I'm a masochist for still playing Guild Wars 2
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Never moved from GW1, turned out to be the right choice when they started employing people like Jessica Price.
Plus 90% of the enjoyment at the end was staring at my huge library of several hundred skills to decide which 8 could be the most OP together, and then doing that again with 7 of my heroes too. GW2 felt like crayon eating in comparison.
GW2 had its place as a game you could just "explore." As in, you wander around, get involved in some quest going on, or do some sort of wierd world puzzle. In that regard it was a refreshing pace in the "WoW clone" era, but had so little to do with GW1 that it might have hurt it to use the name considering the retarded decisions they made with the lore.
GW1 was a lot more of a planning game, where you had to know what you were doing and git gud to succeed, as the low level cap and lack of gearing meant skill was important.
I've been working on my "God walking among mortals" title for 20 years now, and I doubt I'll ever get it, but GW1 is one of the last pre-WoW mmos still around and its so amazing.
Same here, I loved gw1 but gw2 just never stuck with me. I was so disappointed when I realized that gw2 got rid of secondary professions and half of your skill tree was hard-set by weapon choice. The build making was the best part of gw1 and they ruined it.
Meh could be worse
You could be playing Starfield hoping for a new update or mods.
At this point, I think Bethesda fans are hoping for no more updates. The last update for Fallout 4 killed all the mods for a “graphical upgrade” (something mods fixed years ago.)
It really says it all, that they'd rather Bethesda STOP updating and leave their games in the hands of the modding community.
Not surprised, their whole creator club is a joke, they did the dumbest thing of paywalling quests in that shop. You should at least make those free so you incentivise people to regularly check that shop than making it pay only.
With the latest update (that broke the script extender and a bunch of other mods), one of the big things they announced is "we made several of the mods there free! It was Enclave armor, and Enclave was mentioned in the TV Show!"
There are virtually no quests in the Creation Club shop. Oh, sure, "technically" there are, but pretty much all of them are "go to this location, kill one enemy, get item". Or, if they're really complex, maybe you'll have to go to two or three locations. As far as I know, there's no quests out there that have any semblance of story or anything remotely complicated to them.
Those you said are pretty much it, they also are doing the scummy practice of while mods turn off all trophies if used in game, anything bought in the creation club DOES NOT and even offer game benefits not just customisation (for example, using mats bought in the creation club passively increase happiness in settlements).
It would be better if they got some modders to release content on the creation club that were quest like, opened up more of the map like have a new settlement locations, take over bandit locations or more development for fractions like BoS, Railroad and especially minuteman WITHOUT removing trophy access but they always think short term than long term with money.
I dropped it after part 1 of the wizard's tower expansion. The first zone felt like a solid farewell to the game.
I looked at the Janthir wilds trailer and saw all the story characters were replaced with literal who women, and the spear animations had characters using them one handed. I had zero urge to return after that.
Story has been saturday-morning cartoon garbage since first game, and pioneered superwoke since at least 2nd expansion. I only play it for the almost-bloated gameplay.
Spears are fine gameplay, but everything from SOTO and Janthir points to them winding down the game. Recycled assets, 1 old mount revamped per expansion, spears being an existing underwater weapon, unfinished launches and seasonal releases. Don't forget bugs existing since at least first expansion, and powercreep contrasting with the game direction at launch. This leaves pvp, small-scale wvw, and newest CM content having any sort of challenge; open-world I just avoid because its piss-easy or the players are new-gen gamers running low-damage gear/builds; some of the most egregious anti-gatekeepers in all PC gaming since 2017.
For someone who hasn't really touched social gaming in a long time, can you explain what's up with that?
It's hard for me to put this in a short response. Gaming as a hobby is more mainstream than it was 3 decades ago, and our general culture has gotten softer. There's always been the Eternal September effect, where pioneers in an area of life have said thing experience rapid growth of newcomers. Overwhelmed by sheer numbers, they aren't able to acculturate the masses with healthy norms that ensured the success of said thing or community in the first place. With games in particular, monetization shifted towards post-purchase micro transactions, so devs put more resources into retaining a lowest common denominator playerbase, oftentimes with whales. This coincides with the general cultural shift of expecting competency (or in-group compatibility) towards unqualified inclusivity, even when said inclusivity weakens a hobby or makes it dangerous (ex: skiing and snowboarding at a popular resort). This effects singleplayer and multiplayer games, like Total Warhammer removing what little campaign logistical depth there was.
Multiplayer games in particular shifted away from the high-skill, always alert Quake/Unreal. Battle Royales (disclaimer: I've play them for 40 hours at most) are the prime competitive example, where one can relax and mess around. But a player struggling to win can blame their teamates or random item spawns instead of their own lack of skill and coordination. MMORPGs forever changed with the massive success of WoW which, despite being skillful game, was a casualification of earlier MMOs; this got much worse past the 2nd expansion. I'll explain further down.
Just looking at the Guild Wars franchise alone, the first and second game are stark contrasts. GW1 is basically a party RPG with shared lobbies, and GW2 a regular themepark MMO. The first punishes you if you try to level without any thought put into your skill selection and traits, and required you to find other players to progress missions, or rely on AI henchmen. The game did change with expansions introducing heroes to make other players unneeded (this had to be done as content grew and playerbase shrunk), while certain infamous missions like Thunderhead Keep got nerfed.
The second game targeted the wider MMO audience and changed industry trends. Starting off, they neutered any leveling or open-world that they were afraid scared off enough casual gamers from other new MMOs. IIRC during the beta, there was a trio of Ettins guarding a hero point (needed to make character stronger before reaching level cap) that stunned players (each would telegraph their attack sequentially) that didn't dodge or block, leaving piles of player corpses. Stuff like that had to go to maintain a soft leveling experience. There's actual skill and creativity in the game mechanics and buildcrafting, but most the time it wasn't needed, leaving a large gap between launch content and intro endgame, in addition to an equivalent gap and good players doing the rare slices of challenging content.
With the advent of political correctness, cultural Marxism, and similar coincides with the above to have a multiplayer and MMO scene to replace the declining past-time of watching network television. Whether it's Bob who instead of plopping down on the couch to watch Jerry Springer, picks up the latest game to not talk to anybody or learn mechanics, if the game has them. Or it's Jeff, who instead of watching the latest sportsball game with his buddies heads to a multiplayer game to bad unskilled while downing a few beers and having a grand ol' time with other online folk. This creates a giant vacuum to be filled activists, hall-monitors, or opportunistic devs can be 'anti-gatekeeping' gatekeepers, who then cultivate what I call a gaming underclass to steadily build-up and be exploited. The hidden costs of this dysfunctional social structure accumulate until playerbases of games result in swathes of shit, whether it's the mishandled toxic players, a lopsided skill distrubition, and an over-representation of what Javier Milei deems shit-leftists. It wasn't nearly this bad in 2005.
There's a reason LFR gets called "Looking For Retards".
I guess the part which confused me the most was where you talked about people running low damage builds. I was picturing people deliberately building low damage specs for some reason, but you were just talking about people who don't know enough about the game to actually bother learning how things work?
It's funny to me, because I actually held the world record for top dps in WoW:TBC, but after that I spent years playing with many different types of players to try and understand why some people exceed while others struggle, because I didn't think my innate abilities were THAT much greater than others. My conclusion is that it's largely about priorities, which you seem to have also noticed. Some people had good priorities, such as family taking their time and attention, but many more seemed to simply not try, because they told themselves they weren't good enough for one reason or another. The one that sticks out in my head was a particularly talented girl who was convinced that her hands were too small to reach all the hotkeys.
All that aside though, there is another dynamic I've noticed which plays a significant role in how and why gaming has become what it is: People have been wasting entirely too much time with it. I believe quite strongly that much of our problems today stem from talented people spending their time playing games rather than engaging in the other roles important to the continuing function of society. Now, no small part of that can be attributed to how our society currently functions, in my mind, where the demands imposed upon people who seek to perform such important roles have become immensely more onerous at the same time as entertainment media has become much more engaging. Yet still, we do need those who are able to actually take on these challenges if we intend for our civilization to survive the turn of the age.
Frankly, for as many bad actors that take advantage of our state of affairs to push their own short sighted agendas, I can also see much reason for good people to feel disdain towards those who decline to participate in more important matters because they're occupied with games. So while I definitely can agree with how terrible this state of affairs is for gaming, and I do believe rather strongly that it has a greater negative impact upon society as a whole than what is reasonable, I think that people need to recognize that gaming should not be a way of life for those who are actually capable of serving society in a greater capacity. Recent generations have grown up with the mentality that technological automation will "free" us to spend our time however we choose, yet that is not how things have worked out in actual practice. Instead we have just seen a mass abdication of social responsibility leading to opening up doors for anyone with a motive to seek power in the vacuums which now exist, and wicked who can not rest lest they be set upon by good people who take exception to their depravity are gobbling up all the opportunity.
I'll try the simplified version. Equipment pieces gives stats, usually 3-4 of them. Celestial is an attribute prefix that spreads the stat points among 7 stats, buffed to 9 stats a few years ago. First a player gets to the point of equipping top-level exotic/ascended gear; sadly enough gamers are utterly oblivious and run leveling gear. Often times they will be recommended a Celestial build, as it's boon, tank, power+condi damage, healing but master of none. This popularity lengthens the time of big-group open-world event chains (plus semi-afk leaches during some events), and leaves them utterly unprepared for instanced content (skill level and statwise). If one calls this out in that section of the game, you will be anti-gatekept HARD, as one must always let people enjoy things.
Content-creator mightyteapot, among others, tried to rectify this amongst the community, but there is so much inertia to sail upstream against. These open-worlders are the majority of ANET revenue.
It amazes me how many gaming subreddits have permanently imposed the gay flag onto their logos.
Reddit is a captured institution meant to push "the message" first and their actual topic second.
Compared to last year, I find most of these fragile, humorless true-believers will be encountered less by sticking to the end-game modes. 3/4 of these modes' (pvp, fractals/raids/strikes, wvw) playerbase is still shit, and plenty of good players still subscribe to NPR and Jacobian. Still haven't encountered the mythical 90s/00s ethos pro-gun, pro-attractive fictional characters guild, but at least I see these master baiters rounding the barrel fish shitlibs with usual exaggerated dialogue linked above.
Guild Wars died when the Pale Tree birthed its first Sylvari, just after the time of the Bonus Mission Pack being released to us in the real world.
I could have laboured through the lesbian plant people stuff in GW2, but for a domination shutdown mesmer such as myself the game was far too simple. I even had a place in the Bloodtide Coast semi-named after me as a joke.
My path to Gamergate started when Tabula Rasa was heralded as the next big thing by games media and the community manager at Anet decided to redefine what community meant.
I'm happy to see that it's going strong over a decade later. Long may that continue.
Dhuum and I just stick to Presearing these days. Happier times.
A man of culture. The number of elementalists who just kept spamming Flare after I put Backfire on them still astounds me to this day.
Like the first game, competitive suffers from a decade of bloat. At the very least it's fast-paced and opaque. I finally started playing a mesmer in the past week to figure out how the hell they work, and would say their complexity rivals the GW1 mesmer's sheer oppressiveness.
I found the mesmer in GW2 to be more like an elementalist from the first game. Enemies skills don't get used against them and it's just fancy colours and overused audio in a display of flexing on the genre.
Impressive to see the first few times but not really any different from any other class.
Nobody wanted a mesmer in their groups in the first game because most people couldn't use them properly. But with a good guild they were essential in taking down big damage operators (And they had the best costumes!).
Mesmers wore clothes? 🤔
Back in 2016 in the WvW scene there was pretty favorable reception to the election results. Within a month people were running around shouting "make Black Gate great again". You're always gonna have people from both camps but it seemed like there was a healthy mix of Trump supporters roaming around back then. No idea what it looks like these days. I bounced out hard around the time they introduced mounts which utterly ruined the aesthetic of WvW.
After I dropped WoW in 2018ish I wandered from game to game for a bit, and got back into GW2 enough to level up some long-abandoned characters. There were lots of ACAB-like guild tags I saw while walking around (including that one specifically), and it felt like being in enemy territory. It has to be way worse now.
I think it was here that I saw screenies/video of some character dialogue where they were referring to some expansion badguy as a "fascist." ANet is centered in Washington state, so I guess that tracks.
I barely played wvw till last year, but mounts really changed the under-5 roaming play, and more specs have high mobility.
It's a great MMO if you don't listen to or read the dialogue.
GW2 was a fun game. I try to get back into it from time to time, but never quite could. It's got many flaws, but it at least doesn't feel like a WoW clone.
Every couple of years I install DDO, realize I forgot how to play and don't feel like relearning, and uninstall.