Why does ANet have to cater to the "inexperienced?"

Idk, there's no such thing as a hard area in pve anymore, if you want a challenge you either have to pvp or handicap yourself.

WoW still doesnt have an easy / god mode button like GW does.

UB makes GW easier and less skillful then killing mangy wolves or black bears is in WoW.
I found soloing in WoW up to around level 30 far more challenging and skillful then it was using UB in FoW.

I'm waiting for this legend to show up on Snopes - it's simply not true, just something online gamers keep telling themselves because...who knows why.

The breakdown at 10 million was:

2.5 million US accounts (this includes Oceania - Australia, New Zealand, etc), 2 million EU accounts, and 5.5 million Asian accounts (China, Korea, etc).

To answer the OP: Blizzard is making WoW more accessible and easier. Anyone who's been near the WoW forum recently - especially Wrath of the Lich King - has seen the fallout from this.

Since The Burning Crusade was launched, Blizzard has:

* Added heroic (hard mode) mode to instances, allowing another progression tier for 5-person dungeons. The bosses dropped heroic badges, allowing access to raid-level loot (with enough badges - 25-75 or so).

* Added badges to all raid bosses. The easiest raid drops 22 badges from all bosses, and the most expensive badge loot costs 150 badges.

* Improved XP scaling from 20-60 to increase leveling speed. It's much easier to hit 60 now than it was pre-Burning Crusade.

* Added badge loot that's equivalent to the loot that drops in T5/T6 instances (Tempest Keep, Serpentshrine Cavern, Black Temple). You can get this loot while running Karazhan and heroics over and over again, and never setting foot in a 25-person raid.

* Removed attunement requirements to enter Karazhan, Black Temple, and Mt. Hyjal, allowing raids that have sufficient gear to tackle the BT and Hyjal, but didn't have the attunements, to start working on them. Since 2.4, the number of guilds raiding those two instances have gone up considerably. You also don't need the key to enter Karazhan (although someone with the key needs to unlock the door). This makes it easier to gear up alts, since you don't have to do any quests to get access.

* Provided epic loot via PVP - you can get the best in arenas, and fairly good stuff in battlegrounds at this point. A lot of it (but not all) is useful in PVE, and is easier to obtain than raiding for it.

In addition, with Wrath of the Lich King, they're:

* Adding the Death Knight, which will start at 55th level, eliminating most of your leveling - you just need the last 25 levels to 80.

* Revamping the heroic instance system so that heroic instances have their own separate loot tables from the normal instances, providing more reason to run them after running the normal versions.

* Providing two raid progression routes - All of the raids can be set to 10- and 25-person instances, allowing you to run the same content in a small or medium-sized raid. They're on separate lockout timers, so you can run both the 25- and 10-person versions of the same raid in the same timeframe without any trouble.

But anyway, yeah, a lot of the hardcore players in WoW have been screaming much louder than anyone around here about how WoW's being dumbed down. So, the answer to your question is: WoW's doing the same thing Guild Wars is.

There is difference between WoW and GW in regards of dumbing down:

In WoW it is well expected. Also, in WoW "elite players" (whoever they are) get new elite stuff to do.

elite area gets dumbed down -> new one is added -> elite area gets dumbed down -> new one is added ... over and over.

In GW there is no new content to replace dumbed down one. And few skills singlehandedly dumbed down pretty much everything.

Well, you need to remember that in GW, it isnt that the areas are getting dumbed down, its the skills, or at least that we get new skills that make elite areas far too easy.

But as I said before, hard mode and elite areas are meant to be hard and elite. They arent meant to be for players that cant learn to play them properly, or for people that only have an hour to play the game.

If you dont have the time to do something, then dont do it. You wouldnt ask for an exam in RL to be dumbed down, made easier or for the time length to be reduced because you didnt learn enough to pass that exam.

Guild Wars began as a very simple game for PvE players to play. I mean we had mobs that just stood beneath AoE spells like fire storm that would not even attack!

PvE is meant to be fun, for many this means quick and easy. For others it means a challenge. Unfortunately what some see as a challenge others view as frustrating.

PvP was always meant to be a challenge, a place to push yourself to the limits that this game has to offer.


Remeber also that the challenge of ANY game is centered around the first time you play through. There are few games that have any challenge once you have beaten them a couple of times.

If you are so mad at the differences between WoW and GW wait a year or so and buy GW2. I hear Anet is going to make a "happy-balance" with grinding for WoW fanboys and casual playing for casual players.

Uhm. But GW2 is in 2012. That's 4 years.

[citation needed]

That's a fallacy, you have to factor in all the differences between the two games. It's extremely narrow-minded and stupid to just take one part of a game and then compare it to the game's popularity. It's simular to me saying:

Idiots have hands.
You have hands.
Therefor you're an idiot.

Even the most pessimistic of schedules released in some semi-official form place GW2's release in 2010 at the latest. I wouldn't be shocked at an 09 release myself, but then again they haven't really talked much about their progress.

Regarding this actual topic: WoW caters to casuals/bad players pretty much constantly. I'm not sure where you're getting the idea to the contrary.

WoW doesn't make things easier? Really? So after I spent 4 months working on Naxx for over 8 horus a day to get my Tier 3 elite purples to only have Blizzard release an expansion where people could get blues and greens as good as my hard earned purple tier 3 is not making the easier? I quit WoW after 2 years (Open Beta until TBC release) as a guildmaster of a hardcore 120 man raiding guild because they made the game easier.

It is a problem with almost every MMOG these days. Only Eve Online still caters to the hardcore.

Beating the game was never the challenging part. Even when the henches were complete idiots, couldn't be flagged, and had next to no useful skills, actually making it through all the missions wasn't that terribly tough. Trying to slog through UW or FoW before imba was the rough part. When UW and FoW became too easy because of the new skills, they introduced DoA. Then they took the challenge away from DoA by adding Ursan so people could play it.

I don't want to have to spend hours in front of a video game to see the content, and neither do most other people, so things change.

Like I said, if this bothers you, go play something else that hasn't been simplified yet. AoC just started up, it will be awhile before they carebear the hell out of it.

Leveling was eased because the "inexperienced" didn't want to play through to level 70 when they didn't even have the patience to play to level 60. The only reason I even went back to WoW is because they reduced the assinine leveling times at the same time Guild Wars basically took a huge crap and died.

They opened up leveling so that they could sell the expansion to people like me who didn't have the patience to jump through their ridiculous hoops just to get to 60, nothing more, nothing less.

What a stupid comment. You devoted a laughable amount of time to the game and you're complaining that they advanced it so you can do it all over again? Are you saying you just don't want to play anymore, or are you failing to realize that they basically just handed people like you a whole new set of crack pipes to smoke?

I'm really having a hard time understanding the point here. You devoted a ton of time to a video game, so you obviously enjoy it... and you're upset that they expanded the content so you can move on and do it all over again? What, exactly, is the problem? Were you under the misapprehension that there was some goal to WoW? Are you confused as to the purpose of the endless raiding grind? I don't get it, and I don't think you do either.

Good point about it not having a point, I guess I felt it did at the time as my elite uber armor was a show of my skill, time spent, and commitment to the game with my guildmates in overcoming the most difficult content in the game to date. That armor was a status symbol to me (as dumb as that is I guess) and when they made it worthless it ruined that feeling for me and was the reason I did not buy the expansion and left the game entirely.

I guess it doesn't make sense in some ways because, yes, I did enjoy the endless raiding grind, but not only for the grind itself, more for the results which was having uber armor to pwn people with in PvP and walk around town making everyone drool. It is what it is, and that is how I felt.

I will not say that ANet caters completely to the inexperienced, but face it. In this competative world where people will change what they are doing at the drop of a hat, ANet needs to get people in and keep them. If giving inexperienced people something extra then so be it.

Look at how many MMORPGs are on the market and how many more could spring up before GW2. ANet not only is trying to hold onto some of its established players, but they have to get new ones into the game, so a little extra doesnt hurt that.

To me this is the least of the GW problems as there are still things that need to be addressed that the community has pointed out years ago. Anyway that is for another thread.

QFT. Call To The Torment == *twitch**twitch**Xanax*

On normal mode, all of the elite areas are very doable. It takes a moderately skilled group to progress through them. On Hard Mode, however, is where things get a little rough, and this is where I'm largely concerned. What I don't get, most of all, is why they would add a Hard Mode than simplify the heck out of it. If people wanted to see all of this content, they could just lower the difficulty level. Anything on Normal mode is very doable with a moderately skilled set-up.

I feel that it's more about applying instant gratification more than anything else. By reading all of these comments, I'm starting to realize that more and more. That may seem a little assy of me - calling all of these imba skills "instant gratification" buttons - but I can't see them as much else. It's almost akin to playing Oblivion, setting it's difficulty slider to the highest difficulty, then being handed crazy good weapons and armor to make it feel like your playing on the lowered difficulty level.

I don't know why people feel the "need" to beat these areas at the highest difficulty. It could be all of the titles and the HoM, but I'll leave that discussion open for others.

But they still haven't opened up raiding. While attunements have been removed and other aspects have been eased, they're still not making them soloable just to get people to see the content. The raids are going to be obsolete, only to be explored by a few bored players in the coming months, and they're still not "opening" them to the masses.

They, Blizzard, have held to this for years. They have not opened the "most polished" (quotations for subjectivity) content to everyone. They've only opened it to people with the dedication to see through them. There have been people complaining about them catering highly to raiders and that they'd like to see the content themselves, but Blizz hasn't really budged on it. And WoW has still prospered in spite of it.

No need to wait, just get AoC.

It is GW + WoW 1.5.

Right right, Blizzard making the entire game easier isn't nearly as "bad" as Anet adding an optional skill to make the game easier.

It also has requirements that many people's computers don't meet, like needing 32GB of free space. Not all people have super uber machines.

Not to mention you actually have to own the expansion to use it. :/

*snorts diet pepsi*

I thought you were exaggerating, so I went to look at the FAQ, and even the stupid WEBSITE was so flash-bloated that it took forever to load (this isn't my gaming PC, thankfully). Sho' Nuff... "HARD DRIVE SPACE: 30 GB"

That's nuts

How is adding Ursan Blessing (that's the skill you're referring to, correct?) any different than Blizzard making the game a bit simpler to grasp? With Blizzard easing it up, it now lies in the player's hands to make things more difficult. Same goes with GW: the player is now gimping himself by not using UB. What becomes optimal/optional begins to get blurred and messy.

Hard disk space isn't too much of a concern (whatever helps those loading screens), but the other requirements can be, but take all that talk to the AoC thread in OT.

That's okay Red, I still think your keen intellect is only eclipsed by your good looks.

My apologies, I did not have time to continue my post. I hope this clarifies my thoughts a little. I'll try to be brief.
Guild Wars (ANet) operates under a different marketing strategy... their players don't sell the game, they can't clain to be the biggest game since Monopoly. While Blizzard wants to sell you the game and set a $15/month hook in you, ANet just wants to sell you the game. And the next chapter. And the next. And the PvP expansions. And the bonus packs.

I believe that when the designers made GW, in designing a game that tried to get rid of the negative characteristics of games like EQ and WoW, they were well aware of the limitations of the PvE world, but it was not their intention to hold players with that world. They figured that people would play PvP and enjoy the choice to PvP on their own terms and not in the PvE environment. GW adjustments have traditionally been made to balance PvP, it's only recently (let's call it a year) that ANet has made serious effort into PvE adjustment.

Adjustment. I can't bring myself to call it "balance". They are doing it to encourage people to play GW while they get GW2 online, and sell millions of copies of GW2 at 50+ bucks a pop.

The whole Hall of Honor thing. Activate the Time Machine. Click.

wastewastewastewastewastewastewastewastewastewaste

In early GW, people played PvE to unlock skills and equipment for PvP. Things are different now, and people want more from their PvE. Nowadays, more people play PvE, and more people solo than with people. ANet has now adjusted that side of GW to keep those people interested.

The old school GW player, they learned how to beat the AI, so they added Hard Mode and made the AI smarter. Actually encouraged people to play in groups again. But the new player, they can't hang out with the veteran, they just aren't that skilled. ANet has added skills to make it easier for them to catch up. They did that in EQ too, it was called Monster Missions. Great XP, and you didn't need to play your class (profession) to do them.

Where GW players do sell GW is on selling chapters. You only have Prophecies... man, you should get Factions 'cause the skills are much better. You should get Nightfall 'cause it's so much easier to solo with heroes: heroes don't whine, ragequit or make mistakes. You should get the bonus pack to get more content, and you definately need Ursan Blessing.

You only need one chapter to play, but you might be shorting yourself if you don't have all of the chapters. If you are PvE oriented (most people are) you need all of the chapters to have the best skills, make the right build. Wiki says so.
Absolutely. GW was designed to have PvE world that was nice and cool, that could be challenging at times, but wasn't the grindfest that EQ and WoW were. And if you wanted to get your blood pumping, enter an arena someplace and take on the hardest opponents that you'll ever come into contact with.

Absolutely. EQ and WoW are time sinks: You play to get more powerful so you can support your friends and they can support you to get cool loots that when someone sees it and asks, "What's that?" you can say, "Runetotem's Mantle... Loot drop from Lady Vasjh... My guild farms her."

More levels in WoW just makes the grind longer. Level 80 becomes a goal, reached by some in a week or two (Powerlevel FTW!). We don't have levels in GW, we have rank and titles. More powerful weapons means you're always looking for an upgrade, which just makes the grind last longer.

I don't know about vanity in WoW, but there was plenty of vanity in EQ, and I assume that since WoW is Diet EQ, it can't be much better. The only difference between WoW vanity and GW vanity is that in GW, it's easier for everyone to have the vanity items they want. Just takes time and gold. In WoW, you need a guild to get all the bling you want.

Granted, in WoW, more content is available to make the grind more bearable. I mean, who wants to wants to grind the same crap every day... that's like GW.

Personally, I think the biggest problem with all of these games is the player who rushes through, "beats the game", complains 'cause "there's nothing to do" and treats newbies like they never were one.

I tried to be brief.

/fail

There is really one reason there is to make here mate, as said before. WoW's subscription fee system allows them to cater for the experienced. Why should experienced players pay any more for WoW if its too easy? they need a challenge once they bump 60/70/80 (not sure what the cap is). Blizzard provide that challenge through not only new content every couple of months or so, but also allows them to feel "hey, i got through the easy part (which i assume is leveling in wow), now im ready for the elite stuff". I tried WoW, and suffice to say, i reached level 23 and got bored. the gameplay isn't really for me, but thats not the point. I felt it was very easy really, providing you dont aggro too many monsters.

Anet, being a non-subscription fee business, offers no new content for its experienced players. I'd say from mid nightfall onwards GW has suffered quite a recession, as there is only so much you could do with a pve story with instancing etc. DoA will never have seen the light of day for inexperienced players. I myself found it quite hard to get into a group and enjoy DoA, as people did not prefer paragons/dervs etc other than the trinity. Anyways, it is inexperienced players that bring in the dough. Thus, in order for them not to get frustrated and bored that they cannot take part in pve elite mode, Anet decided to give them ursan/OP pve skills. I'm pretty sure a large GWEN base bought eotn because of ursan and pug pressure. Thus, OP skills = access to harder mode = prospect of player enjoying gw and buying another campaign = friends of gamer interested in ursan and its opportunities.

just my view

Making things more "accessible" usually means that things get dumbed down in a way that does not really serve any purpose. But this is not good for the game or the players.

I have a nice analogy for this:

Marathon runs get reduced to 100m, to make them accessible for players with medical problems, that run out of stamina, do not have the time for long runs, deem them no fun and overly demanding.

Result: No more effort required. Old runners quit running, as it became silly. New runners learn run styles that would not work on full distance runs and do not "catch up" or "improve" at all. There is no more challenge there, the run changes into something completely different.


GW players are not different. They do not get more enjoyment out of the game if it gets ever easier.


More EOTN style areas without the slew of overpowere pve skills, consumables and all that would work out so much better!
GW2 needs more challenging tasks from the very beginning. People can learn and adapt, but they will never if they are not challenged at all. In the end they will become better at the game and also enjoy it much more than before. They do not need to become GW Gurus. But they would not stay mindless vegetables and have more from the game.

If I don't like the difficulty in Guild Wars, I turn on HM or add UB to my bar. If I don't like the difficulty in WoW, I have no options. That's the bloody difference.

Blizz made the entire game easier. This isn't an opinion, this is a fact. They lowered the stats on monsters throughout the game, vastly improved all gear AND added the OP TBC stuff. If you'd like to find out the exact numbers, go check the 2.3 (iirc) patch notes. Oh and they made tons of skills stronger.

Guild Wars added UB AND HM, which you can mix and match to find your preferred level of difficulty. They didn't make gear magically better, they didn't allow you to gain ten more levels, and they certainly didn't make the monsters weaker.

So, as I said before, if anyone is catering to the inexperienced it's Blizz.

But here, I'll run through the rest of the obvious examples you might point to in GW.

PvE/PvP Split Skills: The PvE crowd has been begging for this since the first pvp focused skill update. This isn't something that an inexperienced player will even notice.

PvE Skills: All of them require grind and the vast majority are located in Gwen, where they serve as toys more than anything. Unless someone wants to tell me their neat-o build built around the Ruby Djinn summon.

Monster AoE Avoidance toned down: Again at the request of the forum going pve crowd, and which still goes on full force in HM. This one I could see helping the inexperienced crowd. Score one for you, yay!

Consumables: Gwen only, require grind to access, and cost a fair amount of change. Not exactly something designed for the new player. For the UB crowd, sure. But Anet has also been looking for more effective money sinks for quite some time now, so I'm guessing that was the real reason behind this.

This is really a stupid topic.

You can also see that most WoW players are high level, see WoW census and other sites.

Content available to players is limited by levels:
Level 1-50 content is mostly useless to level 70 players. Nothing to get there.

Blizzard has to adapt the game so that people can faster get 70. Then one can argue the game starts, or one can say its over and all that is left is the endgame content that is not for everyone: PvPing in Battlegrounds, Raiding, Arena. Or doing daily quests over and over.


I must say I love(d) the faster levelling after 2.3, and regret that many early mobs are now pathetically easy. This is not better, it is boring.
But not only on low population servers you can be VERY alone in the early areas.

Blizzard almost has no chance than to react to this, this is a problem of the ever-progressing levelquest system of WoW. The content does not increase with level, you are always tied to the areas of your level range.


But take a look at the late-game areas in Outland. Overland areas are dangerous if you do not take care, mobs are varied and have some tricks. I am thinking about Skettis right now. The dungeons there are still challenging to 70s, even if you are right about crowd control making things easy in WoW. Just do not get too highbrow about it, organizing 28 people to do something together and right is not easy.


GW on the other hand has a much more sophisticated pvp system. PvE was never hard, but there was some challenge at least. Then we got more chapers, classes and tons of new skills and a general power creep. The areas did not get changed as much.
Making PvE easier by consumables, dumbed down mobs or pve skills affects ALL areas, including the areas meant to be a bit more challenging. And see what happened to DoA, now its open to everyone and his bear.


This thread offers more stuff for discussion than the question who dumbs down things more, WoW or GW, which is rather low. It is not "stupid".

Organizing 25 people to do anything is indeed a pain in the ass. But that's a constant across all fields of endeavor and not something specific to WoW. Especially since, in WoW, you can simply do exactly what other groups posted on youtube and achieve success. Raiding isn't a matter of skill, it's a matter of having the right gear, the right macros, the ability to watch youtube and oodles of time.

Unless you think that it's really skillful for raiders to bind a macro to their mousewheel and spend the whole raid rolling it up and down at the called target.

The main problem with GW is the lack of a social nature. People only want to farm or trade. A couple want to do PvE content from time-to-time, but apart from that it's near impossible to get a group.

Seriously - stand in Doomlore Shrine and try to get a HM group for anything. It's frustrating as anything. Then I tried to hero and hench assault the stronghold and failed every time because ANet decided it would be really fun if the Charr archers respawned faster than the catapults killed them off and the NPC group was so weak they always die.

So I blame ANet and the community as a whole. If people actually played the game I don't think there would be problems such that PvE content had to be separated from PvP.

Thanks god it is not that easy, do not be so cynic. There is a statistic about 80%+ of WoW players never experiencing major raids or instances at all.

We could be cruel and say, roughly equivalent to the number of dumbasses in GW or people on earth in general, but well.

But Blizzard does not give these players something like UB, consumables and tons of similar imba pve skills. Or dumb down the mobs even more.

They also care about the older areas. Duskwallow Marshes got really useful and fun improvements. Naxxramas is in a redesign process to become a level 80 instance in WOTLK for the new 25 man raid size. ANet added the Nightmares to UW and made farming somewhat harder, but people learnt how to deal with them quickly and just farm on. Only FoW quest that prevented the chest to spawn and completion got fixed.

ANet's greatest old-area improvement was the introduction of hard mode. But in the very same update they downgraded normal mode loot and difficulty, too.


And you are still keen on bashing WoW, but again, this is not the point!
We can be totally ignorant of Blizzard making WoW harder or easier, as long as we play GW it is GW gameplay that counts.

We can compare WoW and GW forever, and even if GW is oh so much better, what they are doing right now to the game is definitely not good in my opinion. I think they can learn a lot from WoW, but they seem to be so very keen on copying the worse aspects, not really funny.

I agree, why they are doing this,? i dont know but surely deviating from the formulae that made GW so good in the first place, in order to follow the rest, in my eyes is not a good move, i dont want a watered down version of WoW, for GW2.

Comparing GW to any other game will pull focus away from one fact. There has been a severe lack of foresight in much of GW design. From the "buy back" points for characters, to the whole nerfing of this and that skill. And now they just split the skill set into pvp and pve. They could have done that a few years ago, but doing it now is just them saying. "We can't balance these skills for PvP and PvE."

I remember when Sorrow's Furnace came out. It kind of made me think that more of these areas would happen. But sadly the focus went to stopping the bots. So much effort went into that task that much of what GW was supposed to be became lost.

I blame their testers and game designers for not trying to find all those skill combos that would end of "unbalancing" the game. But then, when the game was designed, they didn't think players would change their builds like we do now. You see before you got points to put into attributes and you had to earn points to buy back those points if you wanted to respec a character. So, I don't think they even tried to find those skill combos that were to be nerfed.

As to bots, did they not even think about the problem with bots in other games, or that gold farmers wouldn't invade GW? I also don't believe, other than in concept form, they did any ground work on what expansions would be like. GW, with 1316 skills, has proven the flaw in their expansion philosophy.

GW:EN was their way of saying . . . "Goodbye and thanks for all the fish." GW1 is a dying game. If suddenly there were to be a spike in buying the game, then there would be "some" content. But sadly, they will do anything, and I do mean anything [ursan] to get people to continue to play.

Also, the silence of the GW2 development is scary. I fear greatly for GW2.

This whole discussion, indeed ANY discussion to do with GW comes down to one very simple thing: CHOICE.

Use Ursan, or don't. Play hardcore, or don't. Do titles, or don't. Get elite armours, or don't.

The choice is yours.

Just stop forcing your choice on anyone else. You don't speak for me, or for the "majority"/"everyone"/"others" you so fondly refer to in your arguments.

Players complaining about Ursan aren't complaining from a player perspective. I doubt anyone concerned about Ursan has trouble completing any area in the game. From a customer perspective though, it's clear that Ursan wrecks the overall structure and balance of the game. By operating on completely different principles than everything else, playing Ursan is practically not playing Guild Wars - no skillbar, no tactics, no positioning, just hit them buttons.

People can throw the 'you don't have to use it' argument out all they want, but then why bother? Why not let everyone exploit bugs or have infinite gold? You don't have to use them.

It's not a single-player game. Others getting free rides to everything shouldn't be possible, unless everyone gets them. Unfortunately, this time ANet was fair - they gave Ursan to everyone, and it is retarded.

ANet is adding these skills to cater to inexperienced players like you, giving you an easy way to do everything every other player has done while not understanding the game whatsoever. It is this that stands directly in the way of the principles of the game - you're using your title grind time to supplant skill entirely. Nobody cares that you're using Ursan - they care that Ursan itself went up to the concept of Guild Wars and beat it to death.

I don't know. I think I understand why the dev's haven't put out more info than they have on GW2. With all the argument going on over the direction that GW is or should go in, would you bounce your ideas for the new GW off the community, in a public forum? I wouldn't. I'd already know who I could count on for ideas and feedback, and I'd talk to them. And I'd quietly read these and the other GW forums and make my decisions based on that information, but I wouldn't give the community a "cut".

We can't even decide whether or not capping is important in AB.

While I agree with about 95% of what your saying I have to point out that most of the people that started playing GW since GWEN came out are much more likely to solo than to play in a live party.

We are long past the time when I could log on at any time of day or night and find 10+ people wishing to do the exact same quest/mission/dungeon as I. Now I'm lucky to find 2 live people that are looking for a group at the same time and 1 of them will be almost completely useless either because they have a bad build, lack of skills or simple don't have any experiance with the game.

While 5+ usrans in a live party is extremely powerfull and unbalanced a single Ursan is only minorly overpowered and generaly balances out the lack of ability of the new players.

I don't think they did it on purpose. I think the skills that were added to simplify other parts of the game just happened to also simplify hard mode (and, let's be honest, once you get to the 8-man areas, it becomes less and less challenging compared to NM anyway).

You're not wrong, and I'm not trying to say you're wrong, I'm just pointing out that most people don't take video games seriously enough to care. It really only matters if you think that succeeding at a video game task is an actual accomplishment, and most people don't think that.

People want to see content that they paid for, is what it comes down to. The "elite" players who take their gaming seriously have had plenty of time to prove to everyone how good they are at clicking the mouse, now the areas are being opened up to allow the bored players who didn't want to move forward, or couldn't move forward, into those areas to keep them interested a little bit longer.

It's the way MMOs work. You have a few people who play the hell out of them because it's their only hobby and they take it very seriously. After awhile, all the other players who never got to see the high end content get tired of the game, so the company opens up the previously high end stuff for them and creates NEW high end stuff. You're just not seeing new high end stuff in Guild Wars right now because the game is, basically, developmentally dead. If the enormous amount of reskinning in GWEN didn't drive that point home, nothing will, but that's what it comes down to: the high end areas are going away because the game is coming to an end in preparation for its sequel where there will be all new "elite" content for a few years.

Whaaa? They reduced the man size requirement of [i]most]/i] of the raids before Outlands so that people could get into them and pick up the raiding gear (though there's little point now since most of the Outlands quest greens are superior to end game raiding outside of Outlands...)

They're not going to make the "soloable" because then they wouldn't be raids. They did, however, reduce the difficulty of a bunch of "group" quests like that, especially by removing the Elite status from a lot of quest "bosses" in the World.

They've put out what is typical of a game at this stage of development.

Don't let the lunatics on this forum fool you. The game was only just announced a little over a year ago. It usually take multiple yearS - plural - to actually see any real meat from a game project. They're not being tight-lipped about GW2, they're giving out about what any reasonable person would expect compared to most other game development cycles.

I understand. Still, after seeing how GW was redesigned after launch, it worries me what they are doing. I really don't see how they can distinguish themselves from other MMOs.

By being Free?

Sizeable about of people who got GW got it because they wanted "Free WOW". Its pretty obvious from "Wee needah mounts, wee needah higher level cap, wee needah crafting ..." threads.

GW2 being essentially "Free WoW" is what they are going to do and its not that bad idea as far as making money goes. Too bad it is pretty stupid idea from pow of player who liked Gw for being Gw and not for being Free.