Running and it's effects on the game

Fair enough there although one could also debate the FF and it's series lineage based solely on the fact that aside from X2 no FF game has ever had storyline elements that carried over from one iteration to the next. In essence they make up new lore and plot for each individual title. Still the WoW point stands and is conceded.

well anet has to change that u can't get any XP if a killed foe was 5 or more levels higher than your level (if your level is below 20).

Your first character its your choice, I HATE story line in every game. Cut scenes drive me crazy. If i had to make my first toon again I would have spent 20 bucks on ebay and got enough gold to have it run, but thats just me.

Usually after your first toon you know what you want your second to be and why i.e. 55 monk, ss necro, bp ranger, oro farmer. You just want that char to get to 20 and unlock the skills needed to play a particular build.

I have 600k in my invertory. I can join a group and risk failing the mission and probably take 30min even if we make it. Or i can spend 1k and get it run in 11 min. You would have to be dumb or really like the story line (same thing) to play through all the missions every time you made a toon.

Sort of like the old Diablo 2 Tweak they put in to keep people from power leveling by partying up with high level chars. Not a bad idea but it would only stop power leveling, not running. A good runner won't have to fight enough to justify that kind of nerf to the experience scale.

So your calling me a dumb for refusing to pay money to the plague that is running?

I have an alternate theory to why people do poorly late in the game: they suck.

I wonder how many of these terrible players actually played through the game and weren't run at all or only a small amount. PvE (especially while playing with other humans) is rather easy for most of the game. If you are never challenged you will never be forced to improve. Going through the desert will not make you a better player. Beating Elona's Reach, Ring of Fire, or THK with all hench will. The reason is you need to focus on formation with hench and learn to bring wide utility and play a solid balanced style of play that takes the whole field into account. If you know what you are doing you can control the hench with strong precision. They follow your commands well and the only deadly sin they have is standing in lava/murssaat towers for no reason at all. Sure this means you can't gank the PvE monk in the first ten seconds of the fight, but this is because you needed to command your hench to aggro the enemy W (like a real W should). However, after this point, it should flow like any PvE battle in the game, easy.

People in PvE play generally badly because they have myopic vision. They see the encounters as themselves performing X role and everything outside of that role is in the domain of everyone else. No party failed because of one bad party member (not even the Leeroy Jenkins Wammo). If they really are terrible you can just leave them dead. No mission is unbeatable with less then a full party and that should tell you something. Running doesn't cause missions to fail or PvP losses, bad play does.

I am saying the story line is blah. I hate seeing "7/8 want to skip this scene"
Its very inefficient and imo a waste of time to do all the missions every time you make a toon. In an hour at the troll cave using 3x exp scroll you can get way more xp than doing all those unnessasary missions.
Its like if someone told you how to cut 20 minutes off your drive home and you respond, no thanks I like setting in traffic.

Believe it or not, some people enjoy doing the PvE missions. Some people even enjoy the storyline. Stop trying to troll, you're horrible at it.

But in the higher end levels, it is a major contributer. Yes you will get some lucky idiots making it through the desert and thunderhead keep (read: idiot traps). Nowadays though, people get run through them at a very small and affordable fee. In the six months these people spent trying and failing these missions, surely they would have accumulated a rather hefty sum of gold. Sadly, didn't learn anything from failing either.

Not only what Kakumei said, but they may be there the 1st time and don't know the story. I highly suspect the reason it doesn't show who did not skip to safe guard them from being yelled at.

Anet made this game for a "traditional" path, and the "shortcut path" with the express purpose of unlocking (faction points for unlocks came latter) for PvP. Also when your on your 4th character... some missions are a pain to just do again (and not realted to difficulty either).

Now there are very good points on people who short cut w/o going through the game at least once and stated the effects of too much running, not enough human players.

i was going to write this long, drawn out discourse on my thoughts on running, but i think toll exemplifies it pretty well.

most people don't care about learning their characters well. why? because they don't need to. someone already came up with a cookie cutter build that they read on the forums, and they want to copy it. they know the skills they need and even have the strategies laid out for them already.

there is no thought involved anymore. and this is why i only travel with either guildies or hench these days.

i Dont play with PUGs unless im bored anymore- Got a nice full guild so it isnt my problem


And before i got into my Guild? yeah i had a couple of bad pugs, but most of them were pretty decent, you know what the only problem i every had with PUGs was? People who didnt know how to play theyre character, not asshats, not leavers, not anything but that one factor

At the end of the day, if a Warrior gets run through the entire game , and doesnt learn about say, playing a tank, then there is a problem later on (lets call this guy leyroy)


Group is formed for abbadons mouth for example, and Pug leader advertises for a Tank, leyroy thinks, "hey, i got a big sheild, and an axe, so i can tank!"

Leader asks upon joining, hey leyroy, tank?
To which leyroy says yes, he knows no better


2 mins into the game, the PUG is really struggling, the monks under huge pressure, then somebody points out

Leyroy is using frenzy!
Leyroy is using healing signet!


leyroy got run, he never learned Frenzy was a god-AWFUL skill for Pve


So you say, well then the leader should have checked!

so hang on, now we have to spend 2 mins pop quizzing each character of the party on theyre role, not everybody has hours to waste doing this every mission (more than a quater of an hour per group - and thats not including anyone who drops before it starts)

now if however, leyroy didnt get run, he would have learned all of this, and the leader could just say "tank?" get a yes, and get the heck on with it


And if you think that people getting bad pugs doesnt affect the game at large, then your just an idiot, average joe doesnt play in guilds, average joe's pay for this game, simple really, if bad pugs ruin it for Joe, then Joe wont buy the expansions, kthxbye Anet


Next.

I would definitely not consider running a plague...go to droks international district 1 or 2 and you will see a plague. You cannot label running ...its just that. I run people all the time...because that is the part of guild wars I enjoy. If you despise running so much (because it has this HUGE affect on you huh), call your local polotician/senator/the president or someone who can dispatch the navy seals to disperse of this terrible thing we call running.

I personally see being run as wasting in-game money in order to waste real money. I paid for all of the missions, I want to do all of the missions. I have never been run anywhere, ever, nor will I be.

But if others want to be run because they are after captures for PVP or whatever, let them be run. Doesn't hurt me any.

Different people enjoy different parts of the game. I have no problem with that. If someone wants to spend 40 hours doing all the missions and quests for 500xp and a 8-13 blue hammer, more power to them. But on the flip side if someone has fun getting run through the game, trying to tackle areas that are beyond their skill or experience, and dying a lot then more power to them too.
You need to understand that that is a decision you are making. If you don't want to be stuck at beacons forever, feel free to grab 5 henchies and make for Gates of Kryta.
It doesn't take 2 minutes do realize someone's got no clue. Even so if I was going to go with a full PUG, I'd rather spend 15 minutes making sure wasn't teaming with a group of fence posts than 30+ minutes failing a mission.
I think that's naive. If leyroy is a meat-head like a good many pick-up players I've played with he would have learned that he can agro whatever he wants, get killed quickly and be rebirthed when the party kills the mob that killed him.
If bad pugs are ruining the game for Joe then Joe's the idiot. Anyone who is going to let their experience be governed by the failures of random strangers needs to re-evaluate why and how they're playing the game in the first place.
Holy crap, a mature view point. I'd have to guess that after you've played through all the missions on 4 characters you might change your view on whether you want to be run, but even if you don't that's cool with me. Doesn't hurt me any.

Laziness is the death of Fun


... think about it.

Not only lazyness, also the people who give GW gold and items to beggars. Why would anybody buy a game, just to stand in town begging for money? At least the people who can afford to be ran, might have played to get the money.

I agree.

Shortcuts in games are symptoms of something either getting old, or repetetive, players would try to bypass the ordeal by creating clever ways around the "experience" (ie. running). I admit, I myself had a few runs too, skipped my cutscenes, and took shortcuts. In the long run, it is easy for the entire experience to become "boring". Players usually quit playing a game when that happens.

It's a self afflicted conundrum:

1.) going through the game more than once is a long and tedius task, it gets boring real quick.
2.) but getting run through it makes things way too easy, and that gets broing real quick too.

Getting uber weapons to fight monsters that you're just gonna run by them anyway, seems a bit hypocritical, but that is what's happening.. we cant really blame people for running especially for players whose already played it once or twice, but when taking shortcuts overcome efforts to play the game, and players come on to the boards to complain about the game being sooooo boring when they got ran through 3/4 of the whole thing anyway... It's even harder to blame the game.

Screw running, I want D2 Enigma armor for my warrior so I can teleport to droknars forge.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter if it's where you want to be, what you want to have, or how you want to look. If getting it becomes so easy... it quickly devalues the purpose of getting it in the first place. Being in Drognars Forge is less exciting, Having your gold fellblade is less meaningful, and looking good in FoW is less unique, the whole shortcut itself is mundane and players end up seeking another game to repeat the same cycle again...