Well, back from work. WARNING! Wall of text incoming...
Grammar spelling mistakes absolved with me - your Xenogears username gives you a free pass
Welcome aboard, I too am a recent approval who has been following the GW2 threads here for months!
Thanks a lot! Is that FFIV's Kain with a bow in your avatar?
And all of them pointless. That's actually more of my posts than I've read!
Believe me, they were everything but pointless to me.
You guys' posts (and mailing back and forth with Hawkian, who had to put up with all my ramblings) are what made these late months' wait bearable. It was always a delight seeing that Kid Dracula and reading your enthusiastic posts.
Seriously though, welcome to GAF. Be sure to post your GW2 name in
the community thread and we'll see you in BWE3.
That's right, I should! I'll do it as soon as I finish this post.
Regarding the Elder Dragon fights, I can't imagine what they have in mind... which is awesome. I mean, I had way more fun than I should in the BWE cleaning waterways, feeding cows, gathering apples and watering crops. Even "kill quests" and "gather quests" were made so special thanks to the stuff surrounding them.
As for the manifesto video and whether or not it lies, I think most of it is due to misunderstanding. Indeed, when they say that a village "stays saved", I personally never though it would be "forever"; does anyone really expect or, heck, want an entire game made of one-time events, miss-them-and-they're-gone-forever, like the opening of Ahn-Qiraj gates? I don't think that makes much sense, and to me it feels like a very strange interpretation of the manifesto.
As for the events looping way too fast to cause a feeling of permanence, there are actually several factors into that:
1) Several events are actually triggered when talking to a specific NPC. In the BWE the starting areas were understandably crowded, so someone was talking to every NPC like five times per minute.
2) Other events have a loop that can cascade into other events if people bother to stay behind and do them; otherwise they go back to the start. The classic example was the "poison the water depot"; if you defended the water depot, there was another event to chase the bandits and root them out. If nobody bothered to do that one, they attacked again and the chain looped back to defending the water supplies. Needless to say, most people (sadly including myself) weren't used to linged a minute after an event was done. Hawkian and I, however, did make a point to wait for a chain, and we followed a chain of four-five consecutive events, including a finale, actually non-event step that was absolutely awesome.
3) Events in the starting zones seem to loop much faster than later ones, probably to provide content for people even with the player saturation these zones are bound to get on beta events and release. I would not be surprised at all if frequency for those was lowered down the road.
4) Remember that new events can be inserted at any time in any zone. Adding new events to a zone increases the pool of events that can be active, therefore reducing the frequency of each individual event. In other words, even with all of the above said, this is as bad as it gets; it can only get better with time.
If you are doing the same events over and over again, that is entirely because you chose to. There is no shortage of content that you should feel the need to run the same events repeatedly. If you have completely maxed out a zone and still aren't high enough level for the next zone, there are at least 2 other zones (in the Beta, there will be more at release) in the same level range. Aside from that, WvW is a great way to level up, crafting gives some decent level ups as well, and gathering provides a non-trivial amount of exp.
Absolutely this. I admit it happened to me at first as well; I was still partially conditioned by WoW, and just went to the hearts and did the events that I found along the way. This is not actually the way to do things, as exploring for a while will almost always reward you with events you haven't seen. This was much more obvious when backtracking, as I lost count of the times I found a new event in an area I had been to two or three times before. This gives the game a much richer sense of wonder and discovery than going from quest hub A to quest hub B. I admit this is most certainly not for everyone, though.
Still, by level 17, my character hadn't repeat any event more than twice, had not visited any other starting area, had earned no experience in PvP or WvW, and was consistently two levels above every neighboring heart. In fact, I was so leveled above my personal story that I decided to dedicate the stress test only to that (also, since it's the content that I wouldn't replay at launch, since I would chose a different one). Parenthesis: it is SO COOL that I don't have to worry about overleveling and trivializing content like my personal story! Again, I would catch myself once and again worrying about leveling too much for it and other stuff.
Anyway. I ported to the nearest waypoint to my personal story, and I STILL spent most of the four hours doing events in the short trek to the personal story waypoint! Good thing they extended it for another hour or I would have not touched it at all.
I guess part of the reason I had no problem leveling could be that I made a point to gather every node I came across. Still, one of my crafting skills was cooking and I only later on was able to start doing stuff; I only used my other profession, huntsmanship, to craft equipment I needed (all with the materials I gathered myself). So it's not like I grinded the hell out of these or anything.
By the way, I love your avatar
. Raccoon Scott for the win.
Asura and Sylvari will be playable in the BWE AAAAAAH OMG SO MANY NEW POSSIBILITIES OVERWHELMING GAHHHHHHH
edit: let me just
Asura and Sylvari will be playable in the BWE
FOR REALSIES
Oh god. And I already felt overwhelmed at the amount of stuff to try. There goes me finishing my personal story.
You are what The Kingdom of Loathing dev team calls a "dickstabber". A dickstabber is someone who will do a repetitive, shitty, unfun task if it is somehow more rewarding than playing the fun way.
No one is asking you to stab yourself in the dick, but if stabbing yourself in the dick gives you 40 points, and cooking dinner gives you 30 points, you will continue to stab yourself in the dick for those 10 extra points.
Basically, you're making the game unfun. It's not unfun by nature.
I totally agree with this kind of thinking feeling extremelly backwards; for me, the ultimate currency is fun, and the optimal path is the one that gives me the most fun per time investment. Playing a game when it's not fun as a conscious choice feels alien to me; not to say that I haven't caught myself doing that, unfortunately.
However, it is also true that it's bad game design to make the optimal path not fun; or rather, to make the optimal and the most fun path not one and the same. This is why I love games like DMC3, where doing the most stylish combos is not just fun, it's also the most efficient way to play (among others, by making DT-meter refilling taunts more effective).
That said, so far, GW2 has been exactly that in every sense I could bother to mention. Once I learned dodging and moving and weaving it into my gameplay (curse you, WoW), the game not only felt and looked much cooler, I actually went from being trampled by two normal mobs, to beating a veteran plus a normal or two without breaking a sweat.
Regarding weapon skills, grinding is not only unfun, it is ALSO the suboptimal path. Considering events and hearts give you much more bang for your buck than killing the same monster over and over, why the hell would you actively try to learn skills by doing the latter? It's not like you need them to succeed in level 1 content. Both they and utility skills are gated to you so that you don't feel overwhelmed by all of them and take your time actually learning how and when to use them; something I really appreciate after hitting the PvP lobby and being overwhelmed to hell with all the possibilities.
again, excuse my ignorance if it sounds like what i'm saying is bullshit
whats the difference between killing 10 of X and going to a location and killing things until the event is over?
i apologize for trivializing something i don't understand. i really would like to understand, and would appreciate it if someone can make me understand
I come quite late to the party, so I can only hope you read my reply. I will relate to you my experience with an event during the last stress test; in fact, this triples as an example of an event that sidetracked me on my way to my personal story, and ALSO as one event I didn't come across until my third or fourth visit to where it takes place.
I was on my merry way out of Claypool, a lovely rural town that is up the side of a hill. I had just sold my junk and repaired my armor, and I was ready to go on for more adventure. That's when, halfway down the path, I saw a large herd of cows running up the hill. We're talking 10-20 cows easily, here. I could feel a thought bubble with the venerable "WTF?" letters springing above my head, and so I decided to follow it up the hill. Right at the back of the herd was a farmer. The entire herd ran up the whole length of the town's major street, and then settled upon the town plaza. At that time, the farmer started screaming for help; at this time, an event popped up (automatically; in GW2 you don't have to accept events, they're added to your GUI as long as they're active and you're close by). Apparently, some bandits had invaded and taken his farm. I came back the main street and looked down the hill, and sure enough, at the plain at the foot of it a large farm could be seen.
This would certainly not do, so as a hero I felt compelled to make these guys see the error of their ways. I started the event pretty much alone, picking the bandits one by one, but by the end a couple players had joined me. We killed off almost all bandits, at which point the couple or so remaning just wised up and fled into a nearby cave teeming with more bandits. As the event dinged complete and I automagically received my rewards, I could see off in the distance the herd coming down the hill (I can tell you that GW2's absurd draw distance does it a great service here). The cows settled around the pasture, and the farmer standed around the farmhouse. I also noticed a couple of additional farmers in the field, at least one of which was a vendor, but I can't tell you where they came from because I wasn't looking (but I have NEVER seen an NPC in GW2 pop out of nowhere, so I'll be sure to check if I come across the event again).
So... yeah. That's basically a kill quest in Guild Wars 2; all that was demanded of me was to exterminate the bandits. It's now up to you to decide if this looks or feels exactly the same as a WoW kill quest.
By the way, it seems that this event came to be because the previous one, wherein you have to protect ranchers from being killed by waves of bandits, was failed (either nobody was around to help the ranchers, or nobody cared):
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Protect_the_ranchers_from_bandits
Finally, note that the event is level 8 and I was level 15+. In any other MMO I would have curbstomped the bandits with one hand while covering my yawns with the other; here, downleveling came to the rescue and made me play cautiously (but rewarded me appropriately as well). This is just one of the ways you can see GW2's multiple systems playing off each other; without downleveling, discovering events in zones you've long outleveled would be pointless and anticlimatic.
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