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.