind of enjoyed it in big Qt3 groups when the queues weren’t horrendous, but I suspect the big Qt3 groups aren’t there any more than the queues these days.)
Not playing at the moment, but I found that if you chat in local during events, people do respond (at least on my RP server they do), and sometimes you can get a little group together to continue doing things after the DE that way. You have to be a bit pro-active though, it’s like everyone is waiting on everybody else to initiate conversations, so if you really want more long-lasting groups, you’ve got to initiate.
As someone who cut his MMO teeth on CoH, I do miss those PUGs that would just go on all night, dropping and picking up members as they went. But you can get a reasonable approximation of that in GW2, it just has to be you who sets them up (but then again it usually went better that way with CoH too, so long as one felt up for leading that night).
Oghier
5248
I’ve found the same thing on Ehmry Bay. People absolutely do respond to chat. It’s less likely in the true zerg events (e.g., taking down a dragon in prime time), but I’ve been involved in dozens of impromptu, chatty groups on Orr. It’s pretty easy to bump into some folks for Plinx, and turn that into a rolling event-machine that lasts an hour or three.
It’s not quite the same quality of community as LoTRO, but it’s a heck of a lot better than most MMO’s.
So the Dreamer (legendary shortbow) just got a whole lot cooler:
IT SHOOTS FUCKING UNICORNS!
fdsaion
5250
You missed the quintuple unicorns (ranger #2) shot
EDIT: Drop rate increase on T5/T6s - got to see this tank in real time.
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24295
I’m tempted to return just for that bow :)
But I’ll wait and see if a LFD system makes me go back, or if I win the lottery I might be able to buy all the mats on the AH.
Nope. Only other games I’ve been playing have been Planetside 2 (which while an MMO is nothing like GW2 and thus not likely to cause genre burnout), XCOM Enemy Unknown and some Gnomoria here and there. I do really like the way GW2 is designed in terms of character building, dynamic events and whatnot, I just got tired of soloing my way through what felt like a world filled with checkboxes.
Since you mentioned other MMOs, I would say that LOTRO is a good example of an MMO that I personally felt continually drove me forward. I played for years, across multiple characters, and it always felt like the story, both the overall Chapter plots and the everyday quests that would lead you to the next zone or the next dungeon, were always pushing me forward. I wanted to see what happened next. In GW2 the content isn’t pushing me forward. I don’t even know where I’m supposed to go next other than “oh, I need to visit that Vista and knock out that heart quest”, and after awhile of that there seems to be nothing making me want to continue.
Norn. You may be right. While I love the skills and abilities of my Norn Guardian, the story for him is just awful. Poorly written and horrifically voice acted, it does nothing to inspire me to continue my journey.
I did want to try a Charr character at some point. Maybe I should come back and start a new Charr. The zones would be completely new to me, as would the personal story and the stories related tot he heart quests and whatnot, and if they’re way better than the Norn ones maybe I’d find my “spark” for the game again, so to speak.
Attribute calculations for dynamic level scaling have been rebalanced. In general, this means weaker when adjusted down, stronger when adjusted up. Rewards when adjusted down have been increased to compensate. It is now possible to receive your own level of loot from any level of enemy.
Haven’t tried this yet but sounds great!
Joe_M
5255
Your thoughts on the game mirror my own initial impressions, Slainte. As someone who has always approached MMOs with a keen eye on goals that need to be achieved and a plan for achieving them, GW2 provided way too many things to check off the list on my way to… well, whatever pot of gold exists at the end of the rainbow.
So I set it aside for a few months. Now I’ve returned and my entire approach this time has been to enjoy the little things:
Crafting is fun - I gain XP (and thus trait/skill points) by discovering new items and in the process I upgrade a significant amount of my gear. So crafting is win/win/win all around. It’s never wasted time and I always feel rewarded for it.
The cooperative gameplay is great, especially how it encourages people to be well-mannered and helpful. It’s a minor miracle. No, scratch that, it’s a major fucking miracle. And I don’t have to join groups or a guild or any of that to participate in the action, which is a major boon for someone who doesn’t have the time or energy to commit to a serious guild.
It also helps that this time around I’ve found a class I genuinely enjoy playing. From moment to moment I’m having fun playing the game, sometimes solo and sometimes not, and that’s quite enough for me. Frankly, it’s more than I expected from any MMO after the past several years of WoW clone after WoW clone failing to advance the genre even an inch.
Anyway, if you can’t actively ignore the “big picture” then perhaps it’s time to move on to something else. There’s so many other great games out there that it seems silly to torture yourself with one that just isn’t clicking for you.
What class are you playing, Joe?
This, for me, sums up what makes this game so great and also why some folks don’t seem to “get” it. MMO’s past have trained them to chase carrots and the carrots (rainbow unicorns notwithstanding) in GW2 are just not that alluring. What’s fun about the game is actually playing it, as in right now, this minute. Or not. It’s not a game that “gets better at 40” or whenever. It’s either great right now or it’s not your thing. What a concept! :)
And Slainte: yeah, Norn story is pathetic and absurd and off-putting and just yeesh. Charr story is much better. And Charr thieves corkscrew through the air as they kill you.
The Charr run animation is off putting to me. I don’t like my character running like a dog.
I just felt like the things I had to do in GW2 were not a whole lot different than the things I’d done in previous MMOs. Events are chained quests much like public quests in Warhammer and rifts in Rift. It’s cool that they can branch into different directions, but not that cool. The WvWvW was often a lot of running and little fighting. The story quest writing and voice work was painful.
I enjoyed it for awhile but like other MMOs I’ve played once I figured out how the game worked, more or less, my interest level dropped.
To be fair I doubt any MMO can hold my interest more than a few months at this point, including WoW. It would take an MMO that had more of a sandbox approach that allowed the players to generate the content in some way. These MMOs where the content is mostly static don’t have lasting appeal to me.
After reading the responses here I think that this weekend I am going to create a new Charr Engineer character (race and class I find most interesting after Norn/Guardian, which is what I got bored playing) and see if starting over, with a new race and areas to explore, doesn’t rekindle my interest.
Is the QT3 guild still active on Ehmry Bay? I’m a member already, and perhaps guild chat would fill some of the void that soloing through the world presents.
Klaatu
5260
Gawd, I miss City of Heroes :(
