POS NCSoft can laud the profit from Arenanet, but they can't bother to keep the City of Heros servers up. I just don't bother to buy anything they have their grubby fingers on even though GW2 is probably one of the better games out there. Once the sales drop off they will probably tank the GW2 servers too.

1AngryGamer wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 17:27:
My God people do your own research on the fucking game. Quit asking stupid mundane questions watch a fucking developer video why dont you?

Or you could just... you know... not answer and let those who care to answer do so. Or you could just continue to be an ass. Last I checked, it's not your site, nor your place to dictate what questions people can and can not, or should and should not ask.

In short, if all you have to say is to complain about someone asking a question about a game on a video game site, then do everyone a favor and shut the fuck up.

Smellfinger wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 14:04:
I don't understand why people think closing their WoW account to play a new MMO is a revolutionary act. I guess the new Skinner box is always better than the old one.

Not being a skinner box for one. The leveling curve is flat, you have a lot of freedom in how you level up, and you don't play for the rewards the game gives out. (If you do play for the rewards, you will be dissapointed, they kinda suck)

I can play once or twice a week and feel like I'm having fun and getting somewhere. I can also have a hardcore 8 hour weekend gaming session and really dig into it and enjoy myself. After I turn it off after the 8 hours, I both don't feel like I wasted my time, nor do I feel like I just shut off my morphine drip and need to turn it on again.

Prez wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 15:59:

Keilun wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 15:52:

Yeah they're still up. Ever since they added heroes to the game, solo'ing's gotten a lot easier. You can just look up builds on pvxwiki and there's a good chunk of builds for heroes. You can create a nice 8 man party with you and your 7 heroes and then go complete it.

That said, I still wouldn't bother with the original Guild Wars campaign. God it was painfully boring and then you'll hit a brick wall at one point needing a run thru to get "ascended" or whatever they called it.

Factions and Nightfall were fun though. I got distracted before I could make any real headway into EotN.

Thanks!

...but now that the sequel launched I bet it's pretty quiet over
there.

Just the way I like it!

I managed to finish the original campaign and actually liked it quite a bit more than factions, though Nightfall was quite good. I also preferred to play the game entirely solo, and despite what Keilun said, I managed to get myself ascended just fine using only heroes and henchman with no one running me through.

EotN quests though... some of those beat the ever living crap out of me, particularly the ones leading into the GW2 story. Battle for Lion's Arch.... ugh. To hear the people on the forums talk, it's a breeze that you just sleep through and mash buttons on. I've never managed to finish it, myself.

That said, I more or less lost interest in most of the stuff when I found out they were just transmutes and not actual crafting recipes. Don't know why that makes a difference to me, but evidently it does.

My God people do your own research on the fucking game. Quit asking stupid mundane questions watch a fucking developer video why dont you?

Tumbler wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 16:50:
How many skills / powers are you managing while you fight in GW2? The alphabet soup of powers I managed in swtor left me feeling exhausted after games.

You get 5 weapon based skills, 3 utility skills, one elite skill and one healing skill (and one pet skill and 3 control buttons if your a ranger). Weapon skills are determined by the equipment and class/race. Utility, healing and elite skill you choose by leveling up. You also have the ability to swap to an alternate weapon set on the fly which changes your weapon skills but it has a fairly short cooldown to prevent spamming powers. I'm an MMO newb and it wasn't overwhelming to me and I have to manage my rangers pet in addition to myself.

NewMaxx wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 16:53:
It was much less noticeable in the MMO's of old, where you had either dedicated and professional players, raids of 40 people, or different mechanics entirely. What you have in its place is a stale and modern standard that ultimately is casual in its reliance. That's why DPS is the king of the Trinity now - people like to do damage more than they like to heal or tank. It's just more flashy, and easier to level. So this is very much a symptom of underlying issues in the entire paradigm.

It also does something to restore a lost art in MMO gaming with the support class. I -lurve- support classes, and they've been mostly dead since WoW came out since the new breed of MMO player had no idea what to do with them or no appreciation for what they did since you can't quantify them on a damage meter like you can a straight DPS. They aren't raw support like an Enchanter in EQ was, since I don't think that's possible in healthy PvP, but it's possible to build around it and be successful with it. And desirable.

I don't know how I feel about "the trinity" being gone. I think it generalizes classes a bit more than I like, honestly. But it does allow for another breed of class that was disappearing when the focus was just on DPS with the big 3, since it's not just about the two core characters in a group making it so the DPS were maximizing their spreadsheets...it's everyone doing something important and beneficial for everyone else.

Or it should be, anyway. There's still a lot of people who are trying to force the tank/healer role onto their characters in GW2 with mixed success at best.

Trevellian wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 16:39:
In DND did you ever pick characters based on the holy trinity? We never did, we found ways to solve every problem with people playing exactly the class and race we wanted to, GW2 strives to bring that portion of DND to fruition.

This is one reason why I didn't like 4th Edition. I felt it tried to hard to bring the Holy Trinity into DND.

Verno wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 11:18:
It's all about skill and self-sufficiency. Holy trinity creates a ludicrous inter-dependency and quite frankly has been done to death, there was room for innovation here and they achieved it.

You are on the right track, but you don't take this thought far enough. The problem with the traditional Trinity is that it inevitably ends up relying on DPS over the other two. I'm not talking any one specific boss or instance, I'm talking on the whole. You end up with things like timers, boss rage mode, etc., that clearly illustrate this fact. Yet people still embrace it as if it were the best and only way to do things, when in reality it should have been abandoned the very second it was no longer a true "trinity."

It was much less noticeable in the MMO's of old, where you had either dedicated and professional players, raids of 40 people, or different mechanics entirely. What you have in its place is a stale and modern standard that ultimately is casual in its reliance. That's why DPS is the king of the Trinity now - people like to do damage more than they like to heal or tank. It's just more flashy, and easier to level. So this is very much a symptom of underlying issues in the entire paradigm.

The mold needs to be broken. It won't be done overnight, but I feel Guild Wars 2 is at least a step in the right direction. It manages not to deviate so far from the mold that it is anathema to newcomers, but it also requires players to rethink their roles. That's a good start, and frankly I think most people fall into the position of supporting what appeals to them immediately over truly wanting what's best for the genre. I don't want to proselytize from a pulpit, I just want to point out what should be obvious.

jacobvandy wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 15:08:
No, SWTOR PVP was about your DPS vs. their defense. Believe me, I played a rocket-shitting Mercenary most of the time I partook in that... You pick a target, then stand there and fire off your handful of skills in a specific order to maximize damage and hope they die before you do.

GW2 actually has some tactics, not the least of which is the ability to dodge attacks at your discretion. If not by rolling to evade, then just ducking and weaving to avoid projectiles. The mere ability to move while using skills completely changes things and makes it more dynamic and engaging than other MMOs.

Can you go into more detail on how many skills you have to manage in GW2 in PvP. I played a lot of pvp in Swtor and it is a lot of targeting and attacking but overtime I found I needed to just find a way to add in more of my skills to my attack suite. I could simply work with a few powers that do good damage and just try that but in hutball especially figuring out how to get the most out of my snare and blind powers plus how to activate my counters and evasion boosters and shields did make the combat more interesting.

The problem was that learning to use all those things at the same time was just stupid. You needed to have everything mapped to a key on the keyboard so that no matter what situation you ran into you could simply activate the powers you needed.

How many skills / powers are you managing while you fight in GW2? The alphabet soup of powers I managed in swtor left me feeling exhausted after games.

I think SWTOR drove home the point for me that I, personally, am just sick and tired of MMOs. Every new one that comes along looks great on the surface, but ends up being just the same game with a new paint job, and slight variations on the exact same theme.

Quinn wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 11:02:

Trevellian wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 10:03:
Only 2 Million? I would have guessed far more considering how polished and not like other MMO's it is. I find it far more fun to run around and explore and do events in this than I ever have any other MMO. People need to stop playing WoW.

Instead, GW2 made a few palls of mine and myself go back to WoW instead.

I'm not going to flame GW2 anymore. I've spend a fair amount of time doing that already in an earlier topic. What I have come to realize is that, quite simply, at this moment there are 2 types of MMO players: Those that like the WoW types and those that like the GW2 types.

Now, all WoW clones suck and fail miserably and GW2 is basically one of a kind (to me, in all its shortcomings) thus we come at a conclusion that there are WoW lovers and GW2 lovers. It's much like PC & Mac.

I cannot apprehend why one would chose GW2's style over WoW's, because to me "strength in sinergy" is better than "strength in numbers (and chaos?)" by definition. Here I'm of course referring to the holy trinity in WoW and lack thereof in GW2. In the week I tried GW2, I ended up prefering solo play over the visual mess that comes with the big "dynamic events". But one does not really play MMO's for its lukewarm singleplayer experience...

That's that for my little pathetic attempt to analyze the WoW vs GW thing. Sorry for again critisizing GW2 in the process. Couldn't help it.

You must first understand I played WoW for years... before that I played DAOC for years, and before that EQ... for years. I was in a hardcore raiding guild in each and every one of them so believe me I fully understand the holy trinity. The problem with the holy trinity is that it ousts people from playing the class they enjoy because "We already have too many tanks, sorry", or you run into the opposite problem "Where the hell are all the tanks".

Playing GW2 has made me realize how much I hated other people in every other MMO. GW2 goes out of the way to solve this problem by making every aspect of the game multiplayer friendly. Crafting nodes, Events, Mobs. You aren't cursing at the guy who just stole your Gold vein because he didn't. You get to an event with an epic Champion fight and you call out for help from other adventurers and they show up to fight back the evildoer. When you do an instance, you don't have to worry about Classes, just Skill level (Which is hard to determine with random people, obviously, just like any other game, but when it's with mates from your guild, hopefully you know they don't all suck).

So now playing with my friends, I don't have to care if one is a tank and one is a cleric, we just pick 5 people who are on and want to go and go. Each person is self sufficient, if one goes down the other 3 draw the fight to them so someone can get the downed person up or even allow the downed person to get themselves up if theres not a lot of AOE. This is the way a dungeon should be run. In DND did you ever pick characters based on the holy trinity? We never did, we found ways to solve every problem with people playing exactly the class and race we wanted to, GW2 strives to bring that portion of DND to fruition.

So as someone who played the holy trinity MMO's for years, and always felt there was something wrong about being made to hate random people and only want to play with people I know in a game that was meant to be played by thousands, GW2 is a far far step in the correct direction.

WvWvW doesn't hurt either, considering DAOC all I did was RvRvR and it's the exact same thing. This alone gives me the longevitey this game needs, I will spend days upon days sieging Keeps and Castles. It is like Medieval Planetside

I'm not hating on WoW, I liked it once, so did the guild I play with, but that ended in BC after they began to make things accessable to everyone easily, gone where the keys and attunements that I enjoyed that made getting that epic loot challenging and special. I tried to stick it out through WOTLK, and made it, but Cataclysm lasted a month with my group before we decided the game was done for us.

Axis wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 14:20:
I like GW2 but the longevity is not there as many will soon see.

It could change, I hope it does. But farming for looks, exploring nooks and pvp zerging has an extremely limited fresh feel for most people.

Yeah, but the upside is no monthly fee. So you can leave off the game and come back whenever for major patches and/or expansions and jump back in. It's not crippled like other F2P MMOs and you don't have to shell out $15 just to see how things are looking. And even with an 80 toon already I've seen maybe a 1/4 of the game world, only ran 2 dungeons once, and haven't even touched the WvW so there's still tons to do. That's pretty solid bang for $60.

jacobvandy wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 15:58:
Of course they are! I was playing for a few weeks before GW2 released, trying to earn some of the legacy rewards. It was full of tons of other people doing the same thing, but now that the sequel launched I bet it's pretty quiet over there.

I logged in a week after launch and Kamadan was still live and kicking. Maybe even moreso than when I last logged on. But maybe that's just everyone trying to get their HoM points. I hit my 30 HoM a while back. I'm a bit disappointed with what we got out of it (most of the transmutes are hideous), but oh well at least we got something.

Keilun wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 15:52:

Yeah they're still up. Ever since they added heroes to the game, solo'ing's gotten a lot easier. You can just look up builds on pvxwiki and there's a good chunk of builds for heroes. You can create a nice 8 man party with you and your 7 heroes and then go complete it.

That said, I still wouldn't bother with the original Guild Wars campaign. God it was painfully boring and then you'll hit a brick wall at one point needing a run thru to get "ascended" or whatever they called it.

Factions and Nightfall were fun though. I got distracted before I could make any real headway into EotN.

Thanks!

...but now that the sequel launched I bet it's pretty quiet over there.

Just the way I like it!

Prez wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 15:30:
Completely off topic but are the original GW servers still running? It occurred to me while reading this thread that I never completed any of the campaigns. I liked the singleplayer friendliness of the game but got tired of seeing people in the hubs dancing like tards and spamming the chat with "WTS" and ferrying offers. I had sucky builds to that made soloing difficult as well, making me quit before completion.

Of course they are! I was playing for a few weeks before GW2 released, trying to earn some of the legacy rewards. It was full of tons of other people doing the same thing, but now that the sequel launched I bet it's pretty quiet over there.

Prez wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 15:30:
Completely off topic but are the original GW servers still running? It occurred to me while reading this thread that I never completed any of the campaigns. I liked the singleplayer friendliness of the game but got tired of seeing people in the hubs dancing like tards and spamming the chat with "WTS" and ferrying offers. I had sucky builds to that made soloing difficult as well, making me quit before completion.

Yeah they're still up. Ever since they added heroes to the game, solo'ing's gotten a lot easier. You can just look up builds on pvxwiki and there's a good chunk of builds for heroes. You can create a nice 8 man party with you and your 7 heroes and then go complete it.

That said, I still wouldn't bother with the original Guild Wars campaign. God it was painfully boring and then you'll hit a brick wall at one point needing a run thru to get "ascended" or whatever they called it.

Factions and Nightfall were fun though. I got distracted before I could make any real headway into EotN.

jacobvandy wrote on Sep 13, 2012, 15:08:
GW2 actually has some tactics, not the least of which is the ability to dodge attacks at your discretion. If not by rolling to evade, then just ducking and weaving to avoid projectiles. The mere ability to move while using skills completely changes things and makes it more dynamic and engaging than other MMOs.

Yep, I'm just getting used to it but it seems that even with the best build in the world, the game WILL kill you if you don't actively dodge or block and keep moving. Plays like a cross between an MMO and Rocket Arena.

In other MMOs, you all run up to the boss monster, stand in groups and hit weapon, buff, healing and debuff skills in a specific order while the tank hits his defensive skills in a specific order, and you win. If you do that in GW2, the monster eats you.

Completely off topic but are the original GW servers still running? It occurred to me while reading this thread that I never completed any of the campaigns. I liked the singleplayer friendliness of the game but got tired of seeing people in the hubs dancing like tards and spamming the chat with "WTS" and ferrying offers. I had sucky builds to that made soloing difficult as well, making me quit before completion.

No, SWTOR PVP was about your DPS vs. their defense. Believe me, I played a rocket-shitting Mercenary most of the time I partook in that... You pick a target, then stand there and fire off your handful of skills in a specific order to maximize damage and hope they die before you do.

GW2 actually has some tactics, not the least of which is the ability to dodge attacks at your discretion. If not by rolling to evade, then just ducking and weaving to avoid projectiles. The mere ability to move while using skills completely changes things and makes it more dynamic and engaging than other MMOs.

As one of those obese basement-dwellers once famously complained, you "can't play this game while watching TV."