Anyone playing GW2?

Yes. It's called what Esoterics call "Awareness".
Or, as Yoda puts it : Be conscious in the present. Be conscious of what you do.
 
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Far from it, if you ask me. Amount of copies sold isn't a particularly trustworthy indicator of quality. SWtOR sold almost 2 million copies at launch as well, and most fans of the genre seem to agree that it's pretty terrible as an MMO. Then we have games like The Sims or EA Sports titles - that sell endless millions with every minor upgrade.

GW2 will dwindle in popularity in the coming months - as people remember why the genre was appealing in the first place.

But I must say the people at ArenaNet seem to understand how to hypnotise their fans better than most developers I know. They even have fans believing that power progression is a bad thing - in a genre that always had power progression as one of the most integral features.

They also seem to have people accept that a limited variety of cyclical "dynamic events" is better than well written quests for the levelling process, because apparently it's a major hassle to talk to NPCs.

Then they went and cut down the arsenal available to classes - and they've made people believe that other games with a much wider array of powers don't really need them - and that you never used most of them anyway.

Oh, and they thought it was brilliant to remove the DPS/Healer/Tank trinity as a tactical overlay and replace it with…. nothing. Now, each player just does as much damage as he/she can, while they spam 1-2 abilities in 95% of all encounters. The remaining 5% of the time, they're spamming dodge/evasion skills with the occasional heal - hoping that they're not one-shot by the beastie.

I could go on.

That's pretty impressive :)
 
I think you're bring overly harsh, Dart. While I'll join you in lamenting the woefully downsized skill lineup as compared to it's predecessor, GW2 can still be great fun - especially in a group conquering dungeons (which are really tough in explorable mode).

It's definitely a different take on online gaming that I welcome. I'm currently level 75 and still enjoying myself for the most part.
 
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Dart, okay. They changed everything. But… You missed one particular MMO component. Dunno why… Are you saying they didn't change the crucial MMO thing? The thing that made me completely move away from MMOs. You saying they didn't terminate 24/7 grinding?!
 
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Dart, okay. They changed everything. But… You missed one particular MMO component. Dunno why… Are you saying they didn't change the crucial MMO thing? The thing that made me completely move away from MMOs. You saying they didn't terminate 24/7 grinding?!

They reduced the grinding by making content exhaust faster :)
 
I think you're bring overly harsh, Dart. While I'll join you in lamenting the woefully downsized skill lineup as compared to it's predecessor, GW2 can still be great fun - especially in a group conquering dungeons (which are really tough in explorable mode).

It's definitely a different take on online gaming that I welcome. I'm currently level 75 and still enjoying myself for the most part.

Yeah, I'm probably a bit harsh - but then again, I'm only trying to match the level of hype surrounding the game. If the developers were less arrogant and the fans more realistic, I'd probably be more gentle.

To be honest, it's a quality product that's well worth the investment. It's possible to have quite a bit of fun - and the exploration is definitely the strongest aspect of the game.

But it's anything but the "next step" in the genre, if you ask me.

At least, I hope it's not.
 
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It is a good investment, it costs as much as any other non-MMO game that you play for 10-15 hours. Here you will play and have fun for much longer than that, and won't cost you any extra in monthly fees.
But yes, it's pretty watered-down and I agree they are genius to make players think it's actually a good thing. I've been using the exact same abilities now that I'm 45 than when I was like 30 (when I got my heroic skill), and will probably be the same all the way to 80. Sure, there are traits and what not, but the vast majority only mean "do 12% more bleeding damage" or "remove a condition when you heal", i.e. nothing that will make you change tactics.
Don't get me wrong, it's a fun game but there is no progression at all. Once I play the storylines for my characters, it's game over probably.
 
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In my most recent session I was having a blast running around waiting for the dragon to respawn. People would call out events as they appeared and helpfully link the nearest waypoint for people to join them.

"trolls up!"
"megalodon is up!"
"how long until the dragon respawns?!"

Do you guys know all your combo clouds and finishers? I only just started messing around with making a smoke cloud then swapping to my shortbow and using a Blast finisher for Area Stealth. Quite a tricky move. Spin finisher in a Dark cloud giving me leeching bolts, etc. I'm using stealing for AOE buffs and dodge to stack Might. There's plenty going on with the skills. I've found the traits to have a significant impact on how I play.

The problem might be that where the grind is removed so is an aspect of the "skinner box" that you're used to and crave. I'm not saying the box is gone from GW2 as it's constantly giving you little rewards, but its not quite as insidious as some games. It's like you've quit cigarettes and gone on to cigars but they just don't seem to hit the spot like your favourite brand. It's the hidden chemicals! You could have the biggest cigar headspin in the world and still feel like a tailormade cigarette.

I feel like its a little casual sometimes but its a good game for sure and if you combine Story mode, world PvE, structured PvP and open World VS World with no subscription fee its a great game for the price. Don't panic about getting to max level. Just take it easy and enjoy taking part in the events with people. You play this game differently to the others. Your old skills mean nothing here!

Hey, I took a picture of the dragon. Wanna see?!
http://i.imgur.com/OgGUQ.jpg

Pretty chaotic stuff. Good fun, though, for sure. I heard there's an Ice Dragon too. I gotta go find that sucker sometime. :)
 
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I bumped into some sort of skill combo but I couldn't ever repeat it.

I actually have stopped playing for a bit. There's no subscription fee so it's no big deal but I am going to have to remember how to play again.
 
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Thats my problem. I see things about combo's but can never figure out how to make them work. Now and then they happen by accident. I have to get off my virtual butt and look it up at some point. Been busy with a new puppy so haven't had much time to play much of anything!
 
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Believe it or not, I'm playing WoW again. Didn't intend to - I just wanted to check out the latest patch with the new talent system. I stopped playing right before WotLK - and have checked it very briefly a couple of times since then. But for the first time, I'm enjoying myself beyond just a quick check.

The best part of GW2 is that it reminded me of why I normally enjoy playing these games in the first place, and that I'm a big fan of power progression and the social requirement that goes into not having everything automated regardless of your personal dedication.

I find that I'm NOT a fan of automatic grouping with no communication required - and I'm NOT a fan of having 95% of PvE be about spamming two abilities without worrying about my role in the encounter.

I'm NOT a fan of having a limited arsenal and having it be almost fully available at level 30. I love having toys to look forward to, and I love the complexity of a ton of meaningful skills and abilities to choose from.

Funny thing is that the levelling process is much more pleasant in WoW these days, and I detect almost no "blatant grind". It's just that there are things to work towards if you want them, but you can gear up rather fast - and you can have a max level character in about a week.

The quests are much better today, as well. Certainly much more engaging than the cyclical repetition of a handful of dynamic events in GW2. I'm enjoying the light-hearted "detective story" in Westfall more than anything I experienced in my personal story in GW2.

Sure, it's still WoW at the core - and it's still a game that can take up a lot of time if you let it, but I find that it's vastly superior to GW2 in almost every single way. It doesn't hurt that it's got an insane amount of content after 8 years of being the most popular MMO :)

I'm even contemplating getting Mists of Pandaria - even if I absolutely hate the idea of having Kung Fu Pandas in my RPG.
 
another example of the 'lightness' of GW2. I recently was in the beta of Secret World. In there I would get a quest with a marker of where to go, once I was there, I had to figure out what to do. I would get some sort of hint in the quest text, and at the location I could look around and figure out what I needed (or not, and then I would google for the solution if you don't want to use your brain). I liked that.

In GW2 I got a quest that I thought was going to be like that recently in my story line. It was about finding a code and a book to decode a message. So in a first quest I got the code, then in the next quest, I found the book. I could read a passage from the book and the game gave me 3 options as what the decoded message was. That got me excited a bit, I checked the quest text to see if it had the decoder part I needed, but couldn't find it there (and my memory is bad). I read the passage I was supposed to decode over and over, trying to figure out which one of the 3 responses was the correct one. But I couldn't find anything. It turned out that you could click any of the 3 options, and if you didn't choose the correct one, your character would just say "nah, I don't think that's the one". And there I was thinking I had to use my brain for anything in GW2. Also goes to tell you that devs had a 'failure is just not an option' approach for this game.
 
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Combos can be made different ways. Official wiki explain how they works well enough.

Some classes have it easy with their own ability sets and Elementalists are amazing for setting fields for others.
 
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by the way, a tip. It only costs 1 silver to form a guild, so form a 'personal' guild with your characters (your alts are automatically invited but you have to click on 'represent' for the points to go there), and you can get a free personal guild bank when you have accumulated enough guild points :)
You can be in 5 guilds at the same time so you don't have to leave your current guild to do this
 
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Arenanet/NCSoft did a press release that said the same thing about the fansite being hacked. About ~11k accounts have been compromised according to them (that was like 3 days after the game released).

Although, the Chineses didn't only hack their GW2 accounts. They also hacked their email and in some cases probably the computer two.

The same thing happened to a friend of mine at the University, a script kiddy hacked our cohort forums and then proceeded to hack his gmail email and computer using the information from the forum database. He realized it when he saw a suspicious program on his Linux running…he also chatted with the hacker (he was from Poland).
 
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I'll never understand why people do this.
 
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