Hope for the future

I'm one of the people who made a 'I might not buy GW2' post in Friday. I'm not about to retract that, but I'm not as pessimistic as I was. I think that the farming nerfs (coupled with some tidbits from the GW2 previews - only the online ones, the UK GW2 preview mag doesn't come out till next week) show that ArenaNet might be about to dramatically change the way we obtain weapons and other gameplay-necessary items in Guild Wars 2.

The current Guild Wars is fatally flawed. No, this isn't a 'Guild Wars is dead' type comment. The problem ArenaNet (and, through nerfs, GW players) has is the way Guild Wars items are distributed. Quality items are distributed randomly - the only way to increase your chances of getting one is not through being better at the game, but by increasing the amount of time you spend killing the monsters who drop those items. Arenanet made a slight change to this with inscriptions - the ability to combine stats from different items into a better item - but they cannot 'fix' this properly because they can't just rewrite the whole of GW1's item system. Guild Wars 2 is the solution to this:

Design Guild Wars 2 so that players can get stat-perfect weapons without grinding or farming (I have a very fervent hope that the 'improved crafting' the previews talk about means a crafter capable of creating such weapons for a reasonable price). Those who wanted rare skins could still buy them for lots of gold from other players (e.g. some in GW1 want a req8 Fellblade - I'm happy with my collector sword thanks) but ordinary players would no longer rely on farming to get items they need to play the game normally. Remove the need for farming to get ordinary gameplay items and you remove any upset when farming is nerfed.

They did this with armour in GW1 and it has been one of the greatest success stories of the game - ordinary 1.5k armour looks nice (personally I think my 1.5k Druid's looks better than the 15k version) and is stat-perfect. You don't need to farm to get armour you need to play the game, but 15k armour is still sought-after by those who value the kudos of it. This shows that making stat-perfect items available to casual players at reasonable cost is a workable idea. If there is one lesson I hope ArenaNet take from GW1 into GW2, I hope it is that one.

If GW2 simply uses GW1's weapon/item system and tweaks the instancing, then it will suck badger gonads. But if ArenaNet put as many changes between the game systems of GW1 and GW2 (such as the weapon acquisition thing I mentioned) as they did from normal MMOs when they made the original Guild Wars, it will be beyond superlatives.

I am going to buy GW2 just for the story. The recent update can go to hell.