This post might be treated as a troll and ignored but I thought it was worth a try anyway...
I recently grabbed the trilogy since GW2 is coming and I wanted to understand the world more before getting into it having only played the game briefly during its beta. With all the praise I've heard about the game it felt like a safe bet, but everytime I try to play the game I quit after an hour or so. So with that being the case I really wish to know what I'm missing when it comes to the appeal of the game?
Issues I'll list with it :
Rubber banding - I remember this in Beta...Your character basically just bounces all over the place on regular intervals when running most especially near objects like trees or what have you. I have steady FPS so its not that and I've never experienced it as bad as in this game.
Shallow story - In the Review it was mentioned the game has a good story but I fail to see this? I've made a character in every starting area so far and all I'm getting are extremely run of the mill boring fetch quests with little in the way of interesting writing. Is this something that comes in later?
Frustrating combat system - It just feels extremely unresponsive. The thing that I've had the most frustration with is tanking. I made a warrior and I can't seem to generate any sort of threat so as soon as the healer henchman fires off a heal the entire lot of them focus fire him dead. Is there some way around this? I've had a similar problem rolling other classes and having a tanking NPC...Everytime a decent sized engagement starts the healer gets FF'd and dies.
Poor Visual aides - I know some will cringe when they hear WoW invoked, but I have gotten used to having minimap indicators of where NPCs are that have quests and as far as I can find so far they only show up when you have a quest to turn in? Also on some quests you aren't given much indication of what to do. One quest had me needing to get various foods which required a specific drop to be turned in for each one, but the individual NPCs give you no indication at all of what might drop said trade in item.The trade-ins themselves seem rather ill-thought out as you have all these random NPCs strewn about and remembering who trades what for what where just comes across as needlessly complex.
Harsh Difficulty - This is partly because of the combat problems I've had but the game has a very punishing difficulty level very early on it feels. A specific example would be I was playing the Nightfall campaign and Attempted to do a quest at level 6. The problem was the mobs you had to fight where quite clumped up and even if you waited for them to spread a bit from one another you would end up pulling 4 - 6 of them with no good indication of social agro range. Even more frustrating is the death penalty and how going into town resets your instance. I had fought half way through dying several times and weakening each time, but if I had gone back to town to wipe my res penalty (It had gotten to the point where the healer was getting 2 shot) all of my hard work would simply be reset...It seems rather silly to have such harsh penalties on so low of a level. I also experienced similar scenarios in night fall as well having to clear large packs of mobs and if you died being hampered by ever increasing death penalties. Killing monsters to lessen this seems to take far longer then it should and I saw no means to say pay off this penalty either. All of this lead to a rather frustrating experience.
Anyway I just felt like asking what is it I'm missing here? I'm hardly a novice at MMOs playing them for years (FF11, WAR, WOW, DCUO, and Aion just to name a few.), but this game has truly left me feeling frustrated and vexxed at how it gets such high ratings and yet feels so very un polished and unwelcoming to new players like no other game I've played...Many of my problems may simply be things that I'm misunderstanding, but in that case it would be nice if the game tried to take the time to explain itself more thoroughly.
Comments
1. Rubber banding is caused by two things: collision detection, but mostly, lag.
2. The story starts off really slow in every campaign so far (especially in Nightfall).
3. In GW1 mobs tend to go after the character with lowest health/armor and highest damage output. You should try to attack the healer or at least the casters in a group first, in order to make the AI in your party attack these mobs as well is by holding "left-ctrl" and pressing spacebar or any of the hotkeys while having targeted a mob. http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Aggro
4. Well, most quests create quest markers on your map.
5. Yes, the learning curve can be overwhelming for new players, if you want to properly learn the mechanics you should start with the Prophecies campaign, and I think you should check out http://pvx.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page as well as http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guide_to_making_a_build and the guide that's at bottom of the page about a profession.
And possibly http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guide_to_PvE.
Guild wars has it's certain charm to it.
To me, the exploration part is what makes it great. After I hit max level, I just grabbed a bunch of henchmen and went solo exploring max level areas. Finding random bosses to grab elite skills from.
The story comes from the missions and are pretty decent.
Guild Wars is not the best of games. But for its price and content, it was value for money. I only bought the vanilla version back in 2008 (with out the expansions which don't interest at all) and still I come back to it time to time when I'm bored with another MMO I'm burnt out on.
To be honest. Only playing for one hour isn't really giving it a fair chance.
-Azure Prower
http://www.youtube.com/AzurePrower
guildwars is a great game,if you dont see it just go play something else!
we were millions playing it till arenanet advertised gw2,player of gw1 have been olding their breath ever since that annoucement!