Enough is enough.

I keep saying this and I dont know why people wont accept it, because i did it. You can get rank5 or very close, on all races by just doing all quests and dungeons. Any last few points can be achieved from 2-3 bounty runs in set areas.

How is that grind? I had rank 5 on all after just a week of casual play!

Its no different to being expected to finish Factions or NF before you can get end-game armor!

All 3 protectors +
all 3 gaurdians +
all 3 elite skill hunting = 11 titles!

Two of those are basically just playing the game in normal and hard mode, which people dont seem to mind doing in FPS'ers! So why is it a big issue here? There are aspects of some FPS which you cant unlock unless you do them on harder settings. Why is it so bad if GWs does the same thing?

The elite skill hunting title honestly takes no time at all.

Ive said this before too; PvE only skills which arent critical to anything. There is no aspect of any 3 campaigns or GWEN that require you to use any of the GWEN pve only skills.

Only LB gaze could be considered critical-ish!

Ofcourse its an attempt to keep us playing! I doubt Anet would deny that if asked. But its gonna work!

Besides do we need to keep playing for 2 years? Your allowed to take a break from the game, or start a new char.

I got r5 on all BUT vangaurd by doing quests, missions, dungeons, and exploring.

Vangaurd does take about 6-7k of farming though.

I would think that, if such a thing were to happen to any real country, say Great Britain, then the merchants of London would not hesitate to sell their armor and wares to anyone who has slain a deity, or a horde of Destroyer like things led by a large dragon-like boss, or a lich or 3, or all of the above. So, sorry to say, but the idea that I am not good enough after saving the entire world for the 4th time is patently ludicrous. It is an artificial game mechanic that forces players to act in a macro-like fashion and clear zones again and again and again ad nausaeum.

Why any of you are supportive of this escapes me. It's dippy.

Thanks!
TabascoSauce

You might not like it.... but if you want that rank 5 armour....you're going to spend hours playing the most boring part of the game to grind up the points to get it.
And A-Net have already won.

How would you rather work for the armour? Or would you sooner just have it cheaper?

I am playing the game the way I want to - that does not include grind. I will not be getting a single piece of those armors as it is now. Were they not restricted to rank 5, I might consider it as the barrier to getting them would be the cost and materials which seems plenty enough to me, but I will not grind in GW for reputation to be considered "worthy" when I have already saved the world 4 times. Dippy.

Thanks!
TabascoSauce

I have one character that has finished gw:en so far....he does NOT have level 5 in all 4 areas (I did GRIND to level 5 in norn for some new boots---and I did the dungeons in the norn area as well and was still not even close to level 5).
Currently he is sitting at level 3 in most of them somewheres in the lower teens, not close to level 5, not even half way....I have done the dungeons, still not up to level 4 adding them in.....guess I just aint as lucky as some people (the blessings I get are usually 'your health is increased' or 'kill a boss' when I have just killed the last one in the area, I usually get the level 2 blessing at the last shrine as well). So I guess some people might be able to get to level 5 by just playing and getting good blessings, others of us will need to grind to get to level 5.
And has also be mentioned, some of the dungeons arent meant for casual players....taking HOURS to complete is not something someone with say an hour or so at playtime can do; so some of them are just out of reach thus taking away from that faction point accumulation.

I am glad that some can 'easily' reach level 5, but some of us arent that lucky.

Merely an example, no offense meant. To make a funnier one, If Manchester United decided that the world cup was full of tossers and just ran out and beat every other team there for the heck of it - would any bartender in all of England insist that they do anything, and I mean absolutely anything, before selling them some beer? No way - they'd be lynched.

Thanks!
TabascoSauce

I came to the conclusion i wanted to have only one RP character on my account, since it's the best way to keep the game from becoming a chore. So i only kept my monk and used the other slots for pvp. The whole game seems to encourage that kind of account use.

But think about it: If Anet had continued to pump out chapters every six months with two new professions and a huge new continent, this would have been the only sane thing to do anyway. Imagine having like sixteen RP characters wich all need their 15K armor...

No, one RP char is the way to go for me.

Heh, cos most of the team would be there?

Most of the Man. utd. team would be in the teams of their country... leaving, what? 2 or 3 man. utd. players to do this? and they'd be with the england squad anyway

Yeah the whole idea of reputation is pretty stupid. If you just do the primaries, you save the world, and most often save the group you want to buy armor from. And they say "yeah sorry we don't respect you enough for saving us. You'll have to clear out an area.... repeatedly... because that gives us more respect for you. Much more respect than saving us, actually."

That said, I don't think it's that hard to get to rank 5 if you do all the quests, explore everything and kill everything in the area while you're at it, and do all the dungeons. However, this is not going to happen quickly with casual play. It took me about a week, and I was not playing casually.

But the armor requirements don't bother me. It does bother me, though, that you can't buy the armor until you've finished the game, or at least until you've completed much of it. I'd rather be able to buy armor so I can play through the game with it... instead of getting it after my character has finished the last GW1 campaign and has nothing else to do. Then I have to grind just to enjoy the armor...

Someone else said pretty much the same thing on pg 13 and I totally agreed with them, but I'd like to add a 2nd opinion.

I'm a total casual gamer. I have 1 rp char, I don't pvp and previous to GWEN I hadn't played for months. I LOVE the "grinding" aspect of the game. For three reasons.
1) I don't feel like I HAVE TO HAVE the r5 armors. In fact, I don't even care. The 40 advertised armor sets? I knew I'd be lucky to get 1 when I bought the game. Didn't care. Same goes for the skills. I have my fire ele, I get ele skills and I couldn't care less about the rest.

2) Titles have given the game a new point to me. Since I don't pvp, skill points are pretty useless. That makes exp totally useless. So up until now, killing npcs on the way to quests was a hinderance and generally a waste of time. Now, there's a reason for me to want to kill everything I see, instead of wanting to go around the mob. When I get points and blessings, I'm thrilled, mainly because it ups my permanent title blessings. More energy? Yes please!

3) I have a hard time setting aside large blocks of time to play the game. I used to not play unless I knew I could devote the rest of the evening or at least 3hrs to the game. Now, even if I only have 30min, that's enough time to go get a blessing and go kill some stuff. I like to see how many npcs I can kill in my time limit. And I know it's upping my rank. Win-win for me. Also, a lot of the side quests are short and easy to do with heros/hench. I dont have time to wait around for a PUG group and the h/h group is pretty successful in GWEN where I didn't find it as helpful in other chapters.

So, because I look at the game from a casual gamer's point of view, I don't feel the need to spend 6hrs straight farming an area for points. All chapters have had something that makes it extremely determential not to own it. AB for Factions, Heros for NM and skills for GWEN. Not a biggie to me, when that's a company's only source of revenue, they have to do it that way.

Yes, the game has changed from the days of Prop. If it didn't everyone would be complaining that it's stale. For me, the game is still skill>time, because like the original philosophy of GW, I play it my way. I'm going to be in GWEN for awhile because I like doing all the quests that I can, so I know eventually I will get to at least r5. Might be 2 months, but that's ok. That's 2mo of me having something to do in GW. And hey, as I inch my way there, at least I finally have a purpose other than bragging rights to get a title.

I don't agree with people who think cool looking rewards are bad. Sure they add grind to the game but I think its completely ignorable because they just make you look cool, and there are tons of ways to do that in the game. Grind for stat based rewards are bad, for several reasons, mostly because it gives an advantage to people to be more effective in the game for an arbitrary reason. Plus several other annoying problems. Sure you may feel compelled to get cool looking items and so you will play things that aren't fun to get them (other words grind) but largely they add more good things to the game then bad.( ie long range goals as opposed to wahh i'm never gonna get FoW armor)

I think a big issue people are having in GWEN in particular is because of how restrictive they view the titles to be.(note I have not played GWEN myself so all of the examples are hearsay but the reason holds for any instance you want to apply it to) Gold is a good way to limit things for reward, there are a ton of ways to get it so it allows people to achieve it in ways they find enjoyable, when things are restricted so there are relatively few ways to achieve it in game thats when it seems grind is the worst, because naturally less people are pleased by one of playing then several ways. Titles in GWEN sound like they work similarly, they do have several options to increase them but it sounds like killing creatures repetitively is the only viable way to get it done. If that is the case thats the real problem. To add gold to be able to trade faction would be a decent solution for this problem if it exists. It really shouldn't happen because of PvE skills. But thats a different argument all together.

I'd like to see a good loregical reason for this. I need a good giggle : ).

The Norn are stubborn and wanted a way to force you to do all their clean up crap while they got drunk out of their skulls.

The Vanguard are actually only 3 people and reeeaaally needed help killing Charr, so they tricked you into thinking you had to do all that charr slaughtering.

The Asura ..they are just dicking you around. They really couldn't care less how much rep you have. They just want to see you break a sweat.

Maybe it was me. Before I had heroes to equip I'd give away tons of unwanted golds/greens to low level chars I'd see running around in the starter areas of a campaign.

I feel the OP's pain. Nightfall completely turned me off to bringing my characters through GW. I only brought my Rit through and then was so totally tired of the Lightbringer grind that I quit GW for 5 months. I'm back now and though GW:EN has rank grind it's either more bearable for me or the vacation gave me amnesia.

At any rate I did have to clear the Charr areas about 4-5 times to get to R5 Ebon Vanguard. I haven't bothered going to R5 Norn because I hate the armor. I blew by R5 Dwarf because I'm thorough in the dungeons and I want to complete the handbook. R5 Asura... pretty soon just by making so many runs to Slaver's...

I think I was one of the first people to post that I missed PUGs when Nightfall came out. Maybe that's why I hated Nightfall so much... I was lonely.

Asura, Ebon Vanguard and Norn are like Best Buy employees:

They know you want their stuff.
They don't care if you live or die (but mostly hope you die).

I left the Dwarves out because you can easily get to R5 just by playing through the dungeons. The short people are on the up and up.

So...They're all dicks?

I can live with that, heh heh.

This is already in the game. It's called the Hero's Handbook and the Master Dungeon Guide.

You know..this thread started out being a complaint against the grinding in GWEN, then Rahja said the only thing that bothered him was how ANet "promised" 40 armor sets and he wasn't able to immediately try them all on. Now it's back to grinding.

Come on. 40 new armor sets (even if it's just different art) are in the game, and you can get them if you want. The title track requirement is not a broken promise and is in fact the same exact requirement that has been in Factions for a long long time.

The ominous "growing sense of discontent" is really not that ominous. It's boredom. You yourself Rahja said you have 2-3 elite armor sets on every character *as well as* FoW armor. Do you know how much of a "grind" FoW armor is? The problem is not with GWEN, it's with you getting tired of the game. Notice how you seize upon the Black Moa quest as the only redeeming feature of GWEN, because it was something you hadn't seen before.

You can't blame ANet for not constantly innovating when 1) it's impossible, 2) it's unfeasible, and 3) the majority of people are not as hardcore as you and are still being entertained by the game. GWEN is just more of the same as we've had before in Factions and NF, intended to tide people over until GW2. And it is certainly going to do that.

If you're bored go find something else to do. This thread is just complaining for complaining's sake, and it's going in circles. Queue a response like "this game used to be about skill, now it's about time." Actually, this game has always been the same, you just never noticed the time going by when you were having fun. Then as soon as you stopped having fun you piped up in this forum.

Like I said on page 4 or whatever, if you don't want repetition, why are you in an MMO? Find something to do (out of the dozens and dozens of options), or press the X button and stop QQing for ANet to stop production on GW2 so they can put in some more Black Moa Chick-esque quests. Until you get tired of those, then they should start putting in moon bounces.

I don't mean for this to be an attack. But I get defensive when I see people make comments like ANet has betrayed them, lost sight of their principles, turned into a WoW clone, or what have you. It takes a good bit of objectivity, but I think you'll realize that really it isn't ANet that has changed so much as you.

Lastly I'd like to defend Gaile for doing a good job under the most challenging circumstances imaginable. I know I don't have the self-esteem to listen to personal attacks all day long, 7 days a week. So if you read this, thank you.

Would you agree to the following logic.

In the beginning before Prophecies, the endgame was intended to be PvP where players were supposed to go, thus ANet did not anticipate players spending 4,572 hours with their characters in PvE. The original uber status symbol was FoW armor, and the requirements to farm ectos and such put it into a category that only the most dedicated would actually achieve, presumably.

Fast forward to the end of 2005. Everyone and their brother has at least one set of FoW, and ANet begins to realize that PvP is evidently not for everyone. They thus alter development on Factions, delaying it, to incorporate PvP into PvE and by that encourage players to do it by AB. This is their second chance to move players to PvP. However, they have put an incentive to repeat content - grind if you will - in Factions that actually stops player progression until the player has achieved the specific levels, but does not have any in-game effects - all the bonus material is purely vanity armors and such.

Fast forward to the end of 2006. Nightfall is recently released, and they have accepted the inevitable - that PvE is where 90 percent of their playerbase is. They also redux the incentive to repeat content, and actually introduce an advantage in-game for moderate repetition of content in Nightfall.

Fast forward to now. EotN is released, and they have continued their trend of gating EotN content linked to your repetition of content, and have gone so far as to introduce massive repetition for very powerful skills in Factions that are reckoned total per account yet still tied to each class, such as +100 armor party wide "Save Yourselves!" - that being different than before specifically because they are usable anywhere and (I cant stress this enough) not bound by the 200 point attribute balancing mechanic. And, they have also introduced 50 new skills usable by any class tied to individual grind, not account total grind, that are also outside of the 200 point attribute mechanic and are more powerful than standard skills.

In short, we have moved from "repetitive content rewarding vanity" to "repetitive content rewarding player toon power".

The question being, is that a good thing?

Thanks!
TabascoSauce

It's what WoW did. So it has to be good.

At the same time, it killed replayability. Rather than grind for another profession, when you bring another character into EOTN, you'll be grinding for exactly the same skills you have on your other characters.

So from this perspective, it's removed replayability. If before you could make new character, and play with different skills, or completely different mechanics, you now have what you had in prophecies, plus something that's always the same. One character worth of content.

And this is GW:EN is so incredibly short. Once you bring one character through, you've brought them all. Nothing will change with others. And to compensate for that, the new and improved pointless grind was added.

This approach brings together the worst of both worlds. Pointless grind and worthless rewards.

How would people feel, if Burning crusade added only 10 new skills that are exactly the same for all classes?

Gwen contains content for one single character, and not a tiny bit more. At least in other chapters, going through storyline netted you a whole bunch of skills for you profession, giving at least a tiny bit of motivation. Here, you get those for free in first outpost, then nothing.

I as an elementalist did'nt see any good pve skills that were worth taking out for my current skills. Even if I did I would agree that I would'nt grind for them unless they were at least a little overpowered. Even then, I would'nt really need them because I beat the game and am just waiting for Guild Wars 2.

Post of a God hope everyone takes the time to read it.

Well, really none of the campaigns have replay value for other characters on the same account. If you're new to the game, then yes, it has the advantage of learning different classes' gameplay mechanics, being introduced to some of their skills, etc. But once you've got the hang of things, there really is no point to repeating a campaign unless you want to do it again. Or you want to level a monk for DoA or something.

I agree with the poster above about the original envisionment of GW. I think the plan was for PvE to be somewhat of a tutorial for PvP. Training so that you knew how to play your class. Not something to be done over and over 8 times. Of course that's gonna be boring, like watching the same movie 8 times. I think that's where the PvP-only characters come in. PvP is the ideal endgame because the content (i.e. the metagame) is always changing and player-driven. I guess they never expected you would want to take character after character through pre-searing, buying all the freaking skills again. And if you actually do that, why not do all the title grinding again? Only a few PvE titles are account based. Most are character based. So I don't think you have a basis for a complaint. Even if you do, it's not new to GWEN. The Wisdom title track is character-specific and it even has tangible benefits. You gonna regrind IDing 10,000 gold items on each character?

Like I said before, GWEN is not a huge disappointment, it is more of the same, and it is exactly the more of the same that was *asked for* by hardcore players, both directly and through their actions.

You sum up the problem perfectly, darkdreamr.

So their reward for grind is superpowerful skills? They are the same crowd asking for hard mode, which stumps me.

Thanks!
TabascoSauce

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't even need max ranks to make Hard mode easy.

Just use the consumables.Then Simply C-Space to victory.

[QUOTE]this has to be a joke as you cant be that uninformed.

Factions was live exactly on time one year after GW without a minute of delay.

Anet stated that each chapter would have one year of development with 2 teams after GW having a 6 month stagger.

since they had one team all working on GW they had to start that schedule on the release of GW.

6 months after one team started FACTIONS (1 year release date target end of April 06 which was on time)

the other team started a one year development of NIGHTFALL end of Oct 05 with a one year development schedule and release of end Oct 06 which was also on time as advertised 6 months after FACTIONS with a year of work on it.

it was not delayed and the content was as advertised and i remember all the questions about forced pvp right here on guru way before release

especially the AB questions

...

Maybe if ectos dropped more and were cheaper, people wouldn't have to spend a lot of time in PvE and move on to PvP.

BTW FoW is ugly for the most part.


And it was titles that helped push people into PvE grinding as much as anything else.

I think you hit the nail squarely on the head with this one. I don't mind working for the armor but at least allow them to be accessable by playing the storyline then by repeatedly killing random mobs. This would also encourge players to actually play all of the content that was created.

What you are basically saying is you want it to be just like every other campaign. Work through the game, get far into an outpost where they sell armor and be able to purchase it. Because getting the max titles when you finish the game is the same concept. Not much of a point for those titles then. I think Anet knew that GWEN was extremely short compared to other things they offered in the past and they are trying to appeal to another new player base.

everyone does not have fow


the poor dont

Well,
I for 1 really like guild wars, It is my favorite game. I like the fact that it evolves or as some would say devolves.

To those that say "booo" to the grind,
Guild wars has always had some form of grind. Remember how long it took you to get to level 20 playing through on a proph only character, getting no runs???
oh, ya I was distracted by doing the story....

Grind has always been apart of the game. Its just now that people are getting there primary characters near done with stories or titles that they realize it. Some people would rather a /win emote added in that gave you max everything.

As for the "community", I am extreamly social with my alliance/guild of about 100 people. Out side of these people I find a completely disgusting enviorment. Computers isolate people and are mostly used by the social outcasts (no offense meant I'm in this group as well). A large majority of the community are people that infuriate me so I do not actively seek interaction with them, especially now that the /report has been implemented I WILL NEVER PUG AGAIN, EVER.

GW1 is approaching the end of the road. Everyones assumptions and expectations were far over what Gw:en delivered. I for 1 think it is second only to proph. I like the fact that it gives me "something to do" for the next year while I wait for gw2. This is the purpose of gw:en.

BTW I am a title RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO, my KoaBD will be maxed and I for 1 think it is fun to have goals.

Nope.

PvE only skills are probably the worst thing about Nightfall and GW:EN. Seed of Life was possibly the most broken skill ever created, and many of the GW:EN skills are better than similar elites.

That said, none of the PvE skills are NECESSARY for the completion of any portion of GW. They make things easier, but they aren't necessary. So while they are a generally bad idea (in that they are overpowered), they in no way cripple GW, or require grind.

A little off-topic from where the thread has headed but anyway....

My love affair with playing Guild Wars ended when all bar one of my PvE characters reached and stopped at the point where you had to reach sunspear somesuch to continue. I know they removed that, but it was at that point the game became all about one uber-character and the others were basically abandoned. The game became too much like work, too frustrating to play many characters as I liked to and wanted to. I felt as a player who liked playing several characters I was being somewhat disadvantaged for wanting to play more than one character especially with titles which conferred benefit to the character which held it.

Everyone uses armour as the "look you've always had to grind" example. But consider that it has always been available if you could get your character to it and you had in your inventory the things you needed to buy it. If I had a new character and I managed to get it to FOW I didn't need then to kill x monsters to buy the armour, I could buy that armour if I had the stuff and if I wanted it. I could do the work - the farming, buying whatever on any other character I wanted and shift it onto the character who would get the armour. The mechanic for armour access has changed. I think it is for the worse.

nice thread, well worth the time to read the initial post


and those who just don't care.. there are better looking armor for some players

I have been a long time player; after enjoying Eotn by taking my time on it, all I have left is to max out titles on my primary character. I just can't bring myself to play through with the other classes I have. Most just come out of retirement for the festivals.

It is just not fun anymore to max out grinding titles.They are so pointless to me now that I have grind the Lb/ss titles to max and rank 5 on all the reputation titles (except vanguard) on my primary. I think its time for me to quit for a while and move on. Perhaps I will revisit the game after a time. With all the games anymore requiring inordinate amounts of time to play or grind, I think it may be time to find a more productive and less frustrating hobby.

Guild Wars is not meant to be played for thousands of hours, go find a sub-based MMO if you need to get your PvE fix.

And I would rather have a game with a healthy mix of grind/ alternative-to-grind content, then a game of just one or the other.

And again...

Grind is a state of mind, not a game mechanic.

One of the features I like the best about GW may well be a self defeating gift.

Being able to play multiple profs, having 4+char slots.

When I started I played with 4 chars on a regular basis. As each expantion came out I started new chars until now I've got 9 diff chars all lvl 20.

However Because I split my time over so many chars I has taken me almost 28 months now to bring my main char, the War I started 2nd up to the point where I am really happy with all his armor/weapon/skills/titles.

The game was, at one time, set with a great deal of balance so that more time spent on one char did not have any noticable effect vs playing 4+ chars. Now that has changed to a massive degree.

While on the one hand I am happy to play just one char and build up titles, I do miss the fun of playing the other classes.

There are enough things to do in Guild Wars.... and enough freedom to be creative in finding more. Social environments like that always have the capacity for greater entertainment through innovative interaction.


But then most people have all the creativity of a limestone brick.

Wow, so much to read...in fact too many replies to read them all.

I have to say i think the OP starter is extremely well thought out and well written. I agree with many elements, if not all (as i actually love heroes and always missed that RPG element before their intro).

As a great example of grind, i offer the Rainbow Pheonix. I mean, 10 maxed titles to get it...oh boy.

For my experience of GW:EN, i got to rank 5 in all but Vanguard by the time i got to the end, but ONLY because i did go out of my way to clear a few rep farming areas to get the armors. Without it, i'd have probably been rank 4 in all but Vanguard which is still only rank 3.

One thing i have noticed is that Gaile seems highly absent on these forums of late...does she not like Guru anymore?

Guru questions the greatness that is GuildWars.

It certianly doesn't deserve to be blessed by Gailes presense.

....

srsly