Guild Wars- The Reward Factor

I don't really like moaning about Grind, Ursan or how everything after prophecies is crap but it just came to my mind while watching gameplay of diablo 3 on youtube ( I know, I am uber cool) 'How much of a reward factor is there in guild wars?'.(uber cool rhetorical question, if it is a rhetorical question )

When I say reward factor I am talking about the achievments you do in the game and the amount of goodies you get for doing them. I think this question could be said about almost any MMO, although the last MMO I played was runescape, but that like 4 years ago when I was like 11. Most crtisism of the game that isn't from the community, is about the amount of reward you get for the time you spend playing on it, but once again this criticism is targeted at a lot of mmos.
Apparently the reward factor in the golden age of prophecies was quite good because almost perfect weapons and such were worth using and worth selling, but that probably because everything felt so new. Eye of the Noth, has a different form reward factor compared to the other campaigns, by questing you can obtain unique weapons rather than just repetedly farming, but these weapons aren't that great. After completing a dungeon, that take an hour an a half on a dungeon I don't want weapon that costs 300g, I want I weapon which make me go 'cool', why the hell would I want a staff mode that has '13+damge against undead'. Don't get me wrong pve is easy, but it's long and tedious with little reward, I just thing what's the point.PvP reward system works quite well because you can spend reward points on the items you want rather than just doing tedious farming. Elite areas has a good reward factor, but I don't like this ideology that just because something is hard doesn't mean you have to make it long. I have no interest on going on guild wars for around 2 hours on the trot to get something nice.

All lot of the problem with Anet's ideology of weapons and armour being all flash, I love/hate Anet's concept of weapons and armour being all flash, because it works so well in pvp but I also belive it doesn't work so well in pve, there just isn't anything that just cool when fighting enemies, it's 'all flash' and nothing else. Pve skills are nice in that way because they powerful in pve and the fact that you unlocked them, but Ursan was step too far, not to mention that pve skills are far too easy to get and that there are loads of them which makes the specianess lof them not so special.

That why I love action rpgs , the more you progress, not farm, progress, the more cool stuff you get. I don't take it as if I am an Anet hater, I just feel like I am not rewarded with the progress I make in the game. And I hoping that GW2 will be more like an action rpg like diablo(or what I have seen of diablo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQMBIRipp5A
look at this, look at what happens when he opens that chest, isn't that just awesome, the full set of armour is probably is to demonstrate the game but it's so awesome.

OK, I stopped reading at that point.

yeh me too and i want my 3 seconds back.

That's actually an advertising point for GW. Equality in PvE and PvP.

Of course, that was in April 2005. GW has changed a lot since then.

*givin' 3 secs back* here u go.

Aidin Swiftarrow: *WTS* 3 seconds of life back | PST with offer! |

So what your saying is you want good weapons / armor in a short amount of time and dont want to put any time into getting them?

Welcome to the world of MMOs, where you sometimes have to put in hours to get one item

And that video, all the armor dropped was for demonstration

You should play a game because it is fun to play.

Everything you get in the game is virtual and has no RL value. Therefore if all you are playing the game for is the loot then you should probably not be playing.

If you play the game and have fun doing it then the loot shouldn't even be a second thought.

IMO.

/fail

Too long of a post too early and wanting good items without any effort = total fail.

Some of us who no longer play the game continue to post opinions, you know.

Guild Wars was a fun game, but the fun runs out at the end of the short storyline. I quit playing when it stopped being fun, but I still have opinions on how the fun could have been expanded.

Nobody said that, Captain Strawman. The complaint is that the weapons and armor AREN'T "good". They're just stupid skins. And you don't earn them through progression, you "earn" them by mercilessly exploiting stupid things like perma-SF or Ursan and devoting massive amounts of time to repeating the same few quests and areas over and over and over and over.

One of the staples of computer RPGs has always been the sense of progression in power. Guild Wars, by nature of its excessive PvP influence, flips that upside down. You hit maximum effectiveness early in the campaigns, and all that's left to achieve is fancy accessories which afford no additional power and have no impact on your ability to advance.

If I wanted to play dress-up with a doll, I'd play with Barbies. One of the fun aspects of RPGs has always been that sense of progression, and that lack of progression - the feeling like you hit a wall early on - is probably the single biggest failing of Guild Wars. ANet has effectively admitted to this design flaw in its acknowledgement that most players will probably want to spend more time in Guild Wars 2 leveling and getting equipment.

Here is what some of my friends do:

1. Farm Zaishen Keys
2. Sell the zaishen keys for gold
3. Sell the gw gold
4. Profit!

I guess it works for them. :P

Yes, we know. We don't care, but we know. We'll always know, because you'll never miss a chance to remind us.

That progression is still there, it's just not in the gear. It's earning all of your skills, developing as a player, developing your build, developing new builds, optimizing your runes and other equipment, etc. There's just no emphasis on the gear besides vanity. Granted, I love that, but if I wanted that I'd go play WoW.

So yes, GW is *very* different from your traditional RPG. This is not a bad thing - very far from it, actually - it's just how it's designed, and it is *not* flawed. It's not made to be replayable, it's meant to be finished like a story, like a book. Once you finish it, you're meant to be done with it. Thousands of other games of followed this exact formula, and I've never considered it "flawed". I didn't complain when I couldn't obtain uber gear in KotOR.

Also, we've seen very little "acknowledgment" in ANet admitting this as a "flaw". We've only partially seen it in terms of the high or endless level cap, but the power curve will be strictly flattened. We've had no word in terms of how gear will affect your character.

You hit maximum level early in the campaigns. That doesn't necessarily equate maximum effectiveness. What about skills and elite skillcaps? There are plenty of elite skills that you can't get until further on in the campaign, and some of them are pretty popular.

EDIT: Agreed. You shouldn't be stopping at the point where you hit level 20.

Ive played a few other mmo`s and to me gw is best even with its flaws.
lvl 20 cap to me is great - sro had high lvls and sadly that lead to abuse , players sitting outside low lvl areas and wiping out players below them as well as using scrolls to bring in monsters higher than them and running off then returning to pick up items off dead low lvl players ( im talking about lvl 50+ ).
Gw has a storyline so you can complete the game rather than keep lvling and finding monsters of ur lvl to kill.
Thats the pve side and pvp id hate to think of the abuse that would come - bad enough now in ab if you are a low luxon/kurz rank as ppl dont want to know you - imagine ( if non pvp ) having to get to lvl 50 just to be able to enter the pvp side or even skills being adjusted to compensate.. lvl 20 is 16/15 so what the hell wud lvl 50 show - 30/29 and imagine that on skills for dmg

And for those who hate gw so much - why are you here complaining or even playing when you can find another game to play - if i said i hate drinking milk ppl wud say why drink it

"some of my friends" is code for "this is what I do but don't want to get caught admitting it"

To be on topic, I agree that the rewards don't seem to match-up with the time spent doing some of these missions. I think that this is why, however, they started adding amber/jade/diamonds/ecto/you name it to go along with chest drops so it could smooth out your reward total.

-Alastair

- Of course. But you know, sometimes it makes the game fun when at the end of the day you can see you've made some progress. It's not everything, but it's part of the fun. Dungeon running can be fun in its own right, but getting some underwhelming trash from chests every time doesn't add to anything.

- Okay, I can understand this. But why doesn't design reflect this idea? Why are there still gold and experience rewards for quests instead of something unique like in, say, Final Fantasy games? If experience is totally devalued by low level cap, why is there experience instead of some other system? Skills and armors are not progression, they are replacements.

To the OP, some of your spelling made it hard to read but your point is ' I WANT NICE POWERFUL WEAPONS NOW' or is it ' I WANT NICE SKINS NOW', I could not really understand. Either way this has been brought up hundreds of times and you can either be like me and most people and play the game for fun or go play another game. Anet dont care if you dont like it, they have your money now. Hurts dont it.

PS: Diablo sucks hard. Serioursly its pathetic, if you want to argue about it go play it rather than GW simple enough.

Roshanbey2, I hear you. Yes, the D3 gameplay video is impressive. And D2 loot is much of the reason why I and others continue to love and play that ancient and archaic game.

I started playing Prophecies the day the retail version went live. Loot was great and easy to get! It simply rained loot! Then it snowed loot; yes, there was a real loot blizzard! You did not have to invest your time to arm and equip yourself with the very best.

But then came the farmers with their bots and began to load down the ANet servers. Loot became harder and harder to get until they finally froze out enough of the farmers to save their bandwidth and server capacity for players.

WoW had a similar history of loot decline under attack by the farmers, part of the solution for WoW eventually being to squirrel all the good stuff away in instances and making more of it bind on acquire.

The tragic and doomed Hellgate London simply snowed loot when it first came out. Probably 2/3 of my unique weapons in that game dated back to the first month of that game's operation -- picking up prime loot in between total system freezes! Then Hellgate London tightened its loot as well until by the time FSS layed off its staff the best stuff was confined to a small handful of high end bosses who were troublesome and time-consuming to farm.

Probably every online game that has loot that can be traded and bought and sold in-game will follow the same pattern. At the moment offline single player RPG's are the best solution to the playtime consumption problem if good loot is your thing.

I hope that GW 2 innovates by emphasizing quality of rewards for playtime invested in a way that cannot be exploited by third party farmers and web sites.

Your avatar is da bomb!!!

back on topic:
I really like the reward factor in GW which is that i can be just as powerfull as someone who plays everyday all day long. While i play a 5 or less a week. My character might look less flashier but he/she is still just as powerfull

Because more experience equates to more skill points, one of the only things of real value in Guild Wars.

Did you read the OP before you declared his failure? While I may not agree with his ideas, he wasn't asking for "less effort" at all from what I understood,

His idea (correct me if I'm misunderstanding OP) is that he'd like quest rewards to be cool stuff rather than exp/gold. How is that less effort? You'd get item X upon completing quest Y.

In those games, the new armor and such have more power level so you HAVE to grind in order to be good. In GW, you can start in a week and completely finish the campaign with max armor and max weapons, but you might be beaten in PvP due to the skill required.

Now I like being ahead of everyone, but not if I have to spend 1000 hours just to get max armor and weapons. It makes you too on edge and its just not worth it.

But I don't want to play all day long and that's my point, this isn't about being the best player and showing of you leetness, it is about the pve reward system, and shitty items we get at the end of a dungeon, after having to play for about an hour or 2 . PV everyone should be equal but in pve you should be rewarded for the progress, not grind progress you make, the most of the criticism this game gets form the outside world is it's reward system.......

The game get's criticized for a lot, but not because it's "bad" but because it doesn't fit the mold of an MMO (hence why I don't call it such). PvE rewards in the gear are there, they're just "pointless": they don't change your character besides his looks. The feeling of 'reward' lies solely in the player - and I don't know about you, but I've been rewarded *greatly* for all of my PvE progress.

1. You say you don't like to moan about things then proceed to do so heartily.

2. You say you don't like the time it takes to get things done then state PvE only skills are overpowered. You do realize that they speed up things, correct?

3. You always get a reward. The value of this reward varies and the more often you do things the higher chance of a valuable reward you have. There are awesome weapons and skins available to everyone in the game through things like BMP and many end-game weapons/boss greens. The super rare ones should be just a bit better because they're just that -- super rare.

4. Guild Wars gameplay is now at levels of equality never known before because of the heightened availability of perfect weapons and equipment. The vets already whine that new players can do elite areas. While I despise it when people do that, there needs to be some recognition of experience, and rare/valuable weapons is one of those standards.

So really, I don't agree with your post at all and think it was bad.