/v/ - Video Games

>tfw this most likely means the gw1 servers will be shutdown first

>guild wars dying

About time. They did so much wrong. GW was it's own thing, but no had to try and make it a wow clone. Gear tread mill, even adding a new rarity of gear after launch to keep it going. Had a main story were their self-insert takes over and you character is a bunch of nothing. And living story was shit, just add new content not this live service crap. Then there were lootboxes and tranny shit. The shitshow has lived too long already.

Gee I wonder why

>>16152280

I tried to check on wartower.de and didn't realize that the place has shut down. Now it is a deader than shit. A measly thread with two replies in the reaction to the news about Arena net laying off motherfuckers. Reminder that GW2-guru is also gone offlione after cursed had realized that nobody actually likes GW2.

>>16152310

> there has been no new worthwhile gear since the game came out

Because building characters got so dumbed down, that zerker is all you will need unless you play autism of the mists. Unless you fancy some armor from the dungeon. Good luck getting them, because nobody is going to play shit GWEN dungeons.

>>16152530

Speaking of autism, since the commander badge needs a stupid amount of resources, only hardcore autist got them. Some commanders from my server had afternoon nap so they could WvWvW all night. I am not joking.

Here are some more reason why GW2 was a failure besides its shit battle system.

The weird thing is the game has been doing really well this past year. I hope it doesn't end abruptly, but this is NCSoft we're talking about, after all.

>a single developer at arenanet updated guildwars 1 with more graphics options like increased LOD range.

>its all probably shutting down soon with no source released

I can't imagine why. Got both GW1 and GW2 for free a while ago and just from playing the starting areas, I'm already far more interested in GW1 than the sequel - which seems to largely be trash. Shame nobody plays GW1 anymore, but it's just as well since I don't have the time to really be sinking into MMO/PseudoMMOs these days. If I'm going to play 40 hours of games a week, I want some variety. I want something I can beat and then move on to the next title. Not a second job. Especially not one where I have to hang out with the kinds of faggots that will sink their lives into an MMO.

The layoffs at ANET are apparently around their publishing group being shitcanned so NCSoft can do that work. What does this mean?

The game will get MTX'd out the ass with SK bugmen monetization

NCSoft makes MMOs for the Korean audience, who love grindy, P2W shit. It'll be just like when Perfect World Entertainment got involved with those western MMOs and ruined them with the same cancerous bullshit.

A shame in some respects, I actually think Deadeye is pretty fun.

>>16158346

>GW2

>builds

That game has nothing to build with. The combat was so simplified compared to the prequel.

I'm upset that I lost all the experimental builds I made over the years in guild wars 1. I'd give anything for the deck style skill based combat that guild wars 1 had with pvp. It allowed for some crazy meta building

>>16158498

I'm not saying it doesnt lack a substance to where anyone can hop on and play well. It's that the game is shallow compared to its predecessor. I'm sure if you compare the amount and variety of each games viable pvp builds, there is a significant difference. I know of the PVX wiki with all of the guild wars 1 builds for sure.

I need a new mmo to play. I've played ddo, loved the comfy vibe to it and the world you existed in. But I can't go back to it because the person I always played with killed himself. So I need a new game to play.

GW2 I played for a while when it came out but couldn't really get into the artstyle. Also, it feels like there's literally nothing to do in this game, I just kill random mobs in different areas. I miss having quests. I've been playing it though for the past week. Can anyone recommend a ddo similar game that isn't lotro and doesn't make me grieve?

All I really need:

No subscription - I'll buy a game or microtransaction it

Has dungeons from some area, so not like warframe.

>>16158565

To give you an idea of how many builds have been developed over the years for various purposes.

https://gwpvx.gamepedia.com/PvX_wiki

>>16158514

>PvE nigger newfag here, that story would hurt my feelings if it was true so I'm going to choose to believe that it isn't

>GW1 will die in the near future

Say it ain't so bros

>>16152313

technical producer doesn't need to know shit about the game itself and considering how shit the game was at launch she wasn't in charge anyway.

>>16152479

>The guildwars series died when GW2 had no one from the first game working on it

pic fucking related

>>16158628

eso. comfy af, no sub, horizontal progression, megaserver so no transfer fee bullshit and plenty of chill people (least in EU) and even with just the fuckhueg basegame you can do most endgame stuff

you can buy a key for the base game for dirt cheap (tamriel unlimited keys were like 5 bucks even 2 years ago. so not much harm done if you don't like it. just don't buy a steam key, more expensive in the long run if you want to stick to it).

>>16158493

>We should suffer you sucking at video games because you want to pretend its about the story

If you were born before 2000 you might know what the fuck I'm talking about.

>>16152229

GW2 was always that worst kind of disappointment because they had a few good ideas here and there. Stuff like making the capital city and endgame zone, letting players participate in elections for story shit, and some of the giant map bosses in the expansion all seemed really cool. Played it for awhile with a few friends that were interested only went back and played GW1 later and saw what a travesty 2 was by comparison. It's a shame a fantasy IP with that kind of promise had to get tanked by dykes and trannies.

>>16160038

Alright, said I'd come back and talk about this game some more, so I'll go ahead and do that. This is all off the cuff, so I'll probably forget a lot and overlook shit, but hopefully someone will find this useful and/or entertaining. If anyone started in the beta and/or launch, I'd especially appreciate your thoughts. I started... about a year after launch, when the first Living Story was starting to roll out. I've heard the PvP was better at launch, but I don't know how true that is.

Anyway, to start, there's one key flaw you can find at the heart of every issue this game has. I'm going to try and avoid comparisons to the first game or discussion of the politics of the new dev team, except for where they seem particularly relevant (and there will be a few points where they are). I'm not even going to try to make comparisons to other games any more than I have to. With that in mind, this key flaw isn't that they didn't care to continue in the vein of the first game, nor that they wanted to make a "WoW-killer," nor that they hired a bunch of dykes and other incompetents to check boxes. As far as I'm aware, Guild Wars 2 was designed to court a casual market. That was their target demographic. If you keep that in mind as you approach this game, you really don't even need me to go any further. Every single problem this game has clicks into place with that piece of information.

I've generally been a big fan of lore above all else when it comes to fantasy games, but I'll try not to hyperfocus too intently on that here. Also, >>16157608 is 100% correct. One of the worst communities I've ever seen in a game. I joined Tarnished Coast, the unofficial RP server, and I could probably count the number of good interactions I had with people on one hand. While the community the game has is undoubtedly at fault, it's also the developers' fault for courting that demographic by changing the tone and direction of the world, but I can talk about that later.

>>16162763

I'm gonna try to go wide and then narrow down focus, so we'll begin with the idea of the main character and the Personal Story because that's pretty fundamental to the game. The Personal Story is one of the most ass-backwards concepts I've ever seen in an MMO. It comprises the campaign of the base game, and when I talk about all of the good ideas they had and failed to properly implement, this is the furthest thing from those.

To properly picture the Personal Story, imagine a choice-based, nonlinear western RPG where your decisions have the potential to radically affect the world your character inhabits. Now imagine trying to stick that in a fucking MMORPG with the player as the main character where there are a thousand other main characters running around making all those same hard choices. How does a relatively small dev team square the circle when a guy who picked to spare Jim Bandit and a guy who executed Jim Bandit after he surrendered run into each other? Easy. They don't. They just pretend it never happened.

The character customization is actually surprisingly detailed. Granted, some of the faces look kind of downsy, and most of the hairstyles are the worst kind of tumblrshit, but you've got a lot of options, and that's before you even look at cosmetic shit from their cash shop. You can pick your race, backstory elements, your personality, and your fucking star sign. But by the time you reach about level 10, you will realize that none of this shit matters because the game's campaign and the game's actual world are for all intents and purposes two separate universes because the missions are instanced and almost none of the characters from those instanced missions actually appear in the world. Save some chick? You'll never see her again. Encounter a hated nemesis? You'll kill him at the end of the plotline to clean up all the loose ends. You have like 8 chapters of Personal Story, with different missions that take place based on what your background options and decisions in the mission, but it's all self-contained bullshit that plays out the same way over the course of about 10 levels:

>Premise is established

>Meet your contact for the storyline

>Get your objective

>Fight some monsters in a wave battle

>Maybe fight a miniboss

>Decide from a choice of two missions to continue the plot

>Missions converge back into each other and you kill the bad guy/stop the threat/conclude that storyline in a painfully decisive manner

>Pepper cringey YA fantasy dialogue throughout

Every single one plays out this way. They don't reference each other outside of their self-contained storylines, your choices always lead to the same outcome, and once you reach level 40 or 50, all of your options up til that point become rendered completely moot when the factions you had the option to join all form a megafaction, The Pact, that dubs you the field marshal. This also means the voice actors can all call you Commander instead of whatever stupid name you chose.

I don't think I really need to elaborate on why this kind of repetition is a bad thing. None of these missions have any serious mechanics. The enemies are standard enemies, which you can typically cleave through in droves, and the bosses are just standard enemies but tougher and *maybe* with a name if you're lucky. Some are overtuned and will kill you by sheer numbers, overwhelming your incompetent NPC help, or just having more damage than you can conceivably be expected to survive solo, but I doubt that was intentional in design, they probably just didn't playtest this mode enough. Even putting all of that aside, though, when I first started it was still fresh and new to me, so I wasn't being as discerning, but it really slapped me in the face when I finished my first chapter on my Norn and the evil shaman of Svanir (who I'd been told was a very big deal) that had corrupted the primal spirit of ALL FUCKING MINOTAURS lie dead at my feet at LEVEL FUCKING 10.

I've honestly never been able to figure out what they were thinking with this type of content. The writing is shallow, the encounters are rote, and it's really just wasted development time and resources since many of the missions occupy the same position in their storyline and as such you cannot see them all on a single character, but they all lead to the same outcome anyhow. It's easy to say they just didn't care, or kept it simple so their casual target demographic could just bash their faces up against the story until they killed the big bad dragon, but it's such a bad game mode that even that doesn't entirely make sense to me. There aren't really any epic moments, there's nothing to keep you on the edge of your seat between missions, and I've never even seen people who like the game defend the Personal Story. There's nothing I can point to when I think of the story mode where I can go "Yeah, the normalfags I know would love that."

>>16162841

You're 100% on the money here.

>>16162905

The other main half of the PvE is the world of Tyria. It's full of a rich history and some vibrant cultures, but you really won't see much of that in the course of the game. Even the fluff is kept fairly simple so the players won't get too confused I guess. Your main gameplay options here are Renown Hearts, Events, Minidungeons, Jumping Puzzles, and World Bosses.

Renown Hearts are your sort of bog-standard open world MMO quest areas. You'll enter into one and your little objective and description will pop up explaining what all you have to do there. This sounds fine and dandy until you realize you'll typically just be doing that instead of going out of your way to talk to relevant NPCs, so your objectives have little context, which makes the world feel flat. Since these aren't really structured like a mission would be, they're basically busywork:

>Kill local enemies

>Obtain items from enemies or objects

>Interact with objects

>Play a stupid minigame

Random events are going to comprise a lot of your experience since they typically contribute to Renown Hearts in your area and typically give lots of XP. Much like the Renown Hearts, they're typically devoid of much in the way of lore, and come down to killing waves of mobs or picking shit up. Some of these events are setup in chains, so if you complete one event, it progresses a little storyline, and if you fail then it can change what happens, but much like the Personal Story this is all self-contained and really doesn't matter a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. Even if you fail, you still get participation XP and will typically get another event that asks you to rectify your previous fuckup, so there's not much in the way of consequences that stick.

Minidungeons are exactly what they sound like, there isn't much to say here. You go into a small area like a cavern of bandits or a ruin filled with monsters, investigate, fight the mobs, probably fight a miniboss, and then there'll be a chest at the end with some meaningless junk you'll sell or the occasional quest item. Some of these have little mechanics (carry a torch or darkness monsters will get you) to them, or have to be unlocked through some tricks (like hitting a gong with a thrown object to open a hidden door), so they're a little more engaging, but only a little.

Jumping Puzzles are typically annoying platforming sections in a game that really wasn't made for platforming. They're not really as puzzling as I'm sure the developers would've liked to think, but thankfully they're all side content anyway, because I can't reiterate enough how this game isn't made for platforming. You will slide off of surfaces that look navigable, clip onto planes you thought you'd missed, and in general it's just not the kind of crisp, decisive gameplay you want when platforming is involved. The rewards were mostly chests of meaningless junk you'll sell or the occasional quest item.

I'll talk in more detail about World Bosses later on, but suffice to say that the earliest slew of world bosses were essentially just loot pinatas for zergs of mindless players that would overwhelm them with sheer numbers to get at the bigger chests of slightly more valuable meaningless junk you'll sell or the occasional quest item.

Probably going to take a break for the time being. If I'm just pissing into the wind, just call me a faggot and I'll stop.

>>16158498

>WvWvW

>zerg vs zerg rush

>>16162991

The base game is F2P anon, and the expansion stuff isn't really a big deal until 80; so you can give it a spin wasting nothing but your time and bandwidth.

But I'd hold off on giving Arenanet any actual money in case NCSoft goes full NCSoft and fucks them over.

>>16162905

you can have personal story in a mmo, if you have clever writers. in general you want players to be part of the world and accomplish events, introduce characters to care about etc, problem is most writers go full retard with the YOU ARE TEH CHOSEN ONE singleplayer rpg meme, which immediately becomes stupid when you suddenly do group or even raid shit.

rift did it smart, you were not THE ascended, you were ONE of them. you could still do all shit and whenever a npc references stuff it might have been you or someone else ("some just killed xyz") etc. there's even a meta joke with a normal npc and no one taking him into dungeons because he can't ressurect.

fuck thinking about it not even gw1 had that much focus on YOU specifically, just you being part of a group (since the story was mainly told in missions).

TLDR: gw2 has shit writers writing shit

>>16162985

>Renown Hearts are your sort of bog-standard open world MMO quest areas.

oh fucking god, that reminds me how they were jerking themselves in the manifesto video how they'll revolutionize questing and shit, to end up with literal quests except no dialog, so most of the time you don't even know why you do the shit you do. SO FUCKING NOVEL.

don't get me wrong, the basic idea isn't bad, but it simply leads to nothing. they should've made it all interlinking chains with different outcomes and worthwhile rewards so people come back to it. cap the level to 20 so everything is "endgame" with appropriate rewards and bam, there you go, almost unlimited content.

but that would require actual effort and competence, so…

>>16163061

>giving money to anusnet after gw2 and not hoping ncsoft rapes their asses raw

>>16163189

Fucked that up, but whatever. Moving onto the zones.

I actually disagree with many people in that I find the zones to be fairly bland. They have some scenic vistas, and a lot of the areas look to have had a lot of care put into them, but it all kind of blends together. When I think of a lot of zones from say, World of Warcraft, I can remember a lot of them very easily for their defining color palettes and noteworthy landmarks, even though they were probably working with fewer assets. The same isn't really true of GW2 because all the zones within a region are more or less homogeneous and really only divided up for mechanical purposes. I can tell you about Ascalon or Orr, but within individual zones the specifics become increasingly blurry. It's a shame, too, because you have a lot of really great locales presented in the concept art, which was probably the only really great thing to come out of this game.

Kryta: Generic human kingdom with rolling green plains and lush forests. It's being invaded by centaurs, corrupted by the living dead, and is plagued with generic bandits that are actually pretty inexplicable in the context of the lore. Most of your content in these zone comes down to helping out farmers and hunters with medieval white people shit or aiding the army against the roving hordes.

Maguuma: Big fantasy jungle with ruins, plant people (sylvari), goblins (asura), and some varieties of beastmen. You'll spend most of your time here either helping the sylvari do medieval white people shit, helping the asura do psychopathic magitek experiments, or exploring ruins for theoretical fun and profit. From a pure exploration perspective, this is probably my favorite region. They tuck a lot of shit in various nooks and crannies, and in a better game this region would be really fun. It gets more important in the first xpac.

Shiverpeaks: Name says it all. Fuck the Norn (viking half-giants) are boring. Full of cultists, communist mole people (unironically one of the best races of the game), and frost corruption from the resident dragon.

Ascalon: Home of the charr, a race of industrial catpeople dindus. I'll complain about them when we get to races and lore shit. It used to be a human kingdom because the charr were the villains of the first game, so there are actually a lot of cool haunted ruins. It's home to the Brand, which is evil purple crystal corruption from the resident dragon, but other than that, it's basically Kryta with an autumnal color scheme. Still probably one of the best regions. No peace with beasts.

Orr: Sunken human kingdom that rose to the surface and is inhabited by the living dead, which are the minions of, you guessed it, the resident dragon. Weird architecture covered in giant barnacles and coral and shit. Has a very bleak tone and has some reasonably annoying enemies. If the color palette wasn't quite so muted, it'd probably be one of the most striking areas in any game I've ever played. It's also notable in that most of the waypoints are always contested and half the zone is water, so navigating it can be a chore.

Waypoints are something I forgot to mention. Since mounts didn't get added 'til the second expansion, your main mode of travel was on foot, and while you were traveling on foot you could encounter waypoints, which are basically teleportation checkpoints you can warp to for a miniscule fee once you've discovered them. If enemies are about a waypoint will become contested, which might be one of the only actual consequences losing an event can have until someone retakes the area. They exist in lore, which raises a number of logistical questions the writers didn't care to answer, but that's par for the course.

>>16163274

For your enemies, I'll go by general type, but the trend for all of these is more or less the same. Whatever the skin is, every enemy in the base game has like 1-3 abilities. Combat with them is as easy as avoiding a dangerous attack by dodging and maybe cleansing some debuffs. Because they're not especially dangerous, you'll typically encounter them in waves or groups, but their placement doesn't matter as much.

Back in the early days of WoW, pulling was an artform and there was a fair bit of (often forgotten these days) work put into spawn points and layouts of areas. You had small camps with 3-5 enemies that typically housed a valuable chest, patrols of a few mobs around enemy bases, guard postings, and even enemies placed in some areas to startle players. Best example of the latter that comes to mind is the orcs that would hang out behind trees along the road into the wilderness in Redridge and then aggro onto and ambush unaware players with nets and a ranged attack. These orcs were guerillas and they were designed to behave that way, even with the game's simple AI.

GW2 has enemies posted at gates and the occasional patrol, but since the mobs in the game are far less dangerous, it's just not as impactful.

Most of GW2's enemies fall into roughly four categories with some overlap. They might belong to different factions or affiliations, have different skins, but they all more or less come out to this:

>Melee: They run up to you and hit you. Some might do a cleave or a telegraphed attack that should be avoided, and they might weaken your defense or stun you.

>Caster: Ranged attackers that deal damage and the occasional debuff. They're smart enough to try and get away from you, but they don't run too much because you'd get tired of chasing them I guess.

>Debuffers: Can be casters or melee, are dedicated to stacking shit on you. Anet never seems to know how to tune these, because sometimes they're absolutely catastrophic and other times they're just less dangerous versions of the above two.

>Controllers: Typically casters, but they focus more on CC, typically in the form of telegraphed AoEs you need to avoid or brief patches of bad stuff that will damage/debuff you.

Some enemies will be a combination of these things, but that's pretty much how it goes. You have five ranks to these enemies:

>Normal: Trash you can cut down in droves.

>Veteran: An enemy that will actually put up a fight. As an aside, since all of these ranks are put in the names as well as the enemy portrait frame, you get shit like Veteran Scarred Grizzly Bear. It's hilarious.

>Elite: An enemy that might kill you if you're not on your toes. Intended to be fought with 2-3 people, I think.

>Champion: A boss enemy that is intended to be tackled with a group.

>Legendary: A big fuckoff monster that's as much a setpiece as it is a boss.

Where this can get annoying is that while these are rough indicators of an enemy's danger level, it's not really consistent. Some Veterans are surprisingly deadly, some Elites are basically just trumped up Veterans and others are just shy of being Champions, and some Champions are really more akin to Elites. Not a huge problem, but something worth mentioning I think.

It's also worth mentioning that the design of the enemies did improve as the game went on and into the first expansion. The second one took steps back in many ways, but what I'm talking about in this post is mainly indicative of the base game. The base game is what new players will be dropped into though, so it's no wonder they have trouble getting people interested in the game.

I'll probably cover the bosses more with dungeons or in their own section, because there are some real standout encounters here and there, but the vast majority of them come down to normal enemies with bigger numbers or big dudes that have telegraphed AoEs and patches of fire you shouldn't stand in.

>>16163354

Simple enemies can still be enjoying with depth to your classes or fun gameplay, but GW2 is… I'm not willing to call it bad, but it's shaky in that regard. Some classes are better than others in that regard, but in almost all cases since resource management isn't highly relevant it comes down to mashing all your big damage buttons on cooldown, mashing dodge to get away from bad shit, and mashing your healing buttons if you're going to die. Without any real Holy Trinity, every class is just a DPS with some support and self-sustain. This becomes even more true when you account for the fact that players can change builds on the fly.

I won't delve too deep into the specifics of each class because I really don't think it's relevant.

>Elementalist: Caster that rotates through four elements, each of which has its own specialty (Fire = Damage, Water = Healing, etc.). One of the cooler classes but I never played it too much.

>Engineer: Swiss army knife that can do basically anything depending on your loadout. While the normal bar only has like 10 buttons, engineer has 10, an additional 5, and then kits, which take a utility slot up but change your main 5 buttons when activated. If you enjoy playing piano on your keyboard, this is the class for you, and while it's hard to play it's probably my favorite class in the game.

>Guardian: Paladins that can do general paladin stuff. Excelled at AoE damage and tanking shit. Was hilarious to bunker down with a guardian in casual PvP and watch the retards flail.

>Mesmer: A sort of illusionist that relies on shadow clones and does all kinds of weird shit. I never really figured out how to play this class in GW2, I miss in GW1 when you were just a control god.

>Necromancer: Leech, debuff king, and a second healthbar when you transform into the fucking specter of death. Anet never figured out how to balance their absurd kit for PvP, so they were always either nerfed to hell or OP as fuck.

>Ranger: Hunter class. Never played it, didn't care.

>Revenant: Added in the first xpac. An edgelord warrior that buffs himself with ghosts and shit. A lot less cool than it sounds. Was ostensibly based on Ritualists from GW1, except if Ritualists didn't do any of the things they're known for and weren't fun to play.

>Thief: A rolly dude who can fight with melee or range. I always found the repositions on some of the melee attacks obnoxious so I never really fiddled with it much. There were many broken thief builds and I'm sure they all gave Anet headaches.

>Warrior: A dude who hits stuff with weapons and can buff the party with banners. Equip a greatsword and kill everything in front of you. Good, mindless fun after a long day of classes or work.

You had different weapons and your main 5 skills were bound to whatever type of weapon you had equipped, and then your other five slots were utility slots you could customize. Typically each class had an additional gimmick that lent them a few extra buttons like Stealing for Thieves or the Guardian's little prayer things.

The talent system has been revamped so many times I'll just say that as it stands you have 5 specs at launch and 3 spec slots to fill. Each of those 5 specs have 3 passives you can't change, and then 3 rows of passives with 3 options per row. So you'll have 9 passives determined by your specs and then another 9 passives from the selectable talents. You used to be able to pick all your talents, but that was awhile back. They run the gamut from percentile damage boosts to certain skill types to fundamentally changing how you dodge and other crazy shit. You can do some theorycrafting with this system, but it's nowhere near as deep as the first game.

There's also dodging, which is exactly what it sounds like. You get two (three if you play a Daredevil) and they recharge overtime. Dodges feel very tacked on to the combat so I'm just going to tack them on here. Most of the game's AoEs won't kill you outright outside of certain fights, so the dodges don't feel especially necessary outside of some of the harder content. The fact that you only have 2 on a recharge timer means that a fight where dodges matter is either going to be a cakewalk because the foe is designed to spew them slowly enough for you to always be able to dodge if you're paying attention, or it's going to be a massive hassle because you can't dodge quickly enough thanks to the inherent limits on dodging.

>>16163353

Glad you're enjoying, get some sleep.

>>16163461

I said I'd try not to sperg out about the story too much, but I can't even figure out how I want to untangle that mess, so I'll move onto dungeons for now. I might briefly talk about Fractals, but for now I'm ignoring them.

Dungeons in GW2 had the great premise of being actual dungeons, not just a series of corridors with three bosses you can do on your coffee break. To their credit, it kind of worked. The dungeons are big, they have lots of bosses and encounters, and they used to be quite lucrative before Arenanet nerfed their rewards.

While this is nice in theory, dungeons have a number of problems holding them back. For one thing, they're split into two modes: Story and Explorable.

Story Mode dungeons are essentially glorified missions from the personal story, complete with faggots you don't care about talking way too much. They don't really have the creative encounters EMs have, they don't give the same rewards, and there's really no reason you should do them outside of unlocking the EMs.

Explorable Mode, on the other hand, despite what the name would imply, still follow a story, just not the main story. There's not really much in the way of exploration though. You'll find more enjoyable encounters in this mode, but also more obnoxious ones, as well as stage hazards, the occasional puzzle, etc. They're also divided up into three paths, so that's even less exploring you get to do because you have to choose which dungeon within a dungeon you'll do.

Every single dungeon has a specific currency, and there are like 8 or so in total. These currencies give you different sets of gear and weapons. Most of them are itemized for shit, but you're probably playing this for fashion wars so you'll try to do them anyway. I think a main armor piece is like… 500 [Insert Dungeon Currency], and you'll walk away from a dungeon with something like… 150, but only the first time you run it each day.

Despite having some potential and being one of the first things I'll give much praise to, dungeons were sadly one of the first game modes to be abandoned by Arenanet. They have a habit of dropping features rather than improving them, and dungeons were one of the first victims of this tendency. Will list them in the next post since I'm on a roll.

>>16163562

>as for lore, it can have the best background lore, but you can't expect people to read that stuff when it's hidden in secondary material etc.

That's entirely fair. My point was more that having read a lot of it, I really wanted to like the lore and I do think the setting itself has potential. Even trash like the sylvari are good in theory. It's not so much that the lore discounts the possibility of things being interesting as it just always goes for the most straightforward, uninteresting interpretation. You could tell a really interesting story in the world of Tyria. Arenanet's writers just can't.

>>16163572

You and me both. It had some legitimately good content in Living Story 1 and 2, Heart of Thorns, and even Living Story 3. Every good decision they ever made was met with outcry from the idiots they marketed the game to, though.

>>16163634

They actually add the trinity later on, which I'll elaborate on when I get to expansion shit. You had tanks and healers added for raiding, DPS had always been a thing, and they actually managed to make control relevant in several places. Ironically, after all their crowing about how they'd eliminated the trinity, they fell back on it in desperation.

>>16163634

here's the thing, to make no-trinity work the rest of the game must be changed accordingly. imagine a dungeon with a boss that can oneshot you but you have no way to control aggro - and gw2 was basically designed that way, every bossfight felt like I'm playing with a tank that can't hold aggro.

the only place it _ever_ felt fitting was that boss in the molerat story dungeon, but that's the absolute single instance in the whole game (before expansions, never played those).

plus the reason most companies stick with the trinity is simply because it's easier to design and balance for, so in theory it would've been an advantage for anet (they probably would've fucked that up too tho)

the damage + "role" extra is pretty common outside mmorpgs, destiny etc are all DPS first and X second (destiny is still shit, but the basic setup works).

>>16163651

>Dungeons in GW2 had the great premise of being actual dungeons

eh, they're were still pretty linear with uninspired fights, the shit combat didn't make them more enjoyable. for me they were even worse coming from TSW which hardly had any dungeon trash with great bossfights, I simply couldn't be arsed to deal with design lifted straight from vanilla wow anymore.

>>16163667

>I really wanted to like the lore and I do think the setting itself has potential

I hear ya, I mean I even have the books on the shelf. I'm just too old for this whole "potential" spiel, too many games had that and nosedived because of retarded devs (that should've known better from the fucking beginning, it's incredible how much you can suck in vidya development and can get away with it).

i stoped playing long before and couldn't go back after they made a patch to reuce "visual noise"

i mean for fuck sake ?! and they said it was for their E-sport shit ?

meanwhile >>16162763

> "they aimed at casual"

are they retarded then?

after vs before

>>16152229

tfw I really like GW2 gameplay. But it was obvious this would happen sooner than later.

City of Heroes died for this shit game

F

>>16166824

Because it isn't, blindanon. The building and roads in the immediate area are defined, as well as the roads leading north and east out of the immediate area. Don't pretend that they aren't much more defined than the paint brush smudges in the bottom left and top right.

I think this is a rural effect, too, since IIRC cities have much more detailed and accurate maps.

Environmental art is one area GW2 has never lacked in.

>>16166797

Here's an example of how fucking bad GW2's particle effects are, btw. Your average "conservative" player and your average "special" player (guess who's the majority).

>studio closed for two days as layoffs start

>from twatter: "I still have my job but over a hundred amazing people don't"

>studio is around 400 people, so cutting 100 jobs means a reduction rate of 25%

>NCSoft showing Activision and EA how to do merciless layoffs

>https://www.mmorpg.com/guild-wars-2/news/arenanets-offices-closed-for-two-days-as-layoffs-begin-ahead-of-restructuring-1000051606

How long until the cash shop goes full P2W? Summer?

>>16166517

I remember that vividly, one of the reasons I stopped ever doing them with randoms.

>>16166640

I'll have you know I also remember the Risen Chickens because I remember asking myself how the fuck someone got paid for that. As for the Downed State, something I completely forgot, I don't really see the point of them because as you said they were typically just annoying more than anything. I did like during the Nightmare events when the Nightmare Courtiers would enter the Downed State just like players did and you had to stomp them, shame that mechanic never got fucking used again because faggots complained.

>>16166247

Alright, picking up with the Lore/Story. I've been dreading this part because there's so much shit I could say here. I'll start with the premise of the setting.

There are four (later six) big fuck off Elder Dragons that have awakened and are consuming all the world's magic and turning people into their mindless minions. These Elder Dragons are less dragons and more apocalyptic forces of nature come to cleanse the earth. It's later revealed (and was predicted by several people fairly early on, though I don't actually recall any foreshadowing) that the dragons are a natural limiting factor to prevent magic from running wild on the world of Tyria and fucking up the planet irrevocably. This is a massive retcon from GW1, but if you can look past that you do have a fairly interesting premise. The dragons have to exist to regulate (mount up!) the flow of magic in the world, but their existence and activity is also a huge hindrance to the actual living beings inhabiting said world. There's just a few problems.

For one thing, the Elder Dragons are fucking boring. They each embody a different element and have a different type of minion, but all this amounts to is they have different colored particle effects, appear in different types of terrain, and their minions use different skins.

>Zhaitan: Main antagonist of the base game and had power over Death. Minions are the Risen.

>Primordus: Dragon with the power of lava and fire and shit. Minions are the Destroyers.

>Jormag: Dragon with the power of frost, got a tooth knocked out and now the norn have contests to try (and fail) to break it. Minions are the Icebrood. Pronounced JOR-mag rather than YOR-mag because Anet's writers are idiots.

>Kralkatorrik: Dragon with the power of… magic purple crystals? Minions are the Branded. Krackletackle is one of the cooler dragons, but he's still pretty bland.

>Mordremoth: Gets awakened later and becomes the antagonist of the first expansion. He's the dragon of plants and life or something and you kill him by giving him a magic lobotomy. His minions are the Mordrem/Blighted. The naming is inconsistent on those.

>The Deep Sea Dragon. A still unnamed dragon that exists deep in the ocean and has been given foreshadowing for a long time as Anet tries to come to terms with the fact that they can't design fun underwater combat. Its name has been known in-universe for decades, if not longer, but the windowlickers at Arenanet think it's some awesome reveal they can dangle over the players' heads so they steadfastly refuse to have anyone ever fucking say it.

While these might seem cool, being an embodiment of the end of the world with no personality means your main antagonists all have no personality, which is a pretty severe blow to a good story. Not even their minions exhibit any serious intelligence, just muttering canned aggro lines that vaguely pertain to their element if they speak at all.

Now, a good game could still use this to its advantage. The tone could be established as being incredibly bleak. This could be an apocalyptic fantasy setting on a quick downward spiral towards becoming a post-apocalyptic fantasy as the dragons grow in power and the factions try and fail to get their shit together time after time. I definitely think there'd be a market for an MMORPG in that sort of style.

The odd thing is, the game more or less does have the content that type of story would have. When you set aside the established tone and style of writing, the events of this game are incredibly fucking grim. But the writers just ignore this outside of a few moments of tonal whiplash where they think the story needs some "stakes." Everything else is just Marvel one-liners and girl power and gay tolerance. It's really jarring.

>>16167433

Okay, but maybe if we care enough about the world, we can ignore the fact that the dragons are basically just a multicolored plague that exists to feed us a neverending stream of bad guys to hack-n-slash through. Well, there's where you would be wrong, because ignoring all of the Personal Story characters that don't fucking hang around after their little mini-arcs are concluded, the persistent factions and characters we do have are still garbage. We'll begin with the races and any factions that matter. As I discuss the lore I'm also going to bring up external lore shit that never comes up in the game so you can see all the plot points they ignored when actually implementing the story into this game.

Krytans: The main humans of the setting, they live in the generic fantasy human foothills of Queensdale in their capital, Divinity's Reach. They're meant to be religious in spite of the noted absence of their Six Gods, but this doesn't really show through in the people's behavior, just architecture and priest NPCs hanging around. They're led by the good Queen Jennah, a massive mary sue, and the Ministers, a sort of scheming corrupt parliament overseen by Legate Minister Caudecus Beetlestone. Their representative NPC from Destiny's Edge, which I'll get into later, is Captain Logan Thackeray.

>The main Krytan enemy faction is the Bandits. Yes, the Bandits. While there was a token attempt to justify their awkward writing later, I still can't tell you about these bandits in terms of their aims, customs, or structure. They are bandits and they exist to loot and pillage and cause trouble at the behest of Minister Caudecus because he wants to dethrone the queen. Later on, it's revealed that Minister Caudecus is actually the leader of the White Mantle, a cult from GW1, and these are their remnants acting covertly against the crown, but this is still highly retarded, most notably because this would imply that Divinity's Reach is such a utopia that THE ONLY CRIMINALS are secret cultists. It also took us several years in real time to finally get around to dispatching Caudecus even though he's revealed as the cause of the bandits by the time you're like level 30.

Sylvari: The sylvari are a race of noble pansexual plant people that grow from a magic tree. No I'm not making this up, as was mentioned earlier and you could probably already tell, they're some chick's OC do not steal race. They live in the Caledon Forest in alleged harmony with nature, except when nature gets in the way of their suspiciously similar-to-human lifestyles. Connected by the Dream, a sort of low-tier hivemind that confers them random tidbits of knowledge and purpose on birth but no real context to apply them, and bound by Ventari's Tablet, a collection of commandments that allegedly dictate how they interact with the world. Some sylvari, known as Valiants, are born with specific tasks they need to fulfill, known as Wild Hunts. The Sylvari are led by the Pale Mother, an avatar of the magic tree that births them, and the firstborn, a council composed of the first handful of Sylvari she birthed. Their representative character is Caithe, an edgy assassin chick that's upset her sister/lesbian girlfriend, Faolain, became evil and turned traitor.

>The main sylvari enemy faction is the Nightmare Court, a sort of decadent cult of weird BDSM sylvari that kidnap members of the main race for rape, torture, and other fun and games. They are connected by their own lowkey hivemind, the Nightmare, and also engage in Dark Hunts, which are essentially Wild Hunts but evil.

<The Nightmare Court is actually supposed to be kind of interesting, but their background never appears in-game. After the sylvari encountered hostile life, the group's founder, Cadeyrn, approached the Pale Mother to suggest that they take a heavy isolationist stance and push the hostile races out of their forest with a policy of total war. He was intercepted and rebuffed by Caithe, who explained that their mother would never approve such a thing and he couldn't see her because he wasn't a Firstborn. Infuriated, Cadeyrn leaves and takes almost 1/6 of the sylvari population with him, as they were also tired of mom and their older siblings. Vowing to break the sylvari free of their hypocritical ethics, they basically become psychotic libertarians dedicated to breaking every norm the wider sylvari populace holds dear.

>>16167678

Charr: A race of warlike, atheist, egalitarian catmen that have developed heavy industry with some vaguely, VAGUELY Roman influences. In the first game, these guys were the unabashed main antagonists, but GW2 retconned them into dindus so they could push an anti-racism narrative as humans and charr are forced to set aside their differences. This would probably make more sense if the humans and charr weren't actively still fighting each other, their peace treaties weren't constantly getting stonewalled, and they didn't openly express contempt for one another in each other's cities. It's probably one of the most realistic parts of the game, but they conveniently ignore that the charr are basically a race of imperialists that have come to annex the human kingdom of Ascalon because imperialism bad and playable race can't be bad. Their representative is Rytlock… something or other.

>Their racial antagonist is the Flame Legion, a race of religious zealots that were retroactively made the only bad guys of the first game while the other charr hated them and were their slaves. After being overthrown, they've become a militaristic cult that wants to topple the charr government so they can continue invading human lands. And they hate women, so they're definitely way worse guys.

<Some attempt is made to justify the charr's behavior in GW1 by saying that before Ascalon belonged to the humans it was actually charr land. This rings hollow though, because it's also pointed out that before the charr, Ascalon was controlled by the Grawl, a race of ape-like savages, so if anyone deserves it by that reasoning, it's them.

Norns: Big fucking vikings that hate not being able to do viking shit, minus the raping and pillaging. They worship primal animal spirits and are boring as shit. Expect all of their dialogue to revolve around mead, axes, hunting, and strength. I mained one of these, and fuck did I made a mistake. Their representative is Eir Stegalkin, a hot viking milf.

>They're opposed by the Sons of Svanir, a cult of darwinists that worship Jormag as the most powerful totem animal. They're not actually wrong about that, as far as I can tell, but the norns don't like that shit because they're giving up their freedom by becoming the dragon's pawns. Also they hate women. Probably the least fleshed out enemy faction in the game.

<Something that NEVER once comes up in the game is that the Sons of Svanir should actually be one of the most sympathetic factions in the game. They are supposed to be comprised of desperate hunters and dishonored warriors that are in such dire straits they begin to hear the dragon's voice on the winds calling out to them. In one of the novels, Jormag essentially has a wendigo ambassador that appears to these failed heroes and lost frontiersmen and offers them respite from the cold before welcoming them into the dragon's icy embrace. This never once gets fucking mentioned in-game.

Asura: Creepy little goblins that love science and hate ethics. They're pretty repugnant but they can be amusing at times. They used to live underground but were forced aboveground by the Destroyers. I never really liked them so I don't remember a ton about them. Their representative, Zojja, was a huge bitch, and they're led by the Arcane Council, a corrupt council of science politicians.

>The Asura are opposed by the Inquest, a company of asuran scientists with even looser ethics than the entire rest of the species. They lie, cheat, murder, and steal for the sake of… evil science, essentially. While they're not particularly interesting, their leader Kudu is far more likeable than Zojja, so it's hard not to root for him.

<The Inquest's motivation also never made it out of the design doc. After seeing the destruction wrought by the Destroyers, the Inquest came to fear that if anymore asuran databanks were lost, the race could revert back into a relative dark age. So with that in mind, they justify their crimes against competing scientists with the rationale that since they're the largest faction by far in asuran society, they alone have the resources required to adequately secure any and all scientific breakthroughs.

>>16167433

>>16167683

>images

>>16167697

GW1 had some excellent monsters and even GW2 had some amazing concepts, I'll post more.

>>16152280

Don't worry, she got to keep her job! Her new bosses even let her moonlight for Polygon and post nudes on social media!

>>16167820

It was one of the early concepts for the Shiro'ken from GW1, the puppet enemies that worked for Shiro Tagachi.

>>16167433

>While these might seem cool, being an embodiment of the end of the world with no personality means your main antagonists all have no personality,

just shit writers again. you don't need to give the dragons a fucking personality or "reason", same way you don't give an earthquake or incoming meteor any motives. it simply happens and work as well anything to set a backdrop.

the main antagonists can be the people working for their own gain and/or trying to exploit the situation, don't give a shit or actively work against you because daddy issues or the world needs a good purge. would also make _their_ motives far more relatable instead of LOL MAGIC and give you plenty of space for characters and stories, even personal ones.

but the worst part in all of this that gw2 simply fucked the lore for good, there's no coming back from this. it's like nuwars fucked 40 years of star wars, they had their chance and they utterly fucking blew it. even if gw3 gets back to being a literal gw1 clone the setting will never not be retarded and we will still have to deal with all the shoved in races and their backstories

>>16167683

char were always retarded because claws would prohibit from ever doing any fine mechanical work. but hey, can't have literally talking animals be all animalistic and shit - rian johnson would be proud

also fuck that "every race gets a capitol with their own little story and zones". lions arch worked fine for everybody, new races wouldn't have made much of a difference. if you want new races give them a short intro for people that don't read the lore, then explore them in the game, again way more options for everything.

>>16166853

even ff14 managed to make it an option, and that game is a clusterfuck of spaghetti-code.

>>16167683

While you touched on it, I think its worth repeating how much of a middle finger GW2 Charr are to people who started the series with Prophecies. Charr in GW1 were barely intelligent savages that ate humans and enslaved children. Yet according to GW2 Charr had tanks, helicopters and motorbikes as well as magic users yet 3 full legions of them were oppressed by one legion of magicians with pointy sticks. In GW1 humans are defending their peaceful kingdom from these savages to one day Charr use a magic nuke from their gods to completely fuck the place up and turn it into a barren wasteland where you have to defend whats left from the hoards. In GW2 Charrs were good boys just trying to get their land back and humans deserved to be enslaved and murdered for building a wall. Hell the backstory for GW2 even has the 'good' Charr carry on from where the 'evil' Charr left off.

In fact the game is full of so much retcons and new stuff shitting on Humans you have to wonder about the state of mind of the people writing the lore.

>>16167818

>Okay they killed their own god in favor of an industrial revolution of heavy metal and gear. That's awesome

Like this. The first line you hear after making a Charr is 'The Charr killed their Gods'. No! Humans killed their Gods, it was the whole plot of the first game. They even added some extra missions after where you go back to Ascalon and kill the top Charr and the rest of the Titans to make sure, implying that Ascalon would finally be freed.

It's nice to see someone else post their thoughts about the game rather than just the usual shitposting funtimes. I don't have time to really add to the discussion now, but if anyone is interested in something specific about the game, ask away. I've been playing since launch with no breaks and don't regret it one bit.

>>16163862

> "they aimed at casual"

>are they retarded then?

There was alot of casuals back during Beta+Launch complaining about not knowing where to go that they essentially had to cater to them because too many dumb f#cks kept getting lost. Everyone else just left the moment they saw that the currency exchange in the cash shop wasn't going away since being able to buy ingame gold is the breaking point for alot of players.

They only made a small tweak to the currency conversion over time so it'll instead cater more to buying gems with ingame gold over buying gems for ingame gold. This wasn't enough for most users but remember the people who got lost? Yeah, those were the ones that remained and many of them never saw any issue with the game back then as well, not even the whole buying ingame gold with real currency. Hence why GW2 is in the state as it is right now cause the hardcore crowd have already left years ago.

>>16179912

> f#cks

>I remembered I still have this game installed

>>16179982

For what purpose

>>16184550

Sure thing. I'd say that's one of the most straightforward issues and doesn't merit too much elaboration, but since I forgot about those when I was doing combat shit, I'll go over it.

In GW1, you had your Signet of Capture, which allowed you to obtain Elite Skills from bosses throughout the game world. These were incredibly powerful abilities that you could only slot 1 of that would radically affect your build and playstyle, so much so that many builds were defined by their choice of Elite Skill.

In GW2, on the other hand, you can still only slot 1, but you get them like any other skill by leveling and spending your skill points, and they're essentially just another button in your "mash bar for biggest damage" rotation. You generally can't use them often due to their long cooldowns, and they have very little in the "Oomph!" department. They don't seriously alter your build at all, they're just there to act as more damage or rarely situational utility if you're in a fight that needs a specific type of ability.

They were so lazy they couldn't even be fucked to make a massive variety of them like in GW1. For instance, 36 Elite Warrior Skills in GW1. In GW2, there are 5. They try to pad the number out with Racial Elite Skills, but those're basically all garbage that never get picked because Anet didn't actually want race to be a mechanical factor when deciding a character, which defeats the point of giving them different skills in the first place. It's pathetic.

>>16184686

Following up on the major races, I'll go over a few extra locations and factions of note:

The Durmand Priory: The resident scholarly faction and comprise 1/3 of the Pact. They're led by one of the last remaining dwarves and essentially show up whenever the player needs some kind of lore information to progress or a magical spell or artifact to conclude a plotline. They're basically a faction of plot contrivances, and they've got some of the most annoying NPCs. Their representative is Magister Seiran, a stupid bitch.

The Vigil: The resident warrior faction and 1/3 of the Pact. I actually had to look up their name because I couldn't recall it. They run into problems regularly by charging headfirst into every conflict and never develop a more sophisticated strategy, but once the player character joins them they don't have to worry because no tactical, logistical, or martial advantage can overcome pure firepower. They mostly exist to shout and get killed like redshirts. Their representative is Warmaster Forgal Kernsson, a cool old warrior guy who's sad his family died.

The Order of Whispers: The resident spy faction and 1/3 of the Pact. They're the most obnoxious kind of faction in any story - one that's only competent because everyone else is incompetent. I'm no secret agent, but I guarantee I know more about espionage than the fuckwits that wrote these idiots. Adding insult to injury, joining this faction gets you a ton of extra dialogue that the other factions just don't offer, so I can with certainty say that Arenanet managed something few developers could imagine: they can't even balance their lore. Their representative is Tybalt Leftpaw, one of the closest things the game has to a real character and a fan-favorite for that reason.

The Pact: Take the three retard collectives above and mash them into a giant megafaction. Much in the same way that putting 10 people with IQs of 80 doesn't net you a collective IQ of 800, these guys only get less competent when they're forced to work together. They're led by the player character and Traehearne, a sylvari diplomat/scholar that's… divisive, to say the least. I'll get into him when I get to the characters, because I wasn't kidding when I said this game's story takes a lot of untangling to truly dig into how bad it is.

Lion's Arch: A city-state of pirates led by the Captain's Council. I've never been able to figure out how Lion's Arch actually works, because they maintain positive relations with all of the playable races, so I'm not sure who they're plundering. There are hostile pirates, but I never really got the impression that Lion's Arch is a city of privateers either. It mostly just seems to exist to have a central hub city that wasn't flavored with a specific race in mind. The redesign ruined it.

Beastmen: Races of beastfolk that mostly exist to act as local threats in the zones you explore. Most of them have a very simple overarching culture, and you can befriend a few of the races in the Personal Story, but in general they don't do much beyond antagonist the civilized races.

Elona: The obligatory Africa/Arabia black and brown people region. It came under the sway of the God-King Palawa Joko, a lichlord from GW1 that eventually overran the continent. It was actually pretty cool in GW1, but was the second xpac of GW2 and the one that made me truly give up on the game, so you can imagine how that went.

Cantha: The obligatory Asia yellow people region. It was cut off from the rest of the world by a policy of isolationism and Zhaitan's undead fleets of the doomed threatening their waters. Their capital was an awesome Kowloon Walled City hellhole, and I can only hope Arenanet folds before they can taint this wonderful portion of the setting.

Consortium: A group of shady businessmen that were relevant in the first Living Story and then kind of fell by the wayside. Like many things in the game, they had some potential but it never went anywhere.

Scarlet's Armies: A collective of several villainous factions from the first Living Story. I'll talk about her when I get to that part, but these guys were probably the high point of the game just from sheer variety, as terrible as Scarlet herself was.

>>16184824

Now to approach the elephant in the room: Destiny's Edge and the other major characters. Guild Wars 2 honestly has some of the worst characters I've ever seen in a game. I hate to say it, but it's the truth. Now granted this is just my opinion, but I think there are typically two ways you want to approach characters. You can make them deep and nuanced with lots of history and personality and you really try to become that person - you write a good character. On the other hand, you can forgo a lot of that and leave the depth and fine detail to the dedicated writers and just make archetypal characters that fill the role you need and make them endearing through dialogue, character design, and the personality you infuse them - you write an entertaining character. Most writers can do one or the other on a character-by-character basis, but I'd say it takes an exceptional writer to do both within a character, so I'll settle for one or the other. The problem is that Arenanet's writers can't do either, as we'll delve into.

I should've probably put this in the last section, but here works too. Destiny's Edge is the driving force of the Personal Story outside of the main character, and they hold a lot of it down even more than the general quality of the writing. A disgraced guild of heroes that fell into poor standing and disbanded after they failed to kill the elder dragon Kralkatorrik, far too much of the story is dedicated to setting up and establishing that these stupid fucks hate each other and even the end of the world isn't enough to make them get over their egos and unfuck themselves. It's the kind of childish, short-sighted characterization I'd expect from writers that think emotions are the highest stakes the world can muster.

Logan Thackeray: Token human in Destiny's Edge. Captain of the Seraph, the army of Kryta. He is the highest-ranking member of the Seraph we see and is seemingly the defacto leader, but he also conducts regular on-the-ground work, down to issues as small as dealing with local bandit leaders. His position is vague and his character comes down to having an unrequited crush on the queen and cracking bad one-liners. To the writers' credit, everyone else also acts like he's a dipshit whenever he drops those and he reacts with an awkward laugh or mild embarrassment, which makes him one of the more endearing members of the group. His role in the downfall of DE was that the queen was in danger when they were meant to fight the dragon, so he bounced and left the raid without a tank. His main beef is with Rytlock Brimstone (finally remembered his last name).

Rytlock Brimstone: Token charr in Destiny's Edge. A no-nonsense general in the Blood Legion (charr infantry) that oversees the charr player and tends to work towards his own ends when he's not relegated to desk work. He plays by the rules but wants results above all else, so he's exactly the kind of superior a PC in an RPG wants. Cool enough guy with one of the better voice actors, I don't actually recall him doing anything wrong within the context of the guild. He does hold Logan's choosing the Queen over them against him though, and heavily hinders attempts to get the group back together - typically by calling everyone pussies. Cool guy.

Eir Stegalkin: Token norn in Destiny's Edge. A great viking hero that's already made her legend several times over offscreen. She's a hot milf but that also makes her used goods since her husband, a similarly famous hero whose name I forgot, died in glorious battle against Jormag. Her voice-acting is pretty phoned in and she's incredibly boring. In the first Living Story they try to rectify this by giving her an angsty son that's upset she was too busy repeatedly saving the world to raise him properly, but it doesn't work. She made the call to fight Krabby Patty even though Logan had bounced, so Zojja hates her for being stupid.

Zojja: A stupid bitch.

>>16184994

Caithe: Token sylvari of Destiny's Edge. She's one of the Firstborn sylvari and has a bunch of skeletons in her closet since she inadvertently caused the formation of the Nightmare Court and her sister/girlfriend joined it. This gets worse in Living Story 2 when it's revealed she murdered a fellow Firstborn and knew the sylvari were defective dragon minions all along as a consequence. She just wants everyone to get along and wants her evil sister/girlfriend to renounce villainy so she can stop sleeping on the couch. Her many attempts at reuniting the group are stymied by her friends acting like children, but she's not the brightest bulb in the box either.

Snaff: More like Snafu. Token asura of Destiny's Edge. He was killed when they made their ill-fated assault on Snapkracklepop. This led his apprentice, Zojja, to resent Eir Stegalkin and become a stupid bitch, and his other apprentice, Kudu, to take the reins at the Inquest and become their mad genius leader. Zojja never shuts the fuck up about him and gets mad whenever Kudu brings him up or says she was the shittier pupil (even though he's correct).

Glint: One of Krakadile Dundee's progeny but good that tries to help Destiny's Edge fight the Elder Dragons. She perishes when they fuck up their assault on Kerrang! Magazine. Her egg becomes a major plot point in the second Living Story and the first expansion.

Trahearne: One of the firstborn sylvari and not a member of Destiny's Edge. He has a real bad rap from the fandom for being involved in fantasy hero bullshit and upstaging the player without doing much. If you played GW1, imagine Kormir, but a soft-spoken sylvari necromancer, and you're more or less on the money. I'll actually diverge from the brunt of the community in that I don't hate Trahearne. I'm not in love with him, but he's honestly not as bad as people say. Throughout the plot he second guesses himself, needs the PC to generally help him out, and at the end of the day when Zhaitan lies dead on the ground he turns around and all but confesses his love for you because you were the only person he could rely on to get shit done and all but outright says you're the real force behind the Pact, which is more dicksucking than I'm comfortable with, but is a refreshing amount of humility from a faction leader in an MMO by my reckoning. His ghost even shows up in one of the later storylines to bequeath you his awesome greatsword of legend, Caladbolg. Since the fan response to him was so negative, he was outright killed (by the player's hand, no less) at the end of the first expansion while Divinity's Reach was just put on various buses. Kind of a shame, I hated him less than most of the other characters, but I also don't care about being the chosen one hero guy. I suppose if that matters to you he comes across as a massive middle finger.

Mentor: The Pact representatives mentioned above. They all fill the same role, so I'll lump them together: show up, theoretically ingratiate themselves with the player, get killed by the Risen to make you really care about killing Zhaitan. Sieran is the worst by far and I could dedicate a whole post to how awful she is, but that's just unnecessary. Forgal is a cool guy, and Tybalt is a cooler guy.

Zhaitan: The undead dragon. He's not actually a character and neither are any of his minions, but they still chose him as the main antagonist so I guess he should be on the roster.

Faolain: Leader of the Nightmare Court, her sole goal in life is to convince Caithe that pussy tastes better when it's infused with raw malevolence. She appears at multiple points to try and tempt Caithe with yuri and that's basically it. It's actually kind of funny.

Kudu: Snaff's superior apprentice and the leader of the Inquest. He's got some of the most screentime of any of the bad guys, appearing in story missions and as a boss fight in two separate dungeons, and is relevant to Zojja's background.

Later, Destiny's Edge gets replaced by a group of faggots that come together and form a guild called Dragon's Watch. I'll go over them and any others during the relevant Living Story sections. The playerbase got to choose the name from a list of options and this is the gay shit they went with, in case you needed a reminder of what the community was like.

>>16184996

>glint dies in gw2 lore

>not being killed by the ascended heroes in the flame seeker prophecies as a test

Any other inconsistencies with the first games lore?

>>16187668

To give you an idea of how fucking lazy the devs are, here's the single plot point that really made me lose my shit.

They literally wrote the gods fucking off. Not disappearing mysteriously, they literally pack their shit, tell humanity they are abandoning them to go colonize a new world because this one is fucked, and just…fuck off.

In the EXACT SAME FUCKING STORY ARC, they reveal that Grenth actually does sort ALL the souls in Tyria of every race, regardless of who they worship and because he's fucked off, he's left a fucking intern in charge of doing this now, an intern who can't handle shit and you have to bail out. Grenth hasn't been gone for more then a decade and this guy already can't do his job, you know, the tiny, unimportant task of sorting the souls of all the dead in Tyria. This proceeds to have no consequences.

Also in the exact same fucking arc, Balthazar is the only god who doesn't fuck off. He refuses and decides to stay and fight. He decides to kill all the dragons and eat their magic to see if there is some way he can maintain the world himself and tries to recruit humanity to help him. The God of War tries to get humanity, including the main character, to help him slay the elder dragons with him. Your character flat refuses, because it's 'too dangerous'. You have no say in this. You cannot pick Team Balthazar, no matter what.

When you finish the expansion, you've murdered the God of War, feeding his power to one of the Elder Dragons, making him even more powerful and all of humanity knows their gods have abandoned them. Now, in Guild Wars, the Gods are incredibly important to humanity. They are the ones who brought humanity to Tyria in the first place and gave them Divine Right over the world. Balthazar himself is the one who told them to claim the Charr lands for themselves. The Capital City of humanity is literally called Divinity's Reach and it's effectively a giant temple to the gods. The cultural impact of having your gods, which your entire culture is based on, abandon you should be huge. Divinity's Reach should literally be on fucking fire as soon as the news sinks in that humanity has been forsaken.

And nothing happens. No one even fucking mentions it. Hell, the fact you murdered the God of War is barely mentioned. All because the writers didn't want to deal with the Gods being around, because if they were, they'd have to answer why they aren't trying to stop the world from exploding. So, instead, the Gods, who invested centuries upon centuries into Tyria, who brought Humanity to the world in the first place, one of whom, Grenth, is actually half fucking human to begin with, just said 'Well, this worlds fucked', packed their shit and left.

And no one fucking cares.

It is, without doubt, the laziest writing I have ever seen.

>Hey we somehow made an original MMO that people love, lets make a sequel!

>Oh but lets gut everything that made it unique and loved and just make another generic WoW clone

I still have buyers remorse over it to this day, the first and last game I ever preordered.

>>16167678

>he sylvari are a race of noble pansexual plant people

it took me a while to know they were all bisexual and i fucking hated that shit, my main girl was a plant engy.

>>16168620

>but if anyone is interested in something specific about the game

tell me about the dragon egg that got stolen by a lesbo salad and why i cant raise my own baby dragon

>>16188556

I was oblivious to the goofy bugs/exploits going on like the glorious plank spam on the top of the long-ass jumping puzzle in Obsidian Sanctum (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD3CTPPRCJc), but I did get to experience the glory days of organized WvW like in your vid.

>competent, laid back guild raids

>socially competent, easygoing white guy with a smooth voice barking out my orders instead of the usual unintelligible BR or SEAmonkey

>pre-CC nerf so small groups could control entire 60-man blobs of mindless pugs if they were too stupid to pop their stability (they were)

>siege was weaker, siegehumping was limited and defensive buffs were nonexistent, meaning straight-up mass fights were the name of the game

>tfw dueling organized enemy guilds and breaking map blobs alike during raids that started at 10PM and only petered out at 4AM when the competition went to bed and our raiders were falling asleep in their chairs

Some of the most fun I've ever had playing video games. Then it just got consistently worse in every aspect. The good stuff never got updated or was killed by patch-outs, the bad stuff got buffed to shit and now everyone who ever enjoyed WvW is more bitter than your average /v/irgin.

>>16188469

>When you finish the expansion, you've murdered the God of War, feeding his power to one of the Elder Dragons, making him even more powerful and all of humanity knows their gods have abandoned them

nani da fuck?!

>>16192305

>but it ultimately gets surrogated into the hands of magic armor people for safekeeping

>mfw

fuck it, it was boring doing those missions, im just dropping this game.

>>16188469

>the laziest writing I have ever seen.

That's cause the writing team that worked on the original Guild Wars game didn't write the story for this one and the only bugger remaining was Bobby, the guy who wrote strategy guides prior to being employed as a writer and guess what's his position now? LEAD FUCKING WRITER.

The other writers that work under him? They didn't have a career prior to being employed to work as a writer for Guild Wars 2 so they're just trying their damnedest to not get fired and considering how one of them was fired over their insane tweets and viewpoints? Yeah, their most likely keeping their asses on the dirt level now. The only person with some actual bloody experience is David and that bugger was only recently hired to work on the expac Path of Fire as a writer because they needed someone with experience.

> how fucking lazy the devs are.

That's what happens when all of your gamers are casuals, you can just get fat and lazy and still watch the piss pots spend thousands of dollars to just take the lazy way out. .

>>16188469

>When you finish the expansion, you've murdered the God of War, feeding his power to one of the Elder Dragons, making him even more powerful and all of humanity knows their gods have abandoned them.

This is the first I've heard of this and very currently the most upsetting thing about the game.

>>16194497

>Balthazar is now a villain who is killed

>literally the patron god of every player character in the first game

>who helped maintain balance in the world through the necessary art of war

>the entire zaishen order thrown into the toilet lore wise

This sealed the deal with me on never playing this horrible fucking game

>>16184996

Picking back up, those are the assholes that you're spending about… 60% of the Personal Story to deal with. After the description I've laid out, I don't really think I even need to elaborate on the finer points of the story. The structure doesn't matter, the chapters don't matter, and the characters sure as fuck don't matter. So with that in mind, Living Story 1.

The Living Story/World was a very ambitious idea: what if the world of an MMO evolved as the story did? Instead of just hopping a year into the future whenever you buy an expansion, the idea of the Living Story was that you would get small but regular updates that would keep the world up to date. You never have to question where the story is at because the world is always up to date. New dialogue, new content, new quests in old locales, etc. to reflect the current state of the world.

I actually like this idea quite a lot. The idea that maybe, just as an example, the centaur legions push into Queensdale, so now centaurs are the predominant enemy of the zone, perhaps towns are burned, new warcamps are established - that's all a great idea. But there are some problems with this premise:

For starters, if your primary focus is keeping the world up to date, your content library never really expands beyond the first metaphorical bookshelf. That is to say, while you're consistently producing content, it comes at the cost of past content. Part of the reason a behemoth like WoW lumbers on is because there's so fucking much of it, but if you consume a bit of content every time you implement some new content, you've only got as much to do as your base game, whatever features manage to survive each update, and the swiftness of your update schedule.

Another problem is that a lot of effort has to go into every one of these updates, no matter how minor, if you don't want to harm player immersion. So if the local bandits have been replaced by a horde of zombies, you now need to have the area, enemies, and quests updated to reflect this. You need dialogue in other parts of the world updated to reflect this. You need to consider what you're removing and how the players will react when they find out you nuked their favorite NPC family's homestead. And I imagine that for a relatively small team like Arenanet, this just became too much to continue. While I did like this delivery format, I do think it was probably a bit too grand in scope for them to maintain indefinitely.

The finer details of Season 1 of the Living Story are ones I don't remember especially well since it was years ago now and you can't replay it. As eluded to by others in the thread, Destiny's Edge, outside of Caithe, is mostly relegated to being offscreen and I have little doubt this is because the players that did care about the story gave negative feedback. The problem is, you get a cast that is arguably more insufferable to replace them. Some are still just as flat and boring, but others compound it by being obnoxious to up the ante and fool the players into thinking they're actual realized characters.

>>16197628

Our dramatis personae is as follows:

Marjory Delaqua: A vaguely Canthan lesbian that acts as a bad pastiche of film noir protagonists. Having something of a soft spot for the genre, listening to "I was just about to close shop for the night when the dame walked into my office. I should be used to it by now, though, broads always do show up at the worst time…" type shit delivered in a faux-husky drawl was always fucking obnoxious. If you want a reason not to play this game, it's so you can avoid this bitch and her dumb lesbian romance plot.

Braham Eirsson: Eir Stegalkin's son of questionable ethnicity. He's got some mommy abandonment issues but those don't really manifest into anything meaningful. Early on, the angle seems to be that he's a young, plucky hero that's been thrust into grim circumstances but is trying to persevere nonetheless, and he gets a few fun moments, but as the story progresses he just gets edgier until he's a wet sack.

Lady Kasmeer Meade: A lesbian mesmer that forms the other half of the requisite token gay romance for this arc. Her storyline about coming from a disgraced family never actually amounts to anything and she basically exists to be a dumb blonde and supply necessary mesmer magics as the plot necessitates it.

Taimi: A cute little asuran scientist girl with big dreams and crippled legs that rides around in a golem she treats like a pet. She's the resident technobabble expert and solves every magical/scientific quandary for the player offscreen, then gives them a phonecall so they know how to best hit the newest thing. There's a hilarious scene in Heart of Thorns where her golem "dies" and it's meant to be a really dramatic moment even though it's not fucking sentient and can just be rebuilt.

Rox: A charr ranger chick with big moe eyes and a cute pet devourer. I don't remember anything about her because she doesn't have a character. She might want to fuck the norn I can't recall.

Scarlet Briar: The big elephant in the room for S1, Scarlet Briar is an evil sylvari engineer/blacksmith/mage/criminal mastermind with a convoluted backstory that orchestrates most of the calamities that befall the world in S1. Having been put in touch with the slumbering dragon Mordremoth and driven mad, she wants to awaken it so it will focus on fucking up the world and hopefully leave her alone. To this end, she orchestrates alliances between several of the villainous factions in the world, which then go on to collectively form Scarlet's Armies when she invades Lion's Arch so she can breach the city harbor with a massive arcane drill and awaken the dragon. It's honestly kind of awesome, even if she is another blatant mary sue, albeit a villainous one. With how much work they put into building her up and trying to flesh out the state of the world, getting to finally put a bullet in her for every stupid quip, obnoxious minion, and dead NPC was surprisingly cathartic, doubly so since you fight her on top of a giant magitek drill over the ruins of a now-occupied Lion's Arch. She's voiced by Tara Strong, though, so don't go liking her too much.

Canach: A sylvari mercenary working for the Consortium. His task? Settling their new resort island retreat, Southsun Cove. There's only one problem: Southsun Cove is infested with karka, a breed of monstrous crustaceans. After they accidentally stir up the karka and the beasts follow them back Lion's Arch, the Consortium tries to throw him under the bus. Now a wanted man, Canach tries to make amends by destroying the Consortium's worker dossiers that hold all of the contracts effectively keeping them as slave labor. He's probably one of the only villains with any personal conflict or deeper motive, and then he gets an entire redemption arc and remains a useful contact later on. Easily the most likeable guy in the game.

Mai Trin: The leader of the Aetherblades and one of Scarlet's lieutenants. After Scarlet assassinates one of the councilmen in Lion's Arch, Mai Trin tries to replace him but is revealed to be Scarlet's toady and promptly apprehended by the players. She escapes, however, and remains a loose end to this day.

Ellen Kiel: An investigator working for the Lionguard that hounds Canach, Mai Trin, and later Scarlet herself. She's voted onto the Captain's Council for her good deeds, an event which actually took the form of a real election among the players with related content.

Evon Gnashblade: A ruthless charr businessman that runs the in-universe equivalent of the cash shop. He opposed Ellen Kiel and lost even though he'd have made a far better councilman. His slogan really sums up his character: "Ah, I love the smell of commerce in the morning!"

Job-o-Tron: A tiny golem that became a running joke that went on for far too long.

>>16188469

To reiterate, I honestly would take the gods fucking off a lot better if there were at least some consequences from it. Humanity should be in the grips of an existential crisis as the basis of their entire culture was just ripped out from under them.

And literally, nothing. Not a throw away line, the statues of all the gods in Divinity's Reach are still there, people in Elona continue to pray and support Kormir. Nothing. Not a god damn ripple.

I lack words for how utterly lazy it is.

>>16197633

>Taimi: A cute little asuran scientist girl with big dreams and crippled legs that rides around in a golem she treats like a pet

>Rox: A charr ranger chick with big moe eyes and a cute pet devourer

It's a real shame that characters as wonderfully stupid as these are stuck being written by GW2 writers.

>in-universe election between a money-grubbing businessman and a noble m'lady paper pusher

I can't imagine where they drew inspiration for this from.

>>16197681

> support Kormir

I bet that originally the mc is suppose to kill kormir because that god went full crazy last time, but that would be extremely problematic

>>16205691

I'll work on a few posts tonight, glad people are enjoying. I'll need to check the wiki just so I don't misremember the order of things in S1. S2 wasn't nearly as memorable both in terms of content releases and story, so that one will probably be a lot quicker just because there isn't as much to go over.

>>16205760

Alright, I'll be cutting out chaff like holiday updates and minor shit that's not really relevant:

Lost Shores: Canach investigates Southsun Cove at the behest of the Consortium and disturbs the karka, who spread out into the surrounding waters and follow him back to Lion's Arch, attacking the city. You have to repel them, apprehend Canach, learn how to defeat them, then head into Southsun Cove and kill their broodmother. This event introduces the Consortium, Canach, and Inspector Ellen Kiel. The content is the new zone and some story missions and events.

Flame and Frost: This is where the main plot actually begins. Norn and charr settlements are being destroyed and refugees are flooding into Hoelbrak and the Black Citadel, their respective capitals. After a bit of investigating, this is revealed to be the work of the Molten Alliance, a newfound partnership between the dredge (who apparently didn't learn after working with the Inquest) and the Flame Legion. This storyline introduces the first of the new dungeons: The Molten Weapons Facility. This dungeon is mostly the same linear fare, but unlike the earlier dungeons you can tell they tried to make the setpieces a little more exciting and the encounters were definitely more demanding. They were mostly the same "Don't stand in the fire" mechanics, but unlike many of the game's earlier fights, these were less haphazardly handled. The Weapons Tester boss comes to mind, who releases a set series of patterns that increase in difficulty as his HP drops. The bit of craftsmanship put into this dungeon really shows next to the earlier ones, which will be a trend going forward, as this was before they decided to just start abandoning features entirely. Sadly, all of the Living Story S1 dungeons were cut as their updates came and went. They were reimplemented later, but as Fractals, and were cut into two separate ones in all cases so they'd go faster. A real shame. This event introduces Braham and Rox.

Secrets of Southsun Cove: The Consortium welcomes the refugees from the Molten Alliance's attacks with open arms, graciously offering them work contracts until they can rebuild. Of course, most fail to realize they've effectively signed themselves into slavery. The disaffected settlers, upon realizing their plight, become hostile rioters and brigands, making Southsun that much more dangerous. This event introduced Kasmeer. This one mostly just adds more events and mission in Southsun.

Last Stand at Southsun: The end of the first arc of S1, now-fugitive Canach is revealed to be behind the settlers' unrest, wanting revenge against the Consortium for making him a scapegoat and putting him on the wrong side of the law. His plan is to destroy the contracts keeping the settlers bound to the company, a genuinely good deed that will hurt his enemies to boot. Being the lawful good hero, you can't let that happen and confront him at his hideout in Southsun Cove. To her credit, while he has to be brought to justice, Ellen Kiel uses a bit of trickery to help him get what he wants, ordering the Consortium to hand the contracts over to the Lionguard for safe keeping and then letting them get destroyed. This event adds the Karka Broodmother back in as a world boss and Canach's Lair, a sort of single-player puzzle dungeon where you square off against Canach by utilizing the terrain against him. While not particularly complicated or long, the idea of puzzle content for one or more players could've really been novel, had they decided to pursue it.

Guild wars 2 is dying!?

>>16205864

I'd like to digress a bit here to talk about the improved quality of the game at the point of Season 1.

From a lore perspective, while my summary might not do it justice, you've got a pretty big step up in quality here. These plotlines aren't just self-contained, they entwine and cover a lot of ground, with events in far-flung norn and charr lands affecting the state of Lion's Arch, which kind of becomes your hub city in-character as well during this time period. Southsun Cove itself was designed to be a resort for wealthy human nobles, so even the politics of Divinity's Reach are tangentially related, and Canach is easily a High-tier villain. We even get some detail on the biology of the Karka. I think in the lore department, a lot of this can be chalked up to a name some old-school Magic: the Gathering players will be familiar with. Around this time, Scott McGough got hired on by Arenanet. You might know him as the man responsible for the Chainer's Torment and the Kamigawa novels (as well as several other less notable books and stories). I don't know if he's still with Arenanet, but I don't think it's a coincidence that his hiring coincides with the story getting better.

Mechanically speaking there's not as much to say about the new enemies this early in S1, but I think someone at Arenanet probably realized they'd dumbed down the base game too much. While the normal Molten Alliance enemies just consist of your standard Dredge and Flame Legion mobs (albeit in group compositions that weren't present in the base game), the Karka are a different beast altogether. I checked the wiki to make sure, and yeah, they're about as bad as I could recall. Your standard Karka in Southsun Cove appears as a Veteran at the weakest, with two health bars, one for their armored shells and one for their actual health. They can spit acid, lay eggs that spawn larval karka, and bullrush you down with a dangerous charge attack. While the karka were one of the more frightening enemies the game ever introduced, tougher foes became the norm as the game progressed.

You might also notice that the team was experimenting more with content and mechanics around this time, what with the aforementioned solo dungeon against Canach, players voting on in-universe elections, and zones expanding over time. While most of these features didn't last long or never really came to fruition in the first place, I think it's worth mentioning that Arenanet was kind of playing scientist in the lab and while the fundamentals of their game were standard MMO fare, I think there was some will there to try and break the formula and evolve past it. Hopefully this might also help explain why I stuck with this shitty game for so long beyond having terrible taste.

>>16205989

Continuing on with S1:

Dragon Bash: Lion's Arch decides to throw a giant party as a giant middle finger to the Elder Dragons. While I don't know what prompted this or why the Elder Dragons would care, it does provide the backdrop for the latest bit of villainy: the main ceremony is sabotaged and a member of the Captain's Council is killed in the ensuing chaos, leaving a seat open. This event introduces Marjory Delaqua and Mai Trin, the latter of which is discovered to be the culprit. As far as content goes, I recall this adding a new minigame and some brief story missions.

Sky Pirates of Tyria: Demonstrating once more that they don't understand the concept of piracy, Arenanet unveils the Aetherblades, an alliance between Tyria's (non-Lion's Arch affiliated) pirates and the Inquest, who are supplying them with deadly new technology. The Aetherblades are pretty goofy even by GW2 standards, a gang of steampunk pirates in airships with magitek weapons. Having located their hideout, Ellen Kiel and the Lionguard (as well as players) are forced to storm the place and apprehend Mai Trin, who was looking to claim the council seat she opened up at the behest of a mysterious benefactor named "Scarlet." This update introduces Mai Trin's hideout and another Aetherblade base that acts as a large microdungeon/jumping puzzle.

This hideout is, of course, the second new dungeon they added, the Aetherblade Retreat. This dungeon actually has some interesting mechanics, primarily area hazards like lightning strikes and electrical forcefields that have to be navigated and deactivated to progress. The Aetherblades themselves are new enemies with new abilities. Though their combat capabilities are still fairly limited, they have a tendency to appear in groups that can actually make tackling them comparatively dicey next to the base game's foes. The bosses are similarly more involved. The first is an Inquest researcher that sics golems on you and creates a revolving wall of electricity that has to be avoided. Whenever you're hit, you take damage, but whenever the golems are hit, they enrage, meaning they have to be kited along with the players to keep them from getting all charged up. Mai Trin, likewise, requires a bit more thinking than prior bosses, as she has stacks of a shield that reduce her damage token. Every time her first mate shoots a lightning gun, you need to kite her into the fire to knock a stack off, gradually wearing her down and making her vulnerable. She also seems to have sharper AI than the base enemies, singling out characters that try to revive downed comrades and targeting characters that try to disengage from her with dangerous ranged attacks.

Bazaar of the Four Winds: The Zephyrites, a group of weird zen monks that travel the world on a massive airship appear for their annual Festival of the Four Winds, a big to-do where they land to restock their supplies, merchants from all over gather to buy and sell from them, and folk interested in joining them can try and earn their favor. It's admittedly a pretty cool concept and introduces the Labyrinthine Cliffs, the Zephyrite landing site. While Ellen Kiel has the backing of the council, charr businessman Evon Gnashblade wants the council seat for himself and their rivalry quickly becomes bitter. To determine who will get the seat, the Council determines that one of them will need to earn the favor of the Zephyrites and secure a trade agreement. The zone itself features three varieties of crystal scattered about that allow for magical charges, magic-assisted leaps, and short range teleportation. As you can probably gather, this event is largely focused on exploration and platforming, and introduces a minigame race featuring these crystals.

>>16206071

Cutthroat Politics: The Master of the Zephyrites is unimpressed with both candidates and states that he'll only do business with a leader that has the love of his people. This leads to the aforementioned player election, wherein the content earns you tokens that act as currency to spend at the ballot box, providing more points for your candidate. While this was a small event, it was a cool concept that introduced a couple of minigames and a survival mode (that sadly wasn't made permanent) wherein you represent your candidate and battle waves of Aetherblade raiders. Kiel ended up winning, and to my knowledge there was no vote rigging on Arenanet's part so I won't bitch about it.

Queen's Jubilee: This event has a weird framing device. Wanting to celebrate the anniversary of her coronation, Queen Jennah opens a massive arena in Divinity's Reach that staffed with new clockwork golems magicked up to look and behave like different enemy-types such as bandits or charr. The Aetherblades show up to crash the party, but they're quickly dispatched and proceedings continue as usual. The two content modes here are the Crown Pavilion and the Queen's Gauntlet. The former is a large ring-shaped arena divided into six themed areas where enemies and bosses reside, the latter of which need to be killed within a set time limit for maximum loot. While this sort of breakneck farming can be fun, this sort of thing is a bit of a step back since it encourages mindless zerging. The latter is a solo gauntlet where you can face individual bosses of growing difficulty with modifiers to make the fights harder. If you ever tried the Brawler's Guild in WoW, it's essentially the same concept.

Clockwork Chaos: The Seraph inform Queen Jennah she should probably cancel the event, but she goes on with it because what's the worst that could happen, right? This allows Scarlet Briar to reveal herself to the world and cause more general havoc with the Aetherblades and the now hacked (fuck if I know how) clockwork golems. This is where you first fight Scarlet Briar in Scarlet's Playhouse, another short dungeon akin to Canach's Lair but with more straightforward gameplay. I don't recall much of anything about it, and it's never been remade into a Fractal, so it's probably not worth recollection.

>>16206077

This has ended up a lot bigger than intended, but walking back through this has been enjoyable for me at least, and I think it can be informative (though in this case probably excessively so). At this point I figure I may as well finish.

>>16206077

I think jotting down how they ended the season by unveiling Melvin-Sue sister of Harley Quinn and then gay girls doing gay thinks while Lion's Arch is getting nuked by the sheer power of Mordermoth's Maguuma Ayahuasca should suffice. That shit was less interesting in person than the walls of text make it out to be. The Market of the Four Winds was the most interesting and this only because it was one huge change in kind. Everything else simply sucked in retrospect. You won't see any remnants of Living Story ingame unless you have played it, bought in the cash shop or get a fragment of it in Fractals of autism. What made me finally give up on the game was how the first expansion turned out according to my friends. First they nuked the entire Pact thing then they raped the Character sheet so much with their Elite specializations, that the simplicity of 1 will never return. I don't have to mention how it would take a 7 more xpacs before the game had something equivalent to cass mixing.

Here is another sign of death: Crashing prices. The image shows the prices for a rare Halloween skin. This thing now costs as much as it used to in the beginning of the Game's life cycle. You can see that development in all ware groups.

Orichalcum, one of the most valuable highlevel materials.

https://www.gw2spidy.com/item/19701

Charged lodestones:

https://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24305

Even the latest items have dropped in value:

https://www.gw2spidy.com/item/83008

Same trend with predecessor weapons:

https://www.gw2spidy.com/item/29185

https://www.gw2spidy.com/item/29180

And ascended shit:

https://www.gw2spidy.com/item/46738

Can't be Gamerevision this time, because they don't give a shit about GW2.

>>16206614

Ectos are very easy to get now with farms like Istan and fractals in general. There is an iron node farm in the latest map; pretty much every map added has one specific farm node or large and easy amounts of currency obtainable to gain mats you either use or sell. Makes sense that things in general are cheaper then. There's also many ways to obtain ascended accessories and weapons or mats other than buying from the TP so people usually don't spend gold on that at all.

>>16206840

From what I gather, they always seem to be pushing for large quantities of specific mats for specific items and balancing that with a general variety of lower tier mats for most things. Nevermore, the second legendary staff, requires a ridiculous amount of all kinds of wood, but nothing else is even close to that. General mats from T2-5 are used for various things so they are actually valued higher than T6 mats that are easy to acquire for most longterm players. So if you just start the game, the mats you get from leveling up and salvaging are valuable to those that don't bother with keeping a lower level alt for Silverwastes bags.

Precursors are lower gold value because you can craft them for cheaper gold and slightly more time investment. There are other ways to obtain blueprints through guild commendations and Badges of Honour that are showered to you with reward tracks. Lodestones fit into the specific item tier, otherwise they're useless for most players.

Now I am back home and I have time to go down all of this.

First we have Eternity. This thing is the most expensive weapon in the game that isn't there, because someone has put it into the auction house as ebin troll. This thing takes two other Legendary weapons to make; Sunrise and Twillight. Its the only reason why it had cost like 4000 forever until Summer 2016 in which it spiked. Same on the second pic with Kudzu which was a poorfag choice back in Vanilla. There are all the reasons in the world for the costs of those things to explode. Eternity takes two gifts of Ascalon to make for starters. The dungeons might be in the dailies, but I can't imagine them to be that popular. After all, you have to do the Catacombs of Ascalon daily 8 times in a row. (or Catacombs of Ascalon everyday for like a week if you and 4 other people have autism). Soon you run out of energy to complete the World. Soon you run out of motivation get another Gift of Battle or Money to gamble for the gift of fortune. In other words there is no reason for the Price to crash due to a spike in supply unless something happened in summer 2016. It coincides with the release of the living story. I wonder if people really got so sick of the Burger King Kid's Club and gave up the game immediately. Maybe it is like you have explained and people really were dumb enough to expect Anet to give you a easy to get legendary great sword from the get go. Other than that I see decline everywhere, yet not how it could be brought into the game by two new zones. The more interesting stories are told by the Mini Awakened Abomination, the rarest Minipet in the game and Omega Siege Golem blue Prints. The price of one is spiked to 9000 and the price of the other declined from 2 gp to about 50 Silver. What the fuck is going on?

>>16207619

>Maybe it is like you have explained and people really were dumb enough to expect Anet to give you a easy to get legendary great sword from the get go.

See the top three classes on Efficiency? I can guarantee you there are far more rangers than this. Rangers are a plague. If someone doesn't understand the core game mechanics, how to effectively use the TP, how to manage their inventory, doesn't understand the concept of CC, that is a casual ranger, typically a human female (or norn female if played by a nonsoyboy) with mad cravings for something like Kudzu. 5signet warriors are a thing of the past, but their ilk still want something to complement their Eternity they grinded out in the first month after launch. Guardians are the WvW commanders and you gotta look flashy for that whatever you do. So you have three types of players who desperately want whatever topical legendary they need for their character theme, but ALL three classes have greatswords available. That's why Eternity is still so costly even after precursor crafting was introduced. Unlike Kudzu which is only sylvari ranger bait. The tiger bow from HoT is more popular than Kudzu with those types. Also the godawful unicorn joke legendary.

Don't know about the minis. The golem blueprints are cheap with guild commendations and badges of honour, nobody really buys them from the TP. Also, what do you mean by two zones? There have been far more maps released during the past seasons.

>>16207684

>5 signet warriors

This is still one of the best screenshots I've ever taken.

>>16207619

>What the fuck is going on?

<Casual buys 30k worth of gold with IRL cash

<Uses that gold to buy the best gear found on the AH.

That's why.

If people aren't buying it, then they won't sell and at this point the only people buying that kinda stuff are those that haven't worked for it and since the game has been catering more towards the whales with adding in stuff like Infinite use gathering tools and everything in one place cash shop teleportation. The game as a whole is just killing itself with how much the game is handholding them. The current state of the game isn't any better as it's even worse with how little effort is needed to play the game anymore.

>But the bosses are pretty cool

They are just DPS zerg checks. Sure, they are flashy but that's all they are. It takes 0 skill to mash a button and hang in a group of roughly 30 - 50 people.

>But you can't zerg all of them.

True but again, just DPS checks. It doesn't take a genius at fighting to figure out "don't stand in the fire" or "keep him outside of that spot" in a group of 3-4 people.

>The combat is cool.

The game relies heavily on AOEs, there is only a few single target damage in the whole game. That's why almost every single World Boss fight looks like a bloody Rave Party is going on. This isn't good combat, it's just an AOE spam fest.

>>16207737

Absolutely disgusting, dead game.

How could GW 2's equivalent of ectoplasm globs decline into GW1's equivalent of 2P?

How have they started the trend of all metarials becoming as cheap as leather?

How come that most minis declined in value except for one exception that costs a your very soul and 12 temple maiden?

One part of the answer might lay in the employment history of a certain John Smith.The economy of GW2 was infamous to be more regulated than the Soviet Union relative to the first one. John Smith was in control of it for the entire life cycle of the game until April 2017, until they have fired him. Read some of the fluff piece about him. If you still play that game in contrary to me, you'll need that walk down Memory Lane more than I do.

https://archive.is/hH1tW

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/John_Smith

For what I can only guess. Pic related shows a good candidate: The value of a Gem in coin costs about 23 Silver and 44 Copper and buing gems with them gets you a 66% fee of 14 silver and 70 copper if I haven't fucked up the Math. So far straight forward. What did happen was a spike of the price in April 2016. For some reason I don't know, people decided to pump that motherfucker up. Remember Anets justification of the Gem Shop that went like people who have no time but money can buy themselves gold. Her is where GW-Spidey has done the Math for me. A GP gosts 0.05 dollars. Which makes 20 Gold cost about a buck.This makes Eternity cost 157,45 by the way. I Might be a autistic faggot, but I am not an idiot. Despite all their best efforts, Mr Smith and Arenanet had gang banged the pooch here. Its balls to the walls MUD-flation wherever you go unless its something rare and retarded like a mini panda on steroids, a entire line of herbal XTC similar to Lewi's cannibal tabs and a lot of Crystal Meth. What a is a MUD-flation? Good tat you ask

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Mudflation

Mudflation is a inflation that naturally occurs in MMOs bacause the supply of money grows endlessly as reflected by the value of the Dollar to GW 2 coin. A GP used to be a 1 now you need 20 to buy yourself a Marsbar. According to common knowledge about MUD-flation, the prices should go skyrocket. Instead the market is crashed, because people simply stopped playing by the looks of it.

>>16207821

See above. This is exactly what I wrote. There is so much dough going around that everything should cost a gorillion.

<But the bosses are pretty cool

No they are not.

<But you can't zerg all of them.

But you can spike them all to death or you'll just throw rocks at them until they die.

<The combat is cool.

No it isn't. 80% of it relies on the same shit the floor is lava mechanics. You have described the problems with world bosses pretty well.

>>16207684

This just makes it lines up perfectly what I have observed in Vanilla. By two Zones I mean exactly the two zones they slappend on when the prices began to decline. Guild Commendations strike me as even more ebin source of MUD-flation, because the price of Guild Golems crashed pretty hard.

>the game has been catering more towards the whales with adding in stuff like Infinite use gathering tools and everything in one place cash shop teleportation. The game as a whole is just killing itself with how much the game is handholding them.

This has inspired me to take a look at the GEM store. What do we have here?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gem_Store

<Unbreakable Gathering Tools for 2400 gems i.e 30 Dollarydoos

<World Boss Portal Device 400 gems i.e 5 Dollarydoos

<Additional crafting professions for 400 gems i.e 10 Dollarydoos

<A full level item instantly in your shared account ivnentory for 2000 gems i.e 25 Dollarydoos

<5 of those shared inventory slots for 2800 gems i.e 35 Dollarydoos

Now that's just ballers, because there is the option to buy a additonal Xunlai chest pane for 10 dollars in the NC-soft shop. thats about 1,90 for 5 Xunlai chest slots.

https://archive.is/OpwkK

I think I have seen enough. This almost as depressing as what happened to wartower.de

>>16208020

>shat all over their old playerbase and predictably failed to gain a new one.

Where's all the Asura posting? It's the only good thing to have come out of that game.

F

>>16209770

It's an ancient maymay. The game has been totally dying since launch for a variety of reasons, for a brief period of time it was because everyone and their mother was a 5sig warrior. Currently, the game is dying because of gemshop cancer.

>>16210073

Holosmith is top tier.

>>16210115

Yes, that's the joke.

>>16210127

>public roleplayers

oh baby, brings back memories

so many memories…

>>16210197

There were regular Rata Sum rpers almost daily once. Now I see them less and less. SAB will never be finished.

>>16191329

Humans still have an advantage. It's heavily implied that humans are the best at using magic, especially those with noble/royal blood. Not only that, but humans naturally act as 'magic batteries', that being that can absorb huge amounts of latent magic to become far more powerful. So if a Bloodstone is broken, a human can absorb the magic within for a massive power boost, albeit with some serious side effects. The implication is that non-humans cannot do the same, at least not nearly to the same extent.

The problem with this is, it only ever comes into play when it would help the bad guys, never the good guys. So, the one major advantage humans have is constantly being portrayed as doing more harm then good.

>>16213530

>why do humans keep getting shafted?

It's because the developers were never fans of the humans from the get go. So they try and use every opportunity to trounce on the race without actually outright killing the race off. But i'm not surprised considering that most of the development team are Charr fans without much knowledge about the universe, thus resulting in them accidentally having treated the Charr as some sorta sudo human race. It gets worse though as when you are playing as a human your character will still act like they know next to 0 gods even after the base games endgame. The only playable race which remains consistent with it's lore is the Sylvari and that's the race which didn't exist prior to guild wars 2.

>The problem.

The real problem is that most of the writing team for the game have 0 talent and know only the basics about the lore prior to the game they created.

>>16158496

Because it was the first minigame where playing well earned you a unique prize that you could show-off, the first minigame where you could play solo and not be fucked over by dim teammates (just forget Dragon's Nest even exists), and played almost-completely unlike any of other combat and competitive content that existed in the game. It's really that first part that made it a success though, I believe. The most special thing about it was the minipet you could win and leaderboard you could climb by posting a good time. Without that, you wouldn't have gotten nearly the kind of community and interest that built up around the mode.

Sanctum Sprint is overall a better game than Rollerbeetle Racing though. Despite the drawback of global powerups that can fuck you over from losers on anywhere on the map and a powerup that can warp players ahead great leaps on the course, the freedom of the z-axis and map design alone are great steps forward in fun and complexity. But, Sanctum Sprint is dead as fuck and nobody ever plays it because there's no reason to. There's no draw, because there's no good prize for playing your best. First place gets an insignificant amount of coin and karma than every other place, which itself can be earned much faster outside the game. Unlike RBR that ends 30 seconds after the first player finishes, Sanctum Sprint will go until the end of the match, which means the sooner you finish, the more you wait (and for an extra slap in the face, if you idle for two minutes, you get kicked out of the game). And of course, there's no leaderboard for finishing quickly, no prize for finishing quickly, and no event to showcase either of those things. ANet wanted to make a racing game for their sequel and left out the biggest reason why it succeeded before anyways.

Now there are rollerbeetle mounts, so suckers that buy into the latest expansion can have a sandbox-like experience by bringing one of those anywhere they choose, but there's still no competitive draw or feature (adventure races are just as casual and unrewarding). There is somehow a community of people who like using the mount and calling themselves races, but since this is already picking from the pool of players that are the kind to buy a GW2 expansion, it does not surprise me that some group of them flock to something ANet makes just because it exists.

Here's more example of what you can do by having your racing game with a z-axis and some level of allowable sequence breaking.

>>16205989

>Arenanet probably realized they'd dumbed down the base game too much.

they literally had to. they wanted the mouthbreathing casual retards for them shekels, and remember that half the classes (and balance in general) were absolute shit at launch, which means even the actually good players were hampered left and right by the game itself. also can't have retards getting fed up and stop spending money on shit when they get facefucked the second they step outside the cities with their shit build (which, again, is not even their own fault half the time due to the systems itself being absolute horseshit).

what >>16207684 mentioned also plays into this.

> If someone doesn't understand the core game mechanics, how to effectively use the TP, how to manage their inventory, doesn't understand the concept of CC, that is a casual ranger, typically a human female (or norn female if played by a nonsoyboy)

problem is classes behave absolutely nothing like their implied archetype. have a chick that want to tame cute pets and pewpew from the back (make it easier to dodge shit, gives better overview and simply have to point an shoot - aka the noob option) NOPE. bow sucks complete ass for anything, because that's what people want from a fucking RANGER class: grab a greatsword and do melee.

same for guardian, shield is mostly pointless, a fucking warrior can shrug off damage better to the point a guardian just feels squishy (while having to work twice as hard as some other specs just to be on equal footing). it's utterly retarded and mindboggling.

>>16206566

>the simplicity of 1 will never return. I don't have to mention how it would take a 7 more xpacs before the game had something equivalent to cass mixing.

in the best timeline ncsoft completely cans anusnet, ends gw2 with chronomancer shenanigans and retcon all that shit back to a few years after gw1 (or even before with the whole guild wars) for gw3. considering how ass the story is in general no one would bat an eye.

>>16207037

>>16207619

>I wonder if people really got so sick of the Burger King Kid's Club and gave up the game immediately.

funny story: this thread actually made me play again, and I have to admit I somewhat enjoy it. there's a lot dogshit still but mainly playing vanilla I have no idea how much expansion fix that (silverwastes is the kind of content that should've been in at launch).

but here's the thing: I completely ignored the story. yesterday I thought "let's catch up with s2 and see what the fuss is all about" - it's literally fucking diversity's edge, but it doesn't stop there. abysmal horseshit writing across the board. like holy shit I don't want to hear your fucking relationship drama in the middle of enemy territory. also a female "investigator" with a french name? that fucking reeks of more victorian steampunk shit angel mccoy shat into guild wars…

>>16198386

those aren't necessarily bad character traits (besides the fucking moe eyes, wtf were they thinking), problem is again bottom of the barrel writers. there's load of potential to go with those character outlines, but man there's better written highschool tier fanfiction out there.

>>16152279

christ this shit is cringeworthy. Good that this game bored me too much that i only played a couple of hours before i stopped (as a Guild Wars 1 fan it disappointed me a lot)