Play EVE cocksucker, and then tell me about focusing on exploiting the economy.
I played EVE for six years. What did you want me to tell you?
I appreciate the amazing rant. You aren't even clear on your own opinion:
That said, Guild Wars 2 is a VERY good MMO...
...however I would call it a decent MMO,
Welcome to writing between the hours of 12 and 2 AM under the influence of a 9 month old babby crying.
As far as you playing EVE for 6 years, you came off like you were unused to the concept and it weirded you out.
SNIPPY
That said, Guild Wars 2 is a VERY good MMO, people who claim it's shit need to realize something. It's a radical departure from WoW.
Rofl. You seriously needed a 10k word essay to post that bullshit? I feel bad that I wasted the time reading through your drivel, usually if someone puts enough effort for a 10k word essay into something, they hit a good point by accident at least once. Are you working for A.net?
Personally I didn't find it a radical departure at all. Gameplay-wise, it's years behind the stuff Cryptic has done with the MMO format, and it ultimately does not benefit from trying to break the Trinity because it doesn't seem to have any idea HOW to break the Trinity.
No it's not, Cryptic in my opinion, has made some of the clunkyest MMO's in existence, that function not on the strength of their gameplay mechanics, but on the strength of the setting(STO) and the strength of the character customization. They rely on forced grind for the cash shop, forcing you to grind a currency that doesn't matter in the long run, and trade it for a currency that does. Rendering it so that, outside of the gameplay, the base game currency doesn't matter. Their PVP is each is retardedly simple, either being WoW+SUPER HEROES. Or WoW+Star Trek. The only way they really change the formula with classes is by not having them, but you'll still have to spec in certain ways to be anywhere near effective. Providing the ILLUSION of character customization.
They nickle and dime you constantly. Hell the core character stat and skill customization mechanic in Champions is removed in favor of WoW style classes, unless you cough up 50 bucks or 15 currency units per month. Having experienced how different the systems are, you are thus required to buy premium to get anything out of the system PvP wise, or you will run up against dozens of more optimized builds. Or you'll be playing purely against other free scrubs. You can't even advance your ship past a certain point in STO without paying 20 bucks. Or you can grind for 90 hours, farming Dilithium and making it into cash shop currency and eventually after you are completely sick of the game, you'll have a shiny new space ship, until you hit Admiral mid way through, and need to do it all over again. Fuck, if that's not nickle and diming I don't know what is. However it's still better than a lot of systems.
They actually did a good job of breaking up the Trinity of Whack a Mole, healer, all out, DPS and I stand here, tank.. However I will accept they did it by compromising the survivability of classes. This to me is a good thing. Do you know how often I die in dungeons in supposedly the worst class in the game, the necro? I die on average once. My necro isn't even in full exotics yet. Yet she can do pretty much everything my Warrior can, but she is supposedly much less powerful than the "Developer Favorite" the Warrior. Even then there are some speccs and classes that are just bad for certain paths. The Warrior generally can do anything, which is a travesty, it really does need a nerf. The necro doesn't need a buff it just needs the minor non-game breaking bugs it has. They've replaced the trinity with individual roles for certain classes, which in retrospect is something that should have been done long ago. They just need to fine tune some of it. I have a feeling they were forced to release earlier than they wanted due to money issues. Especially given that they were struggling with small staff size towards the end and it was obvious they were.
Really what Guild Wars 2 does is not innovate truly, it takes a bunch of features from other games, mixes them together mostly to success. Some things fall flat. And maybe it's because I'm on the second most populated server in the game, but the world even a few months after release still feels active with players. And my 400 member guild just got 30 new members because of people buying it during the trial. My guild never has less than a 5th of it's members online. People are still playing, which is more than you can really say about Star Wars, and STO, and Champions on release. Champions itself thrives for similar reasons to why Tarnished Coast as a server thrives and has such a big population. RPers tend to find a game and stick with it for ludicrous amounts of time. In Champions all I really ever see when I log on are RPers. Star Trek is generally just abandoned except the bots and AFKers that I see around the capital. FtP was a boon at first. Ultimately their models are just delaying death, by getting players hooked and spending ever increasing amounts of money or time just to compete with others who are hooked like them.
Also, lol at feeling like you are getting weaker as you progress... It's less that you get weaker and more that the scale of threats increases. Unless you mean going back and doing previous zones. There you have two choices for that, fuck off, because they don't want to have higher level players go in and be able to dominate lower level zones ruining the play experience and actually the game balance(Getting legendaries requires 100% map completion), or realize that they needed to do that to keep the enemies and areas relevant later in the game and enjoy it. In an MMO level scaling the player works, in a single player game, it doesn't. I'm predicting WoW will copy a lot of mechanics from Guild Wars 2 in the next expansion and content patches, just like they've copied any other successful MMO. And am also looking forward to what people make with the initial concept brought out by Guild Wars.
...and it ultimately does not benefit from trying to break the Trinity because it doesn't seem to have any idea HOW to break the Trinity.
That's the truth. The difficult parts of explorable-mode dungeons, as I recall them, consisted of playing musical chairs with the mob(s) because even a defensive-spec Warrior or Guardian could barely take any hits. Healing was a marginal help at best, and when someone went into FFYL mode, every mob in the room would make them a priority target and thus difficult to resuscitate. This might be an enjoyable paradigm in a true action game, but in Guild Wars 2 I found it to be a tedious pain in the ass. My guild could certainly complete the dungeons and eventually became very efficient at completing many of them, but as an alternative to the Holy Trinity, Guild Wars 2's method is no better. Possibly worse.
Agreed. I played a Norn Guardian, and vast majority of the time I felt like 1) I was getting weaker rather than stronger, 2) that ultimately my class choice didn't matter, 3) and that I spent more time running around like a sissy girl than taking it like a man due to how bloated damage was.
This is in sharp contrast to both Champions Online and Star Trek Online, both of which do the same mobile combat thing GW2 has... Except a lot better. In case of both, Cryptic's method of hyper-charging the Trinity is a LOT more enjoyable than trying to break the Trinity by weakening everyone to the point in being indistinguishable for tactical roles... And with a lot more flexibility for your own build and function.
Still, I would say that it's better to have a system where your role is a distinct and important part of the party you're part of. It's simply more satisfying when you feel like you're performing an important function rather than just Cog #X that doesn't really matter besides how much gear he has (incidentally, both CO and STO have a shitload less gearing involved than GW2, so there's that too).
What gearing in Guild Wars... You mean the getting into pointless legendaries and exotics? Or getting pointless imbued items, so you can do fractals? Gear is not relevant in Guild Wars 2 outside of a single instance(Fractals.) The rare equipment which will take you less than a day to get into would suffice for pretty much everything. A bonus of 5 percent does not make you OP.
Honestly having a set trinity role helps new players get skilled at the game, and promotes pointless competition between classes. Well I'm DPS, that means I should be doing the most damage possible, right? Well I'm a healer, I need to get the most heals out possible. And then my guildies see that I'm 5th on the healing meter and decide to kick me out of the raid because RAIDING R SRS BIZNYS. They then bring in a scrub who pulls aggro constantly and can't do what my class was focused on, which was cleansing. Only, the healing meter they were using wasn't tracking cleansing, so they didn't realize I WAS THE ONLY PERSON REMOVING DEBUFFS. This is legitimate drama that got me kicked out of the top raiding on my server guild in World of Warcraft during BC(I had 4 of the server first end boss raid kills during BC.). The roles system, or any system that has super easily measurable statistics results in more than enough pointless drama. In Guild Wars 2, every class should be self sufficient but complement each other. And each one has a unique feature beyond their class feature that makes them useful(Warriors have extreme mobility, Necro's have massive control over debuffs, Mesmers have excessive amounts of mobility, thieves do incredible single target burst damage, etc.) The aggro mechanics are far more interesting than threat in WoW. And they managed a good hybrid of scripted conditions+threat as an aggro mechanism. In WoW especially now-a-days, if you play correctly you almost never pull aggro despite when enemies logically should be swapping targets. Even EVE is trying to make new aggro mechanics. WoW relies on bosses that defy normal mob aggro rules to keep things interesting. Rather than making a system that works and is interesting. Guild Wars system isn't perfect, but again with refinement it could become close to that.
And that's the thing, in Cryptic games, the gameplay in general, in my opinion, is terrible. Star Trek is mostly automatic, annoying circle strafing/doing circles around your opponent in space combat. Champions is mostly just, well let's just say I've never had to move in combat in Champions to succeed. Even running those weird miniquest things. Get into combat, start my damage, things die, select next target, start my damage, things die. OH NOES A BOSS SUPERVILLAIN! Start my damage, occasionally block, things die.
That combined with the time/money investment they want to do anything in both of those games, means that I really don't have the time or money to do so. Again Vaarna I think this is a case of you really not seeing the flaws in the Cryptic MMO's, particularly because you bought life time membership to both of them.
