Amusing GW2 review - light profanity

Horrible UI? ...what? What are you even looking at?

You guys are coming up with some...creative things to hate on, I'll give you that. I get it. You guys don't like anything not CoH. Case closed.

It's not strictly a matter of server resources. It's more along the lines of having issues with configurations, etc. on servers added right before launch. Capacity shouldn't be an issue once those problems are fixed.

Really Jay? That post makes no sense.

Of course they are going to still use the NCSoft forums since they're loyal to COH. They meant that AFTER COH dies they will be done with NCSoft.

I agree with Gecko and Aura. I was actually going to buy GW2 before the coh announcement...now I'm going to hold off a bit or I may never purchase it at all.

Am I doing it to hurt NCSoft? No, but I'm the one hurt and dealing with a great loss because I think...heck I know that they could of ended this game in a more professional manner.

EDIT: Oh and I've been a fan of Angry Joe for years. His review of Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 still makes me laugh my **** off.

The game isn't so much revolutionary as evolutionary.

Ever try to solo with a tank at launch of CoH? You'd hunker down with a spawn of mobs, and diligently work at whittling down their health. A few minutes later, some blaster would cruise by and nuke the remaining 80% of said mobs' health away, and take the proportional XP away at no risk, because you had the aggro. Pretty annoying.

Ever play any game with a gathering system, like WoW? Racing people to the mining nodes was fun! Wasting time in a dungeon deciding who'd get to tap the rare resource nodes was productive! Not.

Ever join an instance in an MMO and hear a round of ******** and moaning because your class or spec choice is sub-optimal? (Eyes WoW here.) Doesn't happen in GW. Neither does sitting around waiting for a tank or healer, both of which are in short demand because playing either role in a PUG is utterly unrewarding. (Another WoW reference. Also some in DDO and other games. Never seen this kind of garbage in CoH.) GW2 tries to eliminate that as much as possible, but to be successful you'll need to know how to run your character, because there's an expectation of self sufficiency built into the game. (The dungeons tend to be tuned on the hard side.)

Guild Wars 2 tries to take these annoyances out of the equation, and they do a pretty good job of it. You don't have to be ticked off if someone wanders by and helps you with something. You don't have to worry about who gets a gathering node, because everyone can hit the same node. Removing that kind of petty competition is fairly innovative, and worth while.

Another innovation is the downed state. When you lose all your health, you don't just pop to the nearest hospital or grave yard. You get a chance to rally by continuing to attack using an alternate tool bar. What you have available varies by class. My warrior may have the option to throw rocks at an enemy, while my elementalist can shift into mist form and move to a new position. You can chose to attack or to bandage yourself. The biggie, though, is that any other player who comes across you in a downed state can give you first aid. And they DO! This reinforces positive behavior, rather than other game systems that encourage petty competition. (Not that competition is petty, I mean competition over petty stuff.)

Overall, these are the selling points of the game. These, and the incredible graphics and decent music. Aside from these things, the game is still a fantasy MMO. You still kill X number of critters (even though X is a variable more often than not), carry crap from point A to point B, click on stuff, etc. That's all there. It's just packaged to be a lot more sociable. In beta, it was a very friendly environment.

Does it work out perfectly? I don't know. It's going to depend heavily on the player base and what kind of culture arises from it. The biggest hitch I see in their plan for a kinder, gentler MMO is that hardly anyone bothers to chat much. If you heal someone back up from a downed state, they may type a quick "TY" before moving on. If anything, the game may be too solo friendly in general.

My overall impression is that it's a solid, very polished, state of the art MMO. But it's still an MMO. I don't think any MMO will ever match CoH for the sheer thrill of a first time play experience. CoH was the first MMO I stuck with past the kill ten rats stage. (Where the rats were capable of beating your heavily armored a** into the dirt, btw.) You may not have felt *that* super out of the gate, but at least if you went down it was to some Hellion with a shotgun and not an over-sized rodent. Gain a few levels and .... Perez Park! Where I met my SG. Had a lot of fun times leveling with those guys.

This is the thing that bugs me about NCSoft's interaction with their player base. (Their treatment of their employees was far worse, but that's another matter.) Most MMOs that go out do so in a predictable manner. Servers get consolidated, and the players know the base is shrinking. The game goes into maintenance mode and no new content is released for a while. The faithful truck on, and enjoy what they have, but they know what's eventually coming. Then, the time comes. There's usually a bit of fanfare and some sort of event staged. This gives the players a sense that their loyalty has been appreciated and maybe helps give a sense of closure.

NCSoft? You just get an abrupt announcement and a huge F-U.

I don't know why they did what they did. Personally, if I was running a company worth billions of dollars, and decided to cut off a service I'd been providing to tens of thousands of loyal customers, I'd handle things a little more generously.

Methinks you missed something - I've never teamed yet, or been to anything that required teaming.

No problem - it's the first I've seen from him, and it was very well done, to the point where I was kinda jealous. Must have taken hours to make.

Good to hear. I was slightly concerned I was missing something.

Wait... what?

The CoH UI is massive and in the way. I love CoH, and am a devoted fan, but it's one of the things I always hated about the game. I have to have at least four trays up to see all my powers, the chat is huge because it's hard to navigate through, the target and nav bar and HP are all giant, and as an added bonus in trials and other events you get an extra window that takes up half the screen. I seriously can't even see myself or what's going on sometimes there's so much clutter.

GW2 has so much less, and it puts all the important stuff in one place so you don't have to move your eyes around the screen to see everything. I don't know why you'd be upset with it.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

To be honest the CoH UI has never been massive or in the way for me, but then I use the tools provided to customize what appears on my monitor and move items to where I want them, adjust the screen size as well as the window size which in turn gives me a glorious uncluttered view of things.

I can't do that in GW2. My power tray is stuck on the bottom middle of my screen where I personally find it to be a PITA compared to where I prefer to have it located in CoH, and my health window is stuck smack in the middle of my power tray where it's a constant annoyance

The Power Tray is also overlly restrictive. I have more powers/skills than I have slots in my power tray. In CoH if I need more slots I can just open up an additional power tray. I can have 90 powers/skills at my fingertips in CoH. I can never have access to more than 10 in GW2.

My Map is inconviently located on either the lower or upper right corner of my screen where I normally put other things in CoH and I'm forced to have it open at all times, whereas in CoH I can turn it on or off at my convenience.

Oh yes and the mission text is always floating in the upper right corner and cannot be turned off like in CoH so it's constantly interfereing with ones immersion.

No our UI here is vastly superior to GW2's

If you'd like to take my comment completely out of context, fine go ahead.

I'm not saying CoH was perfect. I'm not saying GW2 is bad.

I've complained about flaws in this game, and still loved to play it, for years.

Man, really? I'd like to go on a rant and put this noise in it's place but... I hope you enjoy GW2. I do. And it looks like a wonderful launch for them.

My point (that you jumped beyond into make believe land) was that the game, right now, that is being cancelled out of the blue, was fun and had many of those same things - even if GW2 does them better - that this guy raves about like he's never seen or heard of any game trying before.

He makes these videos for a living. He also is considered press for many publishers and may regularly have reviews ready on say one due to advance embargo copies.

If you want to support the guy, better go to his website and watch reviews there. YouTube pays crap for ad impressions, he lists videos there only to help new viewers find his stuff.

To me, what Guild Wars does is it put filters on cigarettes then yells from the mountaintops how this makes smoking so much less damaging to your health, blissfully unaware that NOT SMOKING is both less damaging and easier to do. All of the problems you list are tumours on the MMO genre that exist for no reason other than because they have always existed and that's what an MMO is "supposed" to have. Developers feel they have to include the outdated, irritating mechanics and then struggle to make it so they're not as painful.

Yes, mining in Guild Wars annoys me less than mining in Tera, but "mining" itself annoys me irredeemably. The most you can do is make it annoy me slightly less, but you'll never make me LIKE it.

When City of Heroes launched, it had no gear, no crafting, no inventory management and no loot. And I LOVED the game for it. It was a simple, light MMO which didn't waste my time with busywork ******** and simply let me build a character directly and, most importantly, go play the game. MMOs of old were designed to be "virtual worlds" in the image of D&D campaigns more so than games - an environment for people to log into and live in, rather than a game for people to play through. I'm pretty sure that's not all MMOs can be, and it's high time we started seeing MMOs that aren't trying to be Ever Quest, but with less annoying crap.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

That's not really a UI concern, it's the way the game is balanced. The game is set up so you can eventually have all the skills. If you could have more than 10 skills they'd either have to be far less useful or you couldn't get as many. The game makes you select the type of build you want for specific settings. For instance I want to play a necromancer whose powers are all pets. If every necromancer had all the pets and still had tons of curses and health drain powers and healing wells, they'd be crazy powerful.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

What? How is the City of Heroes UI "massive?" You can scale it, you can resize it and you can move it around. And how is chat anything but perfect? I LOVE the over/under split chat window because it allows me to monitor my system messages AND my chat at the same time without having one scroll the other off-screen. I have yet to see another game do this. Sure, some games let me define my own tabs (and I don't know that Guild Wars does), but even then, I can only have one tab visible at a time. Not only does City of Heroes default to two separate tabs visible at any one time (which you can merge into one if you so wanted), but it allows me to spawn additional chat tabs if I want to see up to six tabs at a time.

And I'm not sure what you're playing that requires four trays to see all of your powers, but I've never needed more than three. But that's the beauty of the UI - if you WANT four, you can have them. Hell, you can have up 11, if I remember correctly.

I like a UI which allows me to scale, resize, customize elements and move them around at will. There's no reason to dislike a customizable UI because it's as good as you make it. The only thing there is to dislike is your own job of customizing it.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Because a sinlge-player version of the game does not exist. Because I don't play this game for the teaming or the guilds or the PvP. I play it for the ability to create my own custom characters with amazing powers in a contemporary setting and experience creative and well-written stories. If you can, point me to a game that does this without being an MMO?

Also, because MMOs receive constant content upgrades, whereas a single-player game rarely receives so much as a patch to fix obvious bugs.

Also, "massively multiplayer" describes a persistent world with many people logged into it concurrently. It describes a design framework, not a gameplay framework. HAVING many people online at a time does not imply that I need INTERACT with many people at a time. Smart MMOs don't require this. Smart MMOs let me duck into an instance when I want to do something by myself. Guild Wars tries to make me "social" by putting the bulk of its content outdoors where I'm expected to cooperate with other people.

I've gone at length about how being a face in the crowd ruins my sense of achievement. It's why I don't run iTrials. I want what Guild Wars offers as "my personal story" as content for my entire playtime. It doesn't have to be as high-qiality as that particular story, but I want A story that takes part in an instance. Then, if I feel like teaming with other people, I'll invite them myself.

I'm not displaying anti-social behaviour. I'm displaying private behaviour. As you can see by both my post count and my posting history, I don't dislike people, I don't dislike interacting with people and I have nothing against the community. However, I want those interactions to happen on MY terms - when I want them, if I want them. When a game is structured so that it doesn't "mingle" me with other people, ONLY THEN do I have any desire to go out and look for people on my own. When the game does what it can to make me social, I simply delegate my social energy to the game and go with the flow, seeing other people as a burden.

It's a mistake in modern game design to try and delegate as much of what would normally be social interaction to the game's systems. The more the game tries to be social for me, the less I care to do anything on my own. I'm the most social in games not built to encourage that, because those are the games which require me to be involved the most personally. Trying to "foster community" by just jamming everyone in the same overworld doesn't put people together to make friends. It sticks other people in my way. It doesn't help endear me to others. It makes me irritated that I keep tripping over them.

You don't encourage socialisation by literally putting people in proximity of each other. You encourage socialisation by providing tools for those times when people want to SEEK OUT social interaction. You make people look for it, you don't shove it in their faces.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Well that's an interesting perspective. Personally, I've always disliked crafting because it often was such a sink at first that you'd *lose* money playing that side-game until you were practically maxxed...then you'd bank on everyone. As a mini-game, it was an interesting prospect but after going through your first few batches of goods, it wore pretty quickly. Because now I was looking at the world like "okay, I need to cut corners with costs here or I'll be broke and won't be able to get good gear in a few levels. If I can set aside just X amount of currency for selling on the auction and gather costly resource Y instead of buying it..."

No idea how GW2 handles that side of crafting but I'm libel to say crafting in and of itself is just dated annoying crap.

Lots of people envision their character capable of doing more than just swinging a weapon. That a game built to provide you a long-term gaming experience tries to offer other avenues of play isn't, IMO, trying to copy MMOs of old. A game is better for offering these things rather than not offering them at all. On one side, if you don't like the side-game/mini-game, you can opt to not play it...vs being only able to do one thing.

That said, I'd particularly enjoy more 'learned' activities for characters that didn't directly tie into making/obtaining goods. Like, it would be very interesting if you could choose a profession like 'Personal Trainer' that then lets you visit a towns local barracks and then go through the process of 'teaching' the NPC guards. Now those guards are stronger and better equipped to fend off attackers...

Or maybe a political career where you'd then establish cease fires, safe zones, treaties and aliances with warring factions that'd offer alternative ways of affecting the world other than blowing things up. Because some people actually like the concept of a learned aristocrat who deals with kings and nobles...yet isn't below picking up a knife, putting on a mask and assassinating a few pesky enemy generals.

I think one point you can keep in mind, Sam, is other players often have other preferences. It's no more adverse to try and touch on lots of little things in a game to make lots of people happy than it is to focus only on instanced play with no interaction with any player or NPC at all like you seem to want.

Window scaling. Run the game in as high a resolution as you can, then if your computer can't support it, run the game's 3D graphics at a lower resolution. If that's still too big, scale your windows down. I don't have the game in front of me, but I know window scaling has some pretty significant bounds.

I don't disagree with the nuisance that is the event window, though. I wish there were a better way to handle this. Also, I suggest NOT using the new Team Interface. Use the classic one. The new team interface is big, fat, cluttered and designed for huge monitors.

Realistically speaking, the biggest UI chunks you have are power trays and chat. If you can keep chat smaller, even down to a single tab instead of the over/under format and keep any additional power trays elsewhere but stacked on top of your regular trays (I have my extra one in two rows of five on the bottom between my power trays and my chat tab).

I ran the game at 1280x1024, which isn't a huge screen, for almost my entire time here - probably 6 out of 8 years - and I managed to arrange my UI to work pretty much fine. It was big-ish, yes, but not that big. So unless your laptop is running at 1024x768, you should be able to do relatively fine. And I never scaled my windows, either.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Crafting itself as a concept? No, of course not. Well, perhaps depending on the genre, but for a Fantasy MMO? I can see that. But what I feel is dated annoying crap is the busywork of inventory management and foraging for resources and experimenting for recipes and all that nonsense. I like crafting as a concept, but I don't like the "MineCraft" approach to it that makes crafting itself only a small part of the process, with the bulk of it spent on actually getting the resources to do it.

I prefer crafting systems like those in Kingdom of Amalur or, heaven help me, Darksiders 2, because they're simple and they focus on actually planning out what you'll create more so than getting the salvage to create it. City of Heroes has probably the worst, least exciting intepretation of crafting since Ever Quest, simply because "crafting" is nothing more than a button press. Everything else is resource management and scavenging.

Consider what a real craftsman is praised on - workmanship, skill, quality, attention to detail. Consider what a real craftsman ISN'T praised on - trudging through the woods to mine rocks to smelt into rods so that he can stuff it in a cake oven that spits out a sword. If crafting is supposed to be a major part of the game, the act of crafting itself should be what the mechanic revolves around, not the scavenger hunt for resources. I get that it's common for a sword of Mythril Ore to be ten times as good as a pig iron sword regardless of what inept troll crafted it, but to me, that's not crafting. That's foraging, with crafting only as an afterthought.

Turn it into a game. I'm sure there's some iPhone rhythm game out there around hitting a piece of iron with a hammer in the right places at the right times, and I'm sure someone can put together a list of procedures needed to maked a decent blade that involves heating it, beating it, cooling it, reheating it and so on. I'm not a blacksmith so I don't know the specifics, but I know it involves more than putting a ready-made sword on an anvil and smashing it with a hammer 15 times.

You can make crafting fun, but you have to set out to make CRAFTING fun, rather than focusing on the resource management system for the salvage you need to start crafting in the first place. Consider, for instance, how we have infinite ammo in City of Heroes, even when we fire special high-tech rare toxic bullets. Why can't a crafting profession assume we have access to infinite resources and instead focus on out ABILITY to use them? But then that's hard to design, since you'd need a whole other game around it. You can't just scatter the salvage around the world using the pre-existing loot system, and that's hard.

*edit*
Even MineCraft is more "mine" than "craft." You have a list of recipes for what arrangement of which resources makes what items, and the "game" aspect of it comes down to actually finding the resources. The actual crafting comes down to arranging items on a grid and clicking a button.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Fair enough. I'll accept the balancing issue as far as that's concerned, but that does't affect the other things I find to be annoying about their UI compared to ours.

My ability to customize my UI in CoH is something I cherish, and find annoying when I can't do it in other games.

But I honestly don't expect others to agree with me since it's a personal preference.