Guild Wars or Grind Wars?

Bingo, that's exactly what i was going to say

i somehow doubt that... i did all the HM missions, dungeons, vanqs, etc with minimal use of pve skills, actually, i dont think i ever used any. if its a guild group...get someone else to take them. not all 8 ppl need them

i guess i could be wrong tho. i dont play with ppl anymore lol

The game is so much better now than when there was just prophecies.

OK, there are bound to be things implemented that we don't like, but on the whole the game is a better experience than it was

There was never any grind in GW for a long time, the titles were just acknowledgment of activities people were already doing. People already did mission + bonus and capped their skills, people already explored and opened chests as well. These early titles were gimmes to people who actually played and didn't get run everywhere. Those who throughly played a campaign never had any issue acquiring titles. Even the Luxon/Kursick titles were something players were doing anyway.The consumable titles sweet tooth/drunk/party animal had excessive requirements and broke the mode giving the rich an advantage, however on the flip side it rewarded farming which people did anyway.
When GWEN came out is when they really went astray imo the rep grind in ridiculous and was the first time I really had to say the game had went to crap grindwise. The second thing that was horrible was Ursan Blessing it totally broke the game and took what little skill there was in pve and threw it out the window. It totally destroyed the concept of class in pve since everyone is a overpowered bear. So from my point of view the game was fine up till GWEN which added grind for the sake of grind and gave broken skills to speed it along, but grind and its rewards are optional and don't effect normal play. The object of guild wars has always been to complete the campaign/expansion by doing all the missions/quests and dungeons and pvp for the endgame so that will never change. Everything else is just gravy.

Agreed.

DE is the man.

In GWs we cap at Lvl 20, so add grind titles. And as a bonus for the grind, PvE skills get stronger - as would reg skills if we did lvl up beyond 20.

That is my take on the titles that have a PvE benefit to them. The others are accomplishments, gold sinks, etc.

It went like this:

Jeff Strain honestly expected people to transition to PvP after doing everything in prophecies.

Dev1: Jeff. You know...some people like PvE more than PvP.
Jeff: Oh really? Well, let's add a grindfest armor for them then. But we must make sure that the whole thing is linked to PvP somehow so that they'll eventually play PvP.
Dev1: Done.

Dev1 created God realms and proposed the "World at War - Favor of the Gods" concept. Needless to say, Jeff nearly wet his pants and greenlight the whole thing.

I guess we all know how it went later.

I always thought this game was named Build Wars. >.>

I stopped playing after I went after the titles for 2 months when they were introduced. After which, I was thinking "Why am I doing this for?"

I haven't left the guild hall ever since. Only place I visited was Kamadan.

The original concept was a mistake. Guilds were associated with PvP, and all kinds of social events. But on the moment you allow players in an adventure environment, you know they are going to gather items. Because that's 99% of the fun in exploring! Not the satisfaction of a great working build, the defeat of a final level boss, but the exiting expectation of what he will drop keeps people playing. Any PvE concept without the abillity to grind is doomed to fail!

My opinion?
I knew I did not want to join PvP when I bought Prophecies 3 years ago. I knew I would not like the low droprates, the forced teamplay, the linear mission way of unlocking regions. But there was a vast world to explore, and I could not resist it. And I knew there would be many players like me, anticipating, trying to change the games direction. It took a lot of time, but it worked! Yes, I'm happy with the game as it is now!

I always thought the whole Skill > Time thing was about not having to spend months getting max armor stats and weapons. However i'm obviously wrong as people have made it quite clear that it was supposed to be about getting everything in the least amount of time.

Hell once the 1st Year Miniatures came out i saw a couple of posts saying that Anet had broken the Skill > Time promise by giving 1 year old characters mini pets......

And time > skill was further emphasized with EOTN, although amazingly some people are still oblivious to it.

It is now Grind Wars, no doubt.

ANet really thinks they can keep people occupied with funtastic titles like doing things 10.000x, standing AFK for hours and stuff like that...

This made me stop playing GW for now, if that is all that is left to do.

They could work on gameplay improvements, contents and lots of other things, but they throw us a grinding bone for a game that contains little incentives or variety of ways to grind things.

GW did not need that, it only sent people on a mindless grinding spree. They had this vision of "play GW, be done with it, next chapter, play again, be done with it..." and their 2nd idea was "PvP as fun and unlimited endgame content".

The hilarious thing is GW works quite well, despite all their visions turning out as outright wrong and pure rubbish. Their changes to the game were not for the better, and I fear if they continue to work on GW2 like they ended with GW1, it is going to become a game I do not really want.

Prophecies had grind. You could farm ectos in The Undworld, shards on the FoW beach, griffons for gold and rares, Sorrow's Furnace for greens, to namea few.

The difference between grind today and grind back in 2005 is that the 'old' grind was optional and didn't feel compulsory. You didn't have to buy obsidian armour sets or save up for Serpent Axes , Dwarven Axes, Sephis Axes and Crystalline Swords but, today, we are enocuraged to grind by the means of titles. There's also an element of peer pressure in the sense that many teams request Ursans with lvl 10 Norn and 8 LB.

My theory is that numbers are bad for games. The only numbers we had in prophecies that represented how we played were XP and Fame. XP couldn't be showed (and nobody really cared much) and Fame was always heavily criticized for not being retroactive indicating the time spent in HA rather than skill.

The lvl20 level cap was deliberately easy to achieve to reinforce the idea that GW players didn't have to spend countless hours of grinding for a number. It's just a shame that the idea didn't stick.

Oh well, i'm off to HFFF. Only 8 million faction to go.

~

There's also the argument that some people like grind - which is very true. It's like a guilty pleasure which people don't announce because it's stronlgy reputed as a negative.

Moderators, please close this thread.

We already have like a dozen of these.

I see nothing wrong with a bit of grind. Like havint to level up 10 characters.

But there are degrees and degrees of grind. And if a particualar title or achievement takes more than one year playing one hour a day, it's WRONG. Really WRONG.

You're a real jackass for it too. If you don't like the game, don't buy it. Don't make it become something it's not. You've just managed to make it a mini-WoW with 8 skills, slightly better graphics, and an ursan fest.

woo.

Who Cares Wars

IMO Nightfall and EotN made the game a grind-fest, introducing reputation titles.
It surely is Time > Skill. I hate grind, that's why I don't play the game that often anymore. I really miss the good ol' days.

2 titles track to grind for is not too bad. But another 4 more? No thanks.

Grinding for titles is one thing, its optional.

Grinding for PvE power is something else entirely, it's wrong and goes against why I purchased Guild Wars in the first place. Grinding for PvE power has also taught me to not play my other characters, and to just focus on one character.

I don't like that, I want to enjoy all my characters not just the one that I grind for PvE power. I say keep PvE power skills away from grind. Give them a separate attribute or force them to use your primary attribute but don't tie them to grind.

Sure, because you've actually have played it....

Guys, to be quite honest, "the good ol' days" of doing the Prophecies campaign wasn't supposed to end with more PvE content: players that beat Prophecies were supposed to be able to jump into PvP. But guess where Anet found its cash crop....people that didn't want to stop PvEing. The original concept of GW was this, and in that aspect it failed for it did not create a large population of mostly PvPers, but a majority of people that PvE that after the bewildering ending of Prophecies thought "What next?" So then the Realms came out, then titles, then SF, then Factions (and with it elite areas and grind elements in the form of PvP) and so on and so forth.

Of course, the PvP population (what the original GW catered to) grew jealous of the PvE titles and wanted titles too, so they got them.

Does anyone see that GW is a result of the community? This is what we wanted, and I think we achieved it, with the crown jewel being the addition of a Prophecies end-game reward. People expected the rewards for both a little and large amount of grind, that they got what they wanted. They wanted character progression, so titles were introduced. They wanted easier/better weapons, so they got unique weapons and inscriptions. GW is a result of the community. Take it or leave it, I don't care, but it was this way even before GWEN was released. Ursan didn't destroy PvE: we did.

sure theres grind and i pitty those who think they have to play to get monuments for gw2. You can still have fun in the game, it was fun when the original gw was out but come on...think about it, would it still of been fun after 3 years?

Grinding is optional, you don't HAVE to do it and your gameplay experience won't suffer from it, you are given a choice and the opportunity to enjoy the game the way you would like the most.

For some people all that's left is to get titles and prepare for the big move to GW2, and of course that requires some grind but there's no other way to do it. They can't make new content for every rank of a certain title to give the user a unique experience.

If you compare the grind you have in GW to the grind you have in real grind-based mmo's where you camp one spot and kill the same monster for a week to level up, hell yes, i would take the variety of "grind" that GW offers, which isn't mindless button spamming for the most part.

Whiners really should consider checking other mmorpgs that are out there, only then you'll see how much GW offers over them. Most of them don't even have a community relations team or care what their users want. And that's one single thing that would always make me pick GW over any other game out there.

I dont grind. I HATE grinding, it was the reason I never liked WoW. Therefore, I only have 2 maxed titles after 2 years of playing, and I intend to keep it that way. Does that make me a worse player? I dont think so.

My only REAL issue with titles is that people who have a lot of titles expect me to be awed by their 1337ness. Im not impressed by titles AT ALL >.>.
On the contrary, in my experience people with a lot of maxed titles are the worst sort, because they tend not to listen to advice anymore, and are not willing to discuss. OMGUNUB I am LB10 U SHuD LiSTeN TO mE - types.

One thing is not infallible because other things are more fallible... it is irrelevant how other games perform as the discussion is about THIS game and what people do and don't want in THIS game.

Holy Crap! An inteligent post at last!
Not that there arent many here, but this one explains it all.

And i would like to state some points that people are really forgeting:
*Before Ursan, the player comunity forced you to play X,Y,Z profession with A,B and C skills. And dont tell me that im wrong because i am a mesmer. And just by understanding my last sentence (saying that i am a mesmer) you agree with me. So removing the ursan problem wont make all pve trouble go away.
*The grind thing was really introduced with the intetion to give the false idea of depth, and it is really working, you all ARE playing arent you? Imagine the game without this incessant grind: we would be back to the Factions time, but with hard mode, you would have dungeons to play at pve and thats it. With that we would be bored in NO TIME.

The problem i really see with the grind thing is that the only one you really have to... grind, is the Luxon/Kurzick titles. The reputation ones you can get about to 8 if play the dungeons (at normal and hard) and vanquish all Eye of The North expansion areas. Although that might look good that is also a problem.

For me, the one example they should follow is the Sunspear Title Track. Why? Because can get it into rank 8 just by playing the storyline and some quests, if you would like to. With that, you will get a good rank for the pve skill, and getting it into rank 10 will make a slight difference, so its not something you HAVE TO DO.

Now at the Eye of The North, if you do all the quests and all (no dungeons included) you will get about rank 4 at maximum. And we all understand that rank 4, specially for the EoTN skills that have a decent increase of parameters (also in quantity because there are so many skills), isnt enough.
Now you have 2 things FORCING you to get into rank 10: The skill parameters+player community AND the Hall of Monuments.
You can allways deny the player community by playing with other people or with our ever-friendly Heroes and Henchman. But you cannot deny the Hall of Monuments. Its something that is allways there and says "GET THE TITLE AT MAXIMUM OR LOSE IT AT GUILD WARS 2 Muahahahaaaaa...ha...".
And thats really what it is doing nowadays, forcing players to get the titles or else their time playing the game will be worthless.
I dont know about you, but I feel forced to get rank 10 sunspear when i have it at rank8, or get 100% cartographer when i have 90%.

Another topic that came up to my mind by saying this is that, if the awards for GuildWars 2 arent account-wide, i will feel very depressed. Because i will have to choose from one of my characters to get these cursed titles, and the rest will be abandoned (and why would we have characyers slots, if the rest is going to "die" anyways?). And thats where the game will get VERY boring, having to grind with only one character and not beeing able to play with another one, knowing that it will be waste of time... wow... thats awful.
A.Net could tell us how is it going to work... i mean... at least!

ze end.

Just to play the game there is very little grind. If you play for titles then there is grind but is not essential to play and beat the game. There is a difference.

if you never PUG it won't be grind wars. It's just that everyone wants R10 ursan and max PvE skills. Yesterday when I was on my warrior it was funny since the ursan died faster than my warrior (no clue how).

Kind of a big deal = grind.

Sweet tooth/Party animal/Drunkard = grind for gold

all reputations (especially Luxon/Kurzick title)= mass grind

Defender of Ascalon = grind

guild wars should be renamed to Ursan Wars, in a contest of who can do the most pointless things to have a thing under their name that says God Amongst Mere Mortals, ya real cool

What bewildering ending? It was all quite straightforward if you'd been watching the cutscenes during and after Missions. You defeat the Big Bad and seal away the evil he'd released. End of story.


Only if you consider playing the game itself to be 'grind', of course, and insist on going for maximum reputaion rank instead of just going for enough to progress in the storyline or to make the skills useful enough for regular use.

Most of the EotN skills, for example, are more than useful enough at r5, the last rank you 'need' since it's the last any new content depends on (ie, the racial armors), which isn't at all hard to get from normal play. And, of course, there is absolutely no need to 'grind' for rep by filling books (which is too varied an activity, IMHO, to really count as grind) or by abusing that last Cipher quest (which does count as grind ) unless you want to use those skills. Me, I'm happy enough with [["I Am The Strongest!"] and [[Ursan Blessing] (yes, I do use it, but it's gotten boring so I've moved back to my previous [[Power Attack] spamming with [[Warrior's Endurance] build for a while) at Norn r7 (currently around 20k away from r8, but I'm in no hurry), [[Ear Bite] at r6, and [[Pain Inverter] at r5 (though I rarely use the latter 'cos of Energy concerns - Warrior's Endurance might let me spam Power Attack and [[Seeking Blade], but there are limits ).

I hear you only need SunSpear r4 to be allowed to progress, easy enough to do as long as you talk to the guy at the nearest shrine whenever you exit town.

I'm also told that the Luxon/Kurzick rep you NEED is easily attainable by the time you reach the chokepoint in the story that requires the rep, as long as you put in a couple of hours of Alliance Battle. I'll find out for sure when I reach that point in a few weeks, of course.

These threads are funny.

Most people wanted guild wars to be this: http://www.warhammeronline.com/
A massive group battle/war that everything evolves around pvp, with great graphics.

we are on a fast track to being a "wow" like mmo.

Gw and Gw2 will always be my favorite as of what is available to play currently.
unfortunately GW is a giant carebear, pve was not supposed to be the main play altho it is.

Grind has always been in gw, even if you don't remember doing it. Not to mention this is a 3 year old game.

Grinding isn't ever going to go away. It's an easy and practically free way to extend the game without actually adding more content, and is therefore every game developer's wet dream. What makes it even better is that a significant subset of their players actually like grinding for recognition. I'm sure someone, somewhere is laughing their ass off about how they conned thousands upon thousands of people into paying for the privilege to sit at their computers and do the same repetitive motions over and over again - and actually enjoy it.

The other side of this is that grinding for power gives some players a sense of accomplishment, and allows them to achieve through time investment what they can't do through skill. The fact is that a majority of people fail at the game, and will always fail at the game. If skill remained the only way to get ahead, these people would hit a brick ceiling and quit before too long. But things like Ursan are a guarantee that, with some time, you can beat anything no matter how clueless you are.

Face it, the reign of skill is dead - it's dead because most players don't have a single shred of skill to begin with, and you can't support a game on a small group of skillful players. About the only games that will consistently push skill are puzzle games and competitive games, so if you care about skill, it might be time to switch fields.

AND THEY DIDNT INSIST ON COOKIE CUTTERE BEFORE GWEN.........SNICKERS

no you are completely wrong on most every post you bitch on.

skill over time was specifically for PVP ONLY as any moron can see the 10 hour a day farmer player will beat the 5 hour a week casual player.

JEFF STRAIN MADE A MAJOR BLUNDER THINKING EVERYBODY WOULD MIGRATE TO PVP AND THE FACTIONS MASSIVE BATTLES

DIDNT HAPPEN SO THEY GAVE THE PLAYER BASE WHAT MOST OF US WANTED NIGHTFALL AND OTHER PVE PERKS TO KEEP THEM.

IF NIGHTFALL HAD BEEN ANOTHER PVP ORIENTED CHAPTER BYE FOR ALL US OPTIONAL NON FARMER PLAYERS

There shouldnt be titles in GW2 considering that its suppose to be the ultimate Guild Wars. It should be able to sustain the chapter every few months model that Anet originally intended for GW and should provide a steady influx of new content, hence removing the need/appeal of titles as replacement for real content. If ppl still want to grind for some reason, there's always that proposed unlimited/really high level cap.

However, gaile already said that there will be titles in GW2 :/

stop whining, guild wars has little or no gring compared to most mmos, god the guild wars community is picky. You want everything even though none of us are paying monthly fees, i can imagine if it were wow or something.... then you have the right to be naggy paying so much.........

It's Whatever-You-Make-It Wars. Yes, there's grind, but there's little that you "need to do". While it is lame that there is a "steady power increase" via PvE skills/titles, they aren't a necessity.

Regarding my opinion of it now: there are a few recent additions I don't really appreciate, but it's still a game that I think people should pick up and try.

Grind Wars.
``````````

and btw the pve never has effected pvp in guild wars and never will.........so if you reckon pvp is grind you are an idiot. If you don't like the grind of pve play pvp. And all pve is somesort of grind, in every pve based game in the world there are places where it takes ages and ages to complete and it gets borring, but you do it anyway, and that is not just for rps.

THink about it apart form titles what real grind is there......you dont need titles

You Don't Need To Titles To Play Guild Wars

You Don't Need To Titles To Play Guild Wars

You Don't Need To Titles To Play Guild Wars

You Don't Need To Titles To Play Guild Wars

You Don't Need To Titles To Play Guild Wars

You Don't Need To Titles To Play Guild Wars

You Don't Need To Titles To Play Guild Wars

You Don't Need To Titles To Play Guild Wars