Why does ANet have to cater to the "inexperienced?"

Not to mention you actually have to own the expansion to use it. :/

*snorts diet pepsi*

I thought you were exaggerating, so I went to look at the FAQ, and even the stupid WEBSITE was so flash-bloated that it took forever to load (this isn't my gaming PC, thankfully). Sho' Nuff... "HARD DRIVE SPACE: 30 GB"

That's nuts

How is adding Ursan Blessing (that's the skill you're referring to, correct?) any different than Blizzard making the game a bit simpler to grasp? With Blizzard easing it up, it now lies in the player's hands to make things more difficult. Same goes with GW: the player is now gimping himself by not using UB. What becomes optimal/optional begins to get blurred and messy.

Hard disk space isn't too much of a concern (whatever helps those loading screens), but the other requirements can be, but take all that talk to the AoC thread in OT.

That's okay Red, I still think your keen intellect is only eclipsed by your good looks.

My apologies, I did not have time to continue my post. I hope this clarifies my thoughts a little. I'll try to be brief.
Guild Wars (ANet) operates under a different marketing strategy... their players don't sell the game, they can't clain to be the biggest game since Monopoly. While Blizzard wants to sell you the game and set a $15/month hook in you, ANet just wants to sell you the game. And the next chapter. And the next. And the PvP expansions. And the bonus packs.

I believe that when the designers made GW, in designing a game that tried to get rid of the negative characteristics of games like EQ and WoW, they were well aware of the limitations of the PvE world, but it was not their intention to hold players with that world. They figured that people would play PvP and enjoy the choice to PvP on their own terms and not in the PvE environment. GW adjustments have traditionally been made to balance PvP, it's only recently (let's call it a year) that ANet has made serious effort into PvE adjustment.

Adjustment. I can't bring myself to call it "balance". They are doing it to encourage people to play GW while they get GW2 online, and sell millions of copies of GW2 at 50+ bucks a pop.

The whole Hall of Honor thing. Activate the Time Machine. Click.

wastewastewastewastewastewastewastewastewastewaste

In early GW, people played PvE to unlock skills and equipment for PvP. Things are different now, and people want more from their PvE. Nowadays, more people play PvE, and more people solo than with people. ANet has now adjusted that side of GW to keep those people interested.

The old school GW player, they learned how to beat the AI, so they added Hard Mode and made the AI smarter. Actually encouraged people to play in groups again. But the new player, they can't hang out with the veteran, they just aren't that skilled. ANet has added skills to make it easier for them to catch up. They did that in EQ too, it was called Monster Missions. Great XP, and you didn't need to play your class (profession) to do them.

Where GW players do sell GW is on selling chapters. You only have Prophecies... man, you should get Factions 'cause the skills are much better. You should get Nightfall 'cause it's so much easier to solo with heroes: heroes don't whine, ragequit or make mistakes. You should get the bonus pack to get more content, and you definately need Ursan Blessing.

You only need one chapter to play, but you might be shorting yourself if you don't have all of the chapters. If you are PvE oriented (most people are) you need all of the chapters to have the best skills, make the right build. Wiki says so.
Absolutely. GW was designed to have PvE world that was nice and cool, that could be challenging at times, but wasn't the grindfest that EQ and WoW were. And if you wanted to get your blood pumping, enter an arena someplace and take on the hardest opponents that you'll ever come into contact with.

Absolutely. EQ and WoW are time sinks: You play to get more powerful so you can support your friends and they can support you to get cool loots that when someone sees it and asks, "What's that?" you can say, "Runetotem's Mantle... Loot drop from Lady Vasjh... My guild farms her."

More levels in WoW just makes the grind longer. Level 80 becomes a goal, reached by some in a week or two (Powerlevel FTW!). We don't have levels in GW, we have rank and titles. More powerful weapons means you're always looking for an upgrade, which just makes the grind last longer.

I don't know about vanity in WoW, but there was plenty of vanity in EQ, and I assume that since WoW is Diet EQ, it can't be much better. The only difference between WoW vanity and GW vanity is that in GW, it's easier for everyone to have the vanity items they want. Just takes time and gold. In WoW, you need a guild to get all the bling you want.

Granted, in WoW, more content is available to make the grind more bearable. I mean, who wants to wants to grind the same crap every day... that's like GW.

Personally, I think the biggest problem with all of these games is the player who rushes through, "beats the game", complains 'cause "there's nothing to do" and treats newbies like they never were one.

I tried to be brief.

/fail

There is really one reason there is to make here mate, as said before. WoW's subscription fee system allows them to cater for the experienced. Why should experienced players pay any more for WoW if its too easy? they need a challenge once they bump 60/70/80 (not sure what the cap is). Blizzard provide that challenge through not only new content every couple of months or so, but also allows them to feel "hey, i got through the easy part (which i assume is leveling in wow), now im ready for the elite stuff". I tried WoW, and suffice to say, i reached level 23 and got bored. the gameplay isn't really for me, but thats not the point. I felt it was very easy really, providing you dont aggro too many monsters.

Anet, being a non-subscription fee business, offers no new content for its experienced players. I'd say from mid nightfall onwards GW has suffered quite a recession, as there is only so much you could do with a pve story with instancing etc. DoA will never have seen the light of day for inexperienced players. I myself found it quite hard to get into a group and enjoy DoA, as people did not prefer paragons/dervs etc other than the trinity. Anyways, it is inexperienced players that bring in the dough. Thus, in order for them not to get frustrated and bored that they cannot take part in pve elite mode, Anet decided to give them ursan/OP pve skills. I'm pretty sure a large GWEN base bought eotn because of ursan and pug pressure. Thus, OP skills = access to harder mode = prospect of player enjoying gw and buying another campaign = friends of gamer interested in ursan and its opportunities.

just my view

Making things more "accessible" usually means that things get dumbed down in a way that does not really serve any purpose. But this is not good for the game or the players.

I have a nice analogy for this:

Marathon runs get reduced to 100m, to make them accessible for players with medical problems, that run out of stamina, do not have the time for long runs, deem them no fun and overly demanding.

Result: No more effort required. Old runners quit running, as it became silly. New runners learn run styles that would not work on full distance runs and do not "catch up" or "improve" at all. There is no more challenge there, the run changes into something completely different.


GW players are not different. They do not get more enjoyment out of the game if it gets ever easier.


More EOTN style areas without the slew of overpowere pve skills, consumables and all that would work out so much better!
GW2 needs more challenging tasks from the very beginning. People can learn and adapt, but they will never if they are not challenged at all. In the end they will become better at the game and also enjoy it much more than before. They do not need to become GW Gurus. But they would not stay mindless vegetables and have more from the game.

If I don't like the difficulty in Guild Wars, I turn on HM or add UB to my bar. If I don't like the difficulty in WoW, I have no options. That's the bloody difference.

Blizz made the entire game easier. This isn't an opinion, this is a fact. They lowered the stats on monsters throughout the game, vastly improved all gear AND added the OP TBC stuff. If you'd like to find out the exact numbers, go check the 2.3 (iirc) patch notes. Oh and they made tons of skills stronger.

Guild Wars added UB AND HM, which you can mix and match to find your preferred level of difficulty. They didn't make gear magically better, they didn't allow you to gain ten more levels, and they certainly didn't make the monsters weaker.

So, as I said before, if anyone is catering to the inexperienced it's Blizz.

But here, I'll run through the rest of the obvious examples you might point to in GW.

PvE/PvP Split Skills: The PvE crowd has been begging for this since the first pvp focused skill update. This isn't something that an inexperienced player will even notice.

PvE Skills: All of them require grind and the vast majority are located in Gwen, where they serve as toys more than anything. Unless someone wants to tell me their neat-o build built around the Ruby Djinn summon.

Monster AoE Avoidance toned down: Again at the request of the forum going pve crowd, and which still goes on full force in HM. This one I could see helping the inexperienced crowd. Score one for you, yay!

Consumables: Gwen only, require grind to access, and cost a fair amount of change. Not exactly something designed for the new player. For the UB crowd, sure. But Anet has also been looking for more effective money sinks for quite some time now, so I'm guessing that was the real reason behind this.

This is really a stupid topic.

You can also see that most WoW players are high level, see WoW census and other sites.

Content available to players is limited by levels:
Level 1-50 content is mostly useless to level 70 players. Nothing to get there.

Blizzard has to adapt the game so that people can faster get 70. Then one can argue the game starts, or one can say its over and all that is left is the endgame content that is not for everyone: PvPing in Battlegrounds, Raiding, Arena. Or doing daily quests over and over.


I must say I love(d) the faster levelling after 2.3, and regret that many early mobs are now pathetically easy. This is not better, it is boring.
But not only on low population servers you can be VERY alone in the early areas.

Blizzard almost has no chance than to react to this, this is a problem of the ever-progressing levelquest system of WoW. The content does not increase with level, you are always tied to the areas of your level range.


But take a look at the late-game areas in Outland. Overland areas are dangerous if you do not take care, mobs are varied and have some tricks. I am thinking about Skettis right now. The dungeons there are still challenging to 70s, even if you are right about crowd control making things easy in WoW. Just do not get too highbrow about it, organizing 28 people to do something together and right is not easy.


GW on the other hand has a much more sophisticated pvp system. PvE was never hard, but there was some challenge at least. Then we got more chapers, classes and tons of new skills and a general power creep. The areas did not get changed as much.
Making PvE easier by consumables, dumbed down mobs or pve skills affects ALL areas, including the areas meant to be a bit more challenging. And see what happened to DoA, now its open to everyone and his bear.


This thread offers more stuff for discussion than the question who dumbs down things more, WoW or GW, which is rather low. It is not "stupid".

Organizing 25 people to do anything is indeed a pain in the ass. But that's a constant across all fields of endeavor and not something specific to WoW. Especially since, in WoW, you can simply do exactly what other groups posted on youtube and achieve success. Raiding isn't a matter of skill, it's a matter of having the right gear, the right macros, the ability to watch youtube and oodles of time.

Unless you think that it's really skillful for raiders to bind a macro to their mousewheel and spend the whole raid rolling it up and down at the called target.

The main problem with GW is the lack of a social nature. People only want to farm or trade. A couple want to do PvE content from time-to-time, but apart from that it's near impossible to get a group.

Seriously - stand in Doomlore Shrine and try to get a HM group for anything. It's frustrating as anything. Then I tried to hero and hench assault the stronghold and failed every time because ANet decided it would be really fun if the Charr archers respawned faster than the catapults killed them off and the NPC group was so weak they always die.

So I blame ANet and the community as a whole. If people actually played the game I don't think there would be problems such that PvE content had to be separated from PvP.

Thanks god it is not that easy, do not be so cynic. There is a statistic about 80%+ of WoW players never experiencing major raids or instances at all.

We could be cruel and say, roughly equivalent to the number of dumbasses in GW or people on earth in general, but well.

But Blizzard does not give these players something like UB, consumables and tons of similar imba pve skills. Or dumb down the mobs even more.

They also care about the older areas. Duskwallow Marshes got really useful and fun improvements. Naxxramas is in a redesign process to become a level 80 instance in WOTLK for the new 25 man raid size. ANet added the Nightmares to UW and made farming somewhat harder, but people learnt how to deal with them quickly and just farm on. Only FoW quest that prevented the chest to spawn and completion got fixed.

ANet's greatest old-area improvement was the introduction of hard mode. But in the very same update they downgraded normal mode loot and difficulty, too.


And you are still keen on bashing WoW, but again, this is not the point!
We can be totally ignorant of Blizzard making WoW harder or easier, as long as we play GW it is GW gameplay that counts.

We can compare WoW and GW forever, and even if GW is oh so much better, what they are doing right now to the game is definitely not good in my opinion. I think they can learn a lot from WoW, but they seem to be so very keen on copying the worse aspects, not really funny.

I agree, why they are doing this,? i dont know but surely deviating from the formulae that made GW so good in the first place, in order to follow the rest, in my eyes is not a good move, i dont want a watered down version of WoW, for GW2.

Comparing GW to any other game will pull focus away from one fact. There has been a severe lack of foresight in much of GW design. From the "buy back" points for characters, to the whole nerfing of this and that skill. And now they just split the skill set into pvp and pve. They could have done that a few years ago, but doing it now is just them saying. "We can't balance these skills for PvP and PvE."

I remember when Sorrow's Furnace came out. It kind of made me think that more of these areas would happen. But sadly the focus went to stopping the bots. So much effort went into that task that much of what GW was supposed to be became lost.

I blame their testers and game designers for not trying to find all those skill combos that would end of "unbalancing" the game. But then, when the game was designed, they didn't think players would change their builds like we do now. You see before you got points to put into attributes and you had to earn points to buy back those points if you wanted to respec a character. So, I don't think they even tried to find those skill combos that were to be nerfed.

As to bots, did they not even think about the problem with bots in other games, or that gold farmers wouldn't invade GW? I also don't believe, other than in concept form, they did any ground work on what expansions would be like. GW, with 1316 skills, has proven the flaw in their expansion philosophy.

GW:EN was their way of saying . . . "Goodbye and thanks for all the fish." GW1 is a dying game. If suddenly there were to be a spike in buying the game, then there would be "some" content. But sadly, they will do anything, and I do mean anything [ursan] to get people to continue to play.

Also, the silence of the GW2 development is scary. I fear greatly for GW2.

This whole discussion, indeed ANY discussion to do with GW comes down to one very simple thing: CHOICE.

Use Ursan, or don't. Play hardcore, or don't. Do titles, or don't. Get elite armours, or don't.

The choice is yours.

Just stop forcing your choice on anyone else. You don't speak for me, or for the "majority"/"everyone"/"others" you so fondly refer to in your arguments.

Players complaining about Ursan aren't complaining from a player perspective. I doubt anyone concerned about Ursan has trouble completing any area in the game. From a customer perspective though, it's clear that Ursan wrecks the overall structure and balance of the game. By operating on completely different principles than everything else, playing Ursan is practically not playing Guild Wars - no skillbar, no tactics, no positioning, just hit them buttons.

People can throw the 'you don't have to use it' argument out all they want, but then why bother? Why not let everyone exploit bugs or have infinite gold? You don't have to use them.

It's not a single-player game. Others getting free rides to everything shouldn't be possible, unless everyone gets them. Unfortunately, this time ANet was fair - they gave Ursan to everyone, and it is retarded.

ANet is adding these skills to cater to inexperienced players like you, giving you an easy way to do everything every other player has done while not understanding the game whatsoever. It is this that stands directly in the way of the principles of the game - you're using your title grind time to supplant skill entirely. Nobody cares that you're using Ursan - they care that Ursan itself went up to the concept of Guild Wars and beat it to death.

I don't know. I think I understand why the dev's haven't put out more info than they have on GW2. With all the argument going on over the direction that GW is or should go in, would you bounce your ideas for the new GW off the community, in a public forum? I wouldn't. I'd already know who I could count on for ideas and feedback, and I'd talk to them. And I'd quietly read these and the other GW forums and make my decisions based on that information, but I wouldn't give the community a "cut".

We can't even decide whether or not capping is important in AB.

While I agree with about 95% of what your saying I have to point out that most of the people that started playing GW since GWEN came out are much more likely to solo than to play in a live party.

We are long past the time when I could log on at any time of day or night and find 10+ people wishing to do the exact same quest/mission/dungeon as I. Now I'm lucky to find 2 live people that are looking for a group at the same time and 1 of them will be almost completely useless either because they have a bad build, lack of skills or simple don't have any experiance with the game.

While 5+ usrans in a live party is extremely powerfull and unbalanced a single Ursan is only minorly overpowered and generaly balances out the lack of ability of the new players.

I don't think they did it on purpose. I think the skills that were added to simplify other parts of the game just happened to also simplify hard mode (and, let's be honest, once you get to the 8-man areas, it becomes less and less challenging compared to NM anyway).

You're not wrong, and I'm not trying to say you're wrong, I'm just pointing out that most people don't take video games seriously enough to care. It really only matters if you think that succeeding at a video game task is an actual accomplishment, and most people don't think that.

People want to see content that they paid for, is what it comes down to. The "elite" players who take their gaming seriously have had plenty of time to prove to everyone how good they are at clicking the mouse, now the areas are being opened up to allow the bored players who didn't want to move forward, or couldn't move forward, into those areas to keep them interested a little bit longer.

It's the way MMOs work. You have a few people who play the hell out of them because it's their only hobby and they take it very seriously. After awhile, all the other players who never got to see the high end content get tired of the game, so the company opens up the previously high end stuff for them and creates NEW high end stuff. You're just not seeing new high end stuff in Guild Wars right now because the game is, basically, developmentally dead. If the enormous amount of reskinning in GWEN didn't drive that point home, nothing will, but that's what it comes down to: the high end areas are going away because the game is coming to an end in preparation for its sequel where there will be all new "elite" content for a few years.

Whaaa? They reduced the man size requirement of [i]most]/i] of the raids before Outlands so that people could get into them and pick up the raiding gear (though there's little point now since most of the Outlands quest greens are superior to end game raiding outside of Outlands...)

They're not going to make the "soloable" because then they wouldn't be raids. They did, however, reduce the difficulty of a bunch of "group" quests like that, especially by removing the Elite status from a lot of quest "bosses" in the World.

They've put out what is typical of a game at this stage of development.

Don't let the lunatics on this forum fool you. The game was only just announced a little over a year ago. It usually take multiple yearS - plural - to actually see any real meat from a game project. They're not being tight-lipped about GW2, they're giving out about what any reasonable person would expect compared to most other game development cycles.

I understand. Still, after seeing how GW was redesigned after launch, it worries me what they are doing. I really don't see how they can distinguish themselves from other MMOs.

By being Free?

Sizeable about of people who got GW got it because they wanted "Free WOW". Its pretty obvious from "Wee needah mounts, wee needah higher level cap, wee needah crafting ..." threads.

GW2 being essentially "Free WoW" is what they are going to do and its not that bad idea as far as making money goes. Too bad it is pretty stupid idea from pow of player who liked Gw for being Gw and not for being Free.