Why is grinding okay now?

So, I remember a while back that everyone was complaining about there possibly not being a level cap in GW2... The complaints were that the game is based on skill, not time spent.

Now everyone's saying that to get the Kurzick/Luxon skills we should have to grind. How can the game be based on skill if someone can farm faction for hours on end and get uber-powered skills because of it?

Sunspear/Lightbringer isn't nearly as bad as Kurzick/Luxon. You can farm those in wurms, quick and easy. Kurzick faction title would take 1000 hours to farm if you make 10k an hour by FFFing. So even if you spend 10 hours out of your day doing this (which would be extremely boring)... You'd still take 100 days. That's nearly a third of a year. (Or 42 days of farming non-stop... good luck with that.) Has this sunk in with anyone else yet? Faction is horrible to farm, as it is currently.

Sure, ANet wants to keep the title as it is, in order to keep the prestige for those that already got it... But this is clearly NOT the title to link skills with if it takes 1000 hours of CHEATING to accomplish. That is, in essence, what FFF is. You just run to a place and die. I'm almost certain that's not what ANet had in mind when designing that quest.

In my humble opinion, ANet needs to take a close look at the Kurzick/Luxon title and decide if this is really the best title to link skills to. Heck, the Drunkard title doesn't even require this much time and energy. 7 days of being drunk... vs 42 days of faction farming. (If you go at the titles non-stop, without sleep.) That's 1/6th of the time.

I might get the Supporter rank for the Kurzick title... But I probably won't go much further. The title is simply horribly broken.

In any case, back to my main question... Why is grinding okay for this title? Now that I've shown the title takes an incredibly long time, (at minimum: ~1000 hours) can anyone tell me how this is any better than removing the level cap in GW2? I actually think removing the level cap is a great idea. Then again, I liked the Lightbringer title as well. It gives you an overall boost, not simply a few crazily-overpowered skills.

Shouldn't "new" players to Guild Wars (by "new" I mean players that haven't played for a year or two) be able to easily get all the same benefits that everyone else has in PvE? I just got GW a few months ago, myself. I thought it was a wonderful game when I started, but now I'm starting to wonder... With all the nerfs I've been seeing lately and these skills...

How's a newcomer going to feel when they're turned down because they don't have a high enough Faction-rating to maintain Elemental Lord on their Ele? This is something that I feel is very realistic for PvE... As Ele Lord is so powerful. Same goes for some of the other skills.

At first I thought that it seemed so cool that ANet still wants to encourage people to buy Factions and play it. Then I thought about it for a while, and these skills really don't encourage people to buy Factions... They simply benefit people that have Faction-farmed for ages, expecting nothing in return. Maybe that's a good thing for them... but for everyone else, it sucks.

Because teenagers, military wives and people with no set goals for their own life need an achievement engine to make themselves feel good.

In my opinion&PoV:

Grinding was taken out of GW so PvP would be balanced by skill, not time spent grinding levels and looting epic gear.

Grinding in PvE could remain, simply for the fact that it doesn't matter in PvE. Those monsters don't care if you beat them up with only [skill]Mending[/skill] on your skillbar and collector armor, or if you have Fow + max cristaline + all the pve skills. Simply because they're PvE skills, they CAN be so hard to obtain. I don't say I like it, but it's a choice that A.Net has made.

Optional grind.

None of this is required to beat the game, its just a little extra to keep people hooked.

ANet tries to go the grind route, as many players seem to like it.

They just forget that are literally dozens of viable modern MMOs out there that already cater to that formula - and much better than GW, to be honest.

Sorry, raising Aldor Faction or gaining Attunement for Karazhan and stuff is much more sophisticated than obtaining Kurzick and Luxon Faction:

1. Do AB's and get slowly Faction
2. Do the repeatable quests every 2-3 minutes
3. AFK in Amatz Basin


What is worse than the grind? The fact that PvE becomes dumber and more brainless with every new freaking IMBA PvE skill they add.

Ironically, Mesmers benefit probably the least from the new PvE skills, while other classes got funny crap that makes things too easy. "There is nothing to fear" anymore indeed!

pvp would be just fine if everyone only had [skill]Mending[/skill] and a start sword, too, right?

in all actuality: the FEATURE of not requiring grind was for BOTH PvP and PvE. It was a core selling point of hte entire game itself. Don't need to grind to beat someone in PvP, and don't need to grind to experience all content in PvE. Up until factions, both were upheld quite well.

Yup yup. Anything that is needed to stay competitive in PvP is made fairly easy to get, very little to no grind. Anything the players want for PvE can be grinded for, since it's not needed or doesn't work in PvP. I'm fine with that, considering it's not that much grind.

If the cookie cutter build for an area requires a title skill, then the grind is required if you want to pug in that area.

Yeah, it's optional. But so would be the "no level cap" thing in GW2. I recall reading that benefits would likely decrease as levels increase. Therefore, after you reach a certain point... You wouldn't NEED to gain any more levels. It wouldn't be required to beat the game, by any means. And yet, everyone was opposed to the idea of grinding for levels because it "makes the game about time, not about skill." Heck, it wouldn't even affect PvP since the PvP players would just be set to a specific level anyway. PvP would be balanced, you could complete the game without getting to level 5000... So what makes that any different than Kurzick/Luxon titles?

And... "a little extra"? I don't call 1000 hours "a little."

The little extra is the increased power skills.

And if I have to have pink armour to join a pink armour PuG, what is your point? You don't *have* to PuG.

The problem with the grind is simply the amount of grind. Grind can be really casual and it can be downright extreme. And as it is typical with GW (they love extremes) there is nothing inbetween. We have the Sunspear Title which is piss poor easy to get. Then comes the Lightbringer Titel, takes slightly more time but is still easy to achieve. And then we have "zOMGosh WTF KOREAN GRINDGAME" Kurzick/Luxon Title.

And this grind sadly is a necessity. Not because you couldn't complete PVE without those skills but simply because almost everyone in Guildwars thinks he is so much superior (PVP and PVE) to everyone else. This leads to real bad elitist attitude and makes certain ranks and titles a requirement that you now actually have to grind for, simply because PLAYERS make them a requirement out of Ego and E-Drama reasons.
It gives pleasure to them to turn down a player by throwing insults at him, simply because his title is lower than that of someone else. One and only solution for that person: Get a higher title. Grind it and here come the extremes again: Enjoy your korean grindgame grind. You know, playing several months no end for a gain that is so ridiculously low that you'll bash your head against a wall after wasting all those thousands of hours.

/edit:
Yeah unless of course you're a loner but then you should reconsider why exactly you're playing a multiplayer game in the first place. And don't get that "get a better guild" crap started. The search for it is about as hard and succesful as the search for the holy grail. Some claim to have found it though no one ever experienced a good guild first hand.

Well, yeah. I love the skills, but the grind is quite insane to make them powerful.

The real problem is that this title was never intended to have skills tied to it. ANet made a decision to do so, and now we're dealing with the outcome.

having the grind staring people in the face like that is probably gunna intimidate more casual gamers than it does get em hooked. the sunspear skills however were done right and have renewed my interest in the game a little as I play around with them. If the sunspear skills required as much grind as the factions skills do, I'd probably be playing oblivion or some other game right now instead of waiting on my group in guild wars.

Exactly my point. I feel that the grind required for sunspear is just right... It also fits in with the storyline. Oh, and one more thing... For each rank of sunspear you get HERO SKILL POINTS. You can unlock a skill for free with these. That's great IMO. Better than normal skill points.

There's just no reason for the Allegiance rank other than skills, unless you own a town.

Its not compulsary grind in PVE. Anet are keeping to their grind free promise in relation to no hardly any difference between players when it comes to PVP. PVE however has some grind in it in which some can rise above others. However mostly this rising is purely cosmetic and does not detract from anyone elses gaming experience.

The grinders get the benefits for their grinding. Its their choice and those that choose not to grind shouldn't go crying about not being as 'leet' as the grinders.

If you want something bad enough you will work hard for it. In RL or ingame its the same.

These skills work perfectly fine at supporter level you know

I dont all the fuss, so you dont get an extra 3 seconds of uberness

We did fine w/o these skills before, its not game breaking if your not a savior, even if you feel you need savior to actually d PvE (god help you) at least it'll bring more people to AB

So do you think that an ele that can't maintain Elemental Lord all-the-time will have the same chances of being selected for a group as one that can? (I use the ele as they're the ones that clearly benefit from higher levels.) Finding PUGs for Hard Mode is difficult enough.

And it's not like there's a small change from Supporter to Savior. Therein lies the problem. I'd be perfectly happy if the skills were the same for everyone, regardless what rank they have on their Allegiance track. However, that's not how it is.

So would raising the level cap be perfectly fine with you? I mean, people will obviously have to grind to get higher levels... They should get benefits, right? But wait, wasn't the level capped at 20 to prevent grinding and give everyone a fair chance at being selected?

As I've said before, this affects newcomers very poorly. Others will have skills that they won't have access to without hours of grinding.

And it's not so easy as "working hard for it"... As I mentioned several times, it'd take 1000 hours to get the max title (that's 42 days without sleep, if you wanted to do it all at once). Assuming you make 10k per hour by FFFing. And FFFing isn't "hard" to do either. You just run somewhere and die... over and over and over again. Or you stand by the door while other people run all over the place for you.

It's not working. In fact, they couldn't do much worse to keep me hooked.
Not just newcomers. Veterans as well. Of the 11 people in my guild, all long time players, no one has a single point in one of the allegiance titles. There was never a point to it in the first thirteen and a half months of the game's lifetime.

Agreed. At first I was like "Oh! Great! Factions skills!" Then I realized how big of a grind it'd be to make them very effective. I think I'll keep my skillbar as it is.