so far the questing has been really lame

Volkon · July 2012

Originally posted by Mephster
Originally posted by DrunkWolf

I hope it gets better than what i have seen so far.

In last weeks beta i was turned in a cat and hunted rabbits, i had to feed cows, i had to follow some wolf around to get credit for quest, and i had to pick up eggs off the ground and put them in a nest.

these are just the stupid ass quest that i remember, there were many more. please tell me that this isnt it, these are some of the most care bear quest i have ever seen in a game. most of them i didnt even have to kill anything.....

This is what i was talking about. Oh and it doesn't change much at level 20+. It is still go kill x amout of mobs in an event and see if we fail or not. Yep pretty epic I must say!

You talking about hearts? Must be. They will change dramatically as the game progresses, and eventually you get to zones with no hearts at all, just dynamic event webs (see: Orr). Webs, yes, as in multiple conditions for multiple results, not a simple straight line pass/fail.

Wickedjelly · July 2012

Originally posted by Mephster
This is what i was talking about. Oh and it doesn't change much at level 20+. It is still go kill x amout of mobs in an event and see if we fail or not. Yep pretty epic I must say!

Eh, they seemed to evolve quite a bit to me from what I have seen. Still though an mmo is an mmo. Only so much quests are going to have available to them outside lore and presentation.

Not real sure what some of you guys want really.

RizelStar · July 2012

Originally posted by quikmixx
One day there will be an mmo that does take it one step further and creates a brand new system devoid of any smiliarities to previous mmo quest structures. You can't honestly think this is the only way a game can be engaging. There are always options. ArenaNet choose to change the wrapper, not the content inside. But ask anybody, and they will always tell you i care more about whats inside of the box than what its wrapped in. Unfortunately arenaNet needs to learn a little modesty and realize that what they are doing is not so much different from what others have done before them. They took existing ideas and improved them, good for them. But i have seen a couple articles from ArenaNet going alittle overboard about what gw2 is suppose to acheive and do for the genre. I don't see it. The only thing i feel that other mmo comanies should take from ArenaNet is its payment model. I think if they stick by the items they have and the box price. I think their price model is a good example for other companies to follow. Ranking for payment models goes like this for me B2P, P2P, and f2P being the worst.

Question, can you please inform us what that system could be like. Like your idea of a brand new system.

Now like I said we already [acting] as if heart quest are the main function of PVE in GW 2 any way lol.

RizelStar · July 2012

Originally posted by Volkon
Originally posted by quikmixx
did i say i was expecting anything different, i just thought the picture was funny and spoke a 1000 words. Guys need to learn to chill out (refering to over obsessive gw2 zealots).

BTW, just because all mmorpgs follow the same quest structure doesn't mean if the content is different it somehow ceases to be a MMORPG.

Someday a MMORPG will do something fundamentally different, its just that the time hasn't come for true change yet.

It may speak a thousand words, but unfortunately none of them are very flattering towards the "cartoonist". It gives the false impression that, like the static quest of WoW modelled games, you have to go to the bandits to get your kills. It fails to accurately portray the simple fact that in GW2 the bandits come to you whether you want them to or not. That simple fact alone is enough to definitively state that the person that drew the cartoon, and those that think it's an accurate representation of events in GW2, are effectively clueless as to how the game actually works.

In GW2, you don't do events. Events do you.

What's sad is they trying to get on Heart Quest. Like no one is talking about event's no more, the OP sure as hell not talking about DE's, he is talking about the heart quest.

That's why the picture is false regardless of DE's and Heart Quest, like I'm sure we all done heart quests, compared to regular quests someone always say "It's the same [except]" when we say there is no difference one doesn't say ok it's not different except, that mean regardless of anything it's different

I'll be fair and say the feeling though, subjectively could be no different.

quikmixx · July 2012

Originally posted by Volkon
Originally posted by quikmixx
did i say i was expecting anything different, i just thought the picture was funny and spoke a 1000 words. Guys need to learn to chill out (refering to over obsessive gw2 zealots).

BTW, just because all mmorpgs follow the same quest structure doesn't mean if the content is different it somehow ceases to be a MMORPG.

Someday a MMORPG will do something fundamentally different, its just that the time hasn't come for true change yet.

It may speak a thousand words, but unfortunately none of them are very flattering towards the "cartoonist". It gives the false impression that, like the static quest of WoW modelled games, you have to go to the bandits to get your kills. It fails to accurately portray the simple fact that in GW2 the bandits come to you whether you want them to or not. That simple fact alone is enough to definitively state that the person that drew the cartoon, and those that think it's an accurate representation of events in GW2, are effectively clueless as to how the game actually works.

In GW2, you don't do events. Events do you.

The emphasis on the picture deals with the content. Not the method of delivery. The picture was all in good humor and i took it for what it was. Not much effort was put in the picture, but for what it shows, you can derive much from it. You are assuming alot by saying that people are clueless just because they draw a stick drawing of a mmo game. And as far as going to the bandits. The picture shows no movement. You assumed that the stick man went to the bandits, but it was never insinuated through the drawing that the stick man walked to them. Thats for the viewer to decide. Im guessing he drew the picture thinking some people had some basic knowledge of mmos and guild wars 2. Because if you had no knowledge of mmos, you wouldn't be able to even understand the irony or purpose of the picture.

Sovrath · July 2012

Originally posted by quikmixx
One day there will be an mmo that does take it one step further and creates a brand new system devoid of any smiliarities to previous mmo quest structures. You can't honestly think this is the only way a game can be engaging.

No one is saying that this is the only way a game can be engaging.

If you look at "quests" in general, not only game quests but quests in literature, there reallly isn't much to them.

You get something, deliver something, kill something, escort someone, seek to destroy something...

somone must offer you the task or you must be made aware of the taks and decide to embark upon it. You then need to complete it and then tell someone its' done.

I think you are going to have to elaborate because there's not much more to it than that. Any game offering a quest, especially a quest to a huge group of people, will require those three things.

BeansnBread · July 2012

Originally posted by quikmixx
Originally posted by Volkon

Originally posted by quikmixx
did i say i was expecting anything different, i just thought the picture was funny and spoke a 1000 words. Guys need to learn to chill out (refering to over obsessive gw2 zealots).

BTW, just because all mmorpgs follow the same quest structure doesn't mean if the content is different it somehow ceases to be a MMORPG.

Someday a MMORPG will do something fundamentally different, its just that the time hasn't come for true change yet.

It may speak a thousand words, but unfortunately none of them are very flattering towards the "cartoonist". It gives the false impression that, like the static quest of WoW modelled games, you have to go to the bandits to get your kills. It fails to accurately portray the simple fact that in GW2 the bandits come to you whether you want them to or not. That simple fact alone is enough to definitively state that the person that drew the cartoon, and those that think it's an accurate representation of events in GW2, are effectively clueless as to how the game actually works.

In GW2, you don't do events. Events do you.

The emphasis on the picture deals with the content. Not the method of delivery. The picture was all in good humor and i took it for what it was. Not much effort was put in the picture, but for what it shows, you can derive much from it. You are assuming alot by saying that people are clueless just because they draw a stick drawing of a mmo game. And as far as going to the bandits. The picture shows no movement. You assumed that the stick man went to the bandits, but it was never insinuated through the drawing that the stick man walked to them. Thats for the viewer to decide. Im guessing he drew the picture thinking some people had some basic knowledge of mmos and guild wars 2. Because if you had no knowledge of mmos, you wouldn't be able to even understand the irony or purpose of the picture.

It's not for all viewers to decide. It's for viewers that played the game to decide.

I see it as a misrepresentation of what actually happens in PvE in GW2. Many of us have extensive knowledge about MMOs going back way too many years. To act like someone can't understand the implications of that picture is condescending... at best. People that like the game get it. The heart quests are similar to typical MMORPG quests. All Guild Wars 2 fans that I've ever seen type a word on these forums understand that. But there really is a lot more to the Gw2 PvE experience. That is why people tend to disagree so vehemently about that particular simplification.

Torgrim · July 2012

heart quest is really for the lazy WoW crowd who are used to everything is marked on a map and sadly those quests are the most boring ones.

The real fun ones are what GW2 is all about.... It's the DE and that evolve wehtever you doing them or not.

Unknown · July 2012

Originally posted by quikmixx
One day there will be an mmo that does take it one step further and creates a brand new system devoid of any smiliarities to previous mmo quest structures. You can't honestly think this is the only way a game can be engaging. There are always options. ArenaNet choose to change the wrapper, not the content inside. But ask anybody, and they will always tell you i care more about whats inside of the box than what its wrapped in. Unfortunately arenaNet needs to learn a little modesty and realize that what they are doing is not so much different from what others have done before them. They took existing ideas and improved them, good for them.

<snip>

Just stop and think for a second what you're suggesting. So you want an MMORPG where they do away with kill quests, escort quests, defend quests, collect quests, crafting quests, and travel quests, which is the makeup of pretty much all PvE content in MMO's today. What else could they do (sandbox content like building towns aside)? Fall in love quests? Grow a garden quests? Foot race quests?

This is a sincere question, not trying to be a GW2 zealot. I'm honestly interested in how you think content could change that would make for interesting gameplay. What could Anet have done that would make you say "hey that's a fundamental change to MMORPG's".

cesmode8 · July 2012

Originally posted by RizelStar
Originally posted by Sixpax
Originally posted by quikmixx

This picture made me smile.

I have never seen such a accurate description of the difference between gw2 and other mmos as far as questing

What i got from this is gw2 zealots can even make the same concepts done in other mmos seem new and innovative hence the "so awesome herp derp".

different wrapper, same content.

It's the wrapper that makes all the difference. If the content were different, it wouldn't be an MMORPG. What are you expecting to be different content wise exactly?

I wouldn't even bother asking him to be honest, apparently talking b/s is the difference.

Honestly who ever been telling people that GW 2 isn't a game, it doesn't have kill x, collect x, make x, do x please slap em lol.

Though the big difference is that in the quests in GW 2 is that in almost all the heart quests I've done I was able to kill x, collect x, make x, do x all at once rather than there be a quest where it's like go collect x and come back to me, but once you do I'll send you out to go kill x, after you kill x, I want you to go make x. That right there is a huge difference lol, because I might get tired of killing x or collecting x just to help, why can't I choose what I want to do to help

Cut off for brevity and bolded/italicized for awesomeness. Exactly! One of the first heart events in queensdale: "Put out fires,kill centaurs, water crops, feed cows".

Meh...I dont really feel like killing these centaurs, Im going to go water some shrubs(or put out fires)...let those guys kill the centaurs.

AWESOME!

bookworm438 · July 2012

Originally posted by Sixpax
Originally posted by quikmixx

One day there will be an mmo that does take it one step further and creates a brand new system devoid of any smiliarities to previous mmo quest structures. You can't honestly think this is the only way a game can be engaging. There are always options. ArenaNet choose to change the wrapper, not the content inside. But ask anybody, and they will always tell you i care more about whats inside of the box than what its wrapped in. Unfortunately arenaNet needs to learn a little modesty and realize that what they are doing is not so much different from what others have done before them. They took existing ideas and improved them, good for them.

Just stop and think for a second what you're suggesting. So you want an MMORPG where they do away with kill quests, escort quests, defend quests, collect quests, crafting quests, and travel quests, which is the makeup of pretty much all PvE content in MMO's today. What else could they do (sandbox content like building towns aside)? Fall in love quests? Grow a garden quests? Foot race quests?

This is a sincere question, not trying to be a GW2 zealot. I'm honestly interested in how you think content could change that would make for interesting gameplay. What could Anet have done that would make you say "hey that's a fundamental change to MMORPG's".

Let's not forget books, movies, real life, single player games, everything pretty much in the history of history. The only thing that will ever change is how it's presented. As technology advances into the future, we'll be able to present these quests in better ways.

Also even building towns will come down to collection quests. You are going to to collect resources in order to build your town, and then most likely kill x creatures or players who threaten the safety of your town. Even growing a gard quest would boil down to collection. You are going to need to collect the resouces necessary to grow the garden.

As I said, everything comes down to a few basic archetypes: collect, killing, and delivery. Capturing is just a combination of collecting and killing. Escort is just a combination of delivery and killing.

What matters is HOW IT'S PRESENTED.

expendable83 · July 2012

How is presented? Masked you mean .. the same old stuff masked like something different? And not only masked like something different, it's the same stuff all over the game, everywwhere. What happends after 1 month when you get use to this bullshit? It's get old veeeery fast, that's why you gw2 fanboys got only 8 days beta in total. 8 days of public beta for a game that pretends to be something great, ahahaha.

There is not enough pve content in this game, because making a lot of content is haaard.

Unknown · July 2012

Originally posted by expendable83
How is presented? Masked you mean .. the same old stuff masked like something different? And not only masked like something different, it's the same stuff all over the game, everywwhere. What happends after 1 month when you get use to this bullshit? It's get old veeeery fast, that's why you gw2 fanboys got only 8 days beta in total. 8 days of public beta for a game that pretends to be something great, ahahaha.

There is not enough pve content in this game, because making a lot of content is haaard.

So tell us, what should they have done to make it better? What, in your mind, would have made GW2 better than the competition?

Wickedjelly · July 2012

Originally posted by expendable83
How is presented? Masked you mean .. the same old stuff masked like something different? And not only masked like something different, it's the same stuff all over the game, everywwhere. What happends after 1 month when you get use to this bullshit? It's get old veeeery fast, that's why you gw2 fanboys got only 8 days beta in total. 8 days of public beta for a game that pretends to be something great, ahahaha.

There is not enough pve content in this game, because making a lot of content is haaard.

You aren't even trying

Spice it up a bit. Add some humor. Don't be so obvious

1/10

Unknown · July 2012

Originally posted by Wickedjelly
Originally posted by expendable83

How is presented? Masked you mean .. the same old stuff masked like something different? And not only masked like something different, it's the same stuff all over the game, everywwhere. What happends after 1 month when you get use to this bullshit? It's get old veeeery fast, that's why you gw2 fanboys got only 8 days beta in total. 8 days of public beta for a game that pretends to be something great, ahahaha.

There is not enough pve content in this game, because making a lot of content is haaard.

You aren't even trying

Spice it up a bit. Add some humor. Don't be so obvious

1/10

Yeah the: I-just-created-this-account-2-days-ago-to-bash-GW2 sorta gives it away.

expendable83 · July 2012

Originally posted by Sixpax
Originally posted by expendable83

How is presented? Masked you mean .. the same old stuff masked like something different? And not only masked like something different, it's the same stuff all over the game, everywwhere. What happends after 1 month when you get use to this bullshit? It's get old veeeery fast, that's why you gw2 fanboys got only 8 days beta in total. 8 days of public beta for a game that pretends to be something great, ahahaha.

There is not enough pve content in this game, because making a lot of content is haaard.

So tell us, what should they have done to make it better? What, in your mind, would have made GW2 better than the competition?

Nothing! Can't be fixed. Because instead of having persistent world they've created persistent zones in which zones they control the population. It is impossible to remove zoning and loading screens cause otherwise all of your "dynamic quest" system is going to garbage. Even the zones are controlled by a overflow server and when the limit is up they create a new instance. And this is everywhere. Cities are basically shared instances, you must loading screen to enter them . This game is not even persistent mmo.

It's totally lame when you are in a lag and pressing buttons and it remembers the action, when you are out of the lag it start to execute it. They can't manage even the controlled zones which are relatively so small (compared to a whole streamed continent for example). Things don't scale properly,not only heppened to me few times, but even in one of the first yogscast videos they are spamming 1 and 2 for about 15 minutes to kill a simple mob, only because a guy was sitting in the water near "the event" and he was doing nothing. And you think this shit 's not going to happend after release? It will get worse.

And this is only one of the few examples i can give you but i just don't want to deal with you guys, cause you really don't think rationally. Whatever.

Volkon · July 2012

Originally posted by quikmixx
Originally posted by Volkon
Originally posted by quikmixx
did i say i was expecting anything different, i just thought the picture was funny and spoke a 1000 words. Guys need to learn to chill out (refering to over obsessive gw2 zealots).

BTW, just because all mmorpgs follow the same quest structure doesn't mean if the content is different it somehow ceases to be a MMORPG.

Someday a MMORPG will do something fundamentally different, its just that the time hasn't come for true change yet.

It may speak a thousand words, but unfortunately none of them are very flattering towards the "cartoonist". It gives the false impression that, like the static quest of WoW modelled games, you have to go to the bandits to get your kills. It fails to accurately portray the simple fact that in GW2 the bandits come to you whether you want them to or not. That simple fact alone is enough to definitively state that the person that drew the cartoon, and those that think it's an accurate representation of events in GW2, are effectively clueless as to how the game actually works.

In GW2, you don't do events. Events do you.

The emphasis on the picture deals with the content. Not the method of delivery. The picture was all in good humor and i took it for what it was. Not much effort was put in the picture, but for what it shows, you can derive much from it. You are assuming alot by saying that people are clueless just because they draw a stick drawing of a mmo game. And as far as going to the bandits. The picture shows no movement. You assumed that the stick man went to the bandits, but it was never insinuated through the drawing that the stick man walked to them. Thats for the viewer to decide. Im guessing he drew the picture thinking some people had some basic knowledge of mmos and guild wars 2. Because if you had no knowledge of mmos, you wouldn't be able to even understand the irony or purpose of the picture.

Focus on the red. Let it sink in. Absorb the meaning behind what you said. Then and only then will you understand.

[Deleted User] · July 2012

The user and all related content has been deleted.

MosesZD · July 2012

So, first, there are only a limited number of ways you can, in any game in this genre, advance thorugh PvE. So we have five basic quest archetypes:

Collect somthing
Find something
Kill something
Defend something
Deliver something

Most MMOs do some combination of those five. Though some don't even do all five. If your complaint is that those five archetypes are in this game, you don't have a point. We already know these archetypes are the game. (NOTE: There are some uncommon quests that most MMOs don't use -- puzzle/knowledge/lore quests -- but I'm just dealing with the basics here.)

What the troll infestation DELIBERATELY fails to understand it's not what the quests are but it is how they are executed. In traditional MMOs the quests are static. You go to a quest hub, click on a man and receive a quest that is a shopping list that, usually, has to be performed in an exact order:

Kill 10 rats.
Kill 20 more rats.
Kill 40 more rats (or 10 elite rats if they're really going out of the box).
Kill rat field boss.

This is an inherently passive involvement with the environment. You are given orders. You fill them. You move on. You never actively search for a solution, but just mindlessly kill things like your a machine in an XP grinding factory. Or perhaps a fast-food clerk punching picture buttons on a register.

In GW2 we really don't get a lot that quest. It's not like it never happens. It's just the unthinking, passively accepted laundry-list execution is not the primary vehicle of execution. What we do get is something that allows active, intellectually engaging (I'm not talking post-modernist deconstructions of War and Peace, just a little bit of active thinking here) game play, for example:

Heart quests. When you're by a heart you are automatically informed you are in a zone where someone needs help. There is very little guidance given and the experienced, actively thinking MMO player will start (at that time) to do things so he can move the progress bar. Some will be helpful. Others will not. Some will, by themselves, have enough impact to complete the entire task, others will not. The gamer gets to pick from a group of tasks, not all of which are obvious or involve shopping-list killing, that are not rigid or clearly defined. The gamer may be required to solve the puzzle of what needs to be done and how to best execute it because these become progressively more difficult to complete as the area levels up.

We also have dynamic events which are both more complex (a chain of events that requires patience and awareness to complete) and simplier (the tasks necessary to complete tend to be singular and not multiple in the solution) in execution.

TL:DR

Let me put it this way.... Hemmingway wasn't a brilliant writer because he used a large vocabulary (he didn't) or because he wen't on and on and on forever (he had clean, terse prose), or wrote in different language making him cool (it was plain old English). It was the execution (through his writing) that made those words into the stories that were so brilliant:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/41444129/Hills-Like-White-Elephants-Complete-Story

Brilliant. Just brilliant. And the trolls would complain about that story if it were a game... "Not enough big words. Too many big words. Too much dialog. Too much metaphor. The issue is not clear. Need pages of descriptive text describing the environment. Blah, blah, blah..."

Creslin321 · July 2012

Originally posted by Fion
Originally posted by cesmode8
Put aside everyone else's commments for a second.. Let me ask you one simple question:

In whatever MMO you came from(WoW, Rift, Tera, EQ, etc) , what kinds of quests/quest content did you experience in the starter zone?

I'll bet my rediculous salary that you weren't killing the Lich King while trampling around Elwynn Forest with a blunt blade and leather hide shorts.

Yes, the starter "quests" in GW2, like every game, is quite elementary. Im willing to bet that when you hit level 50, 60, 70..+ , you'll be killing dragons, demon things, and other bada$$ creatures (not some slimeball in EPL or a skeleton from Icecrown..).

The great thing about GW2 is the 'dragons, demon things and other bada$$ creatures' aren't solely the preview of end game raiding. Massive bosses that kick everyones ass unti lyou learn the fight happen all throughout the game. Even as low as mid-teens level.

You are very correct that the early Renown Hearts 'are' very elementary. They are there as a teaching tool, just like how in Rift the early rifts are very simplistic events that that are on a very short cycle. Just like in WoW you are more likely to be asked to collect bandit scarves and wolf skins, in GW2 you are given the choice 'collect apples, kill spiders or destroy nests'. These are teaching tools.

Anyone who says thats 'all GW2 quests are like' has clearly not leveled past 10 and almost surely hasn't wandered more than a hundred yards from the start of the newbie zones.

You know, I have mixed feelings about this.

I've never been a fan of the whole making the player feel powerful even at level 1 idea. Because when you fight a huge ancient dragon at level 5...then it really doesn't feel like you have progressed that much when you fight another huge ancient dragon at level 80.

I actually enjoyed the old style MMORPGs where you had to start off killing kobolds or rats and then eventually work your way up to fighting dragons. I felt like my character was constantly progressing in these games and fighting harder and harder foes.

So yeah, while fighting fearsome mobs at low levels may make low levels more exciting...it kind of takes away that feeling of progression for me.

MMOGamer71 · July 2012

Originally posted by DrunkWolf
I hope it gets better than what i have seen so far.

In last weeks beta i was turned in a cat and hunted rabbits, i had to feed cows, i had to follow some wolf around to get credit for quest, and i had to pick up eggs off the ground and put them in a nest.

these are just the stupid ass quest that i remember, there were many more. please tell me that this isnt it, these are some of the most care bear quest i have ever seen in a game. most of them i didnt even have to kill anything.....

Sounds like you need a change from the MMO genre.

[Deleted User] · July 2012

The user and all related content has been deleted.

MosesZD · July 2012

Originally posted by fiontar

(Worthless crap posts inbetween deleted.)
I'm sorry, but that's a very ignorant representation.

Stale MMO "X"

You go to a quest hub and get a quest telling you that bandits are stealing food that the villagers need to survive. Go kill ten bandits and collect three apples. Return the apples to the quest giver to get your reward. You go to some spot marked on your map and there are a bunch of bandits standing around doing nothing. You kill 10 bandits and collect three apples. More bandits respawn and stand around the same field. If another player comes along while you are killing 10 bandits, you might ask them to join a party, where you may or may not be able to share credit for kills and apples, depending on the game. If not, that player or gaggle of players just become a hassle, as they compete for the same resources and you all fight to tag kills, in order to meet your quota for killing ten bandits.

When it's all done, you return back to the quest hub, turn in the apples and as you run by the field, on your way to the next quest hub, you see the same bandits, standing around in the same field and nothing ever changes.

GW2

In GW2, you might be out exploring the world and run through a pretty idyllic Apple Orchard, nothing amiss, full bushells of freshly picked apples scattered about the Orchard, waiting to be collected and sent to market.

As you are exploring the general area, you may hear shouts and have an NPC run up to you and tell you that bandits have over-run his apple orchard and he needs help. You see in your interface that there is a new Event nearby and looking at the map, you see it's the same peaceful Orchard you just passed through ten minutes earlier is now in the midst of a bandit raid!

As you rush back to the Orchard, you see the summary of your objectives during the Event.

1.) Defeat raiding bandits to decrease their morale and send them into retreat: With a progress bar that starts full and decreases as bandits are defeated.

2.) Prevent the Bandits from stealing all the bushels of apples: 12/12 Bushells remaining.

Waves of bandits will actually rush the orchard. Many of them are raiders, but some of them are Apple Thieves. Unlike MMO "X", all players in the area who respond or just happen across the event can just jump in and participate. The objectives are shared. A kill by anyone damages the bandit Morale and the Bushells that need to be saved are a communal resource.

If you don't stop the Apple Thieves in time, they will grab a bussle of apples and try to race back the the near by Bandit Camp with the stolen apples. You can intercept them and stop them. If you defeat them before they make their escape, the bushell will drop to the ground and you may be able to pick it up and return it to the orchard, so that another Apple Thief can't just come along and grab the bushell and make off with it.

During all of this, the difficulty will scale based on the number of active player participants. With more players, the bandits may get a little tougher, or the waves of bandits may get bigger, (thus requiring larger number of bandits to be killed in order to reduce their morale).

There is no mob tapping or kill stealing. Everyone who attacks a mob will get 100% of the normal XP for the kill and their own loot as well.

If the players defeat enough Bandits to send them into retreat before all the Apples have been stolen, the event will be successful and all participants will be rewarded automatically with Karma and XP. In most cases, they will also receive an in game mail with a thank you letter and a small currency reward. There are Gold, Silver and Bronze levels of rewards, based on participation, but they have pre-set thresholds. You aren't competing against other players for a finite number of gold rewards, Everyone who participates for most of the event will get a Gold level reward. Those that are slackers or are late to arrive may get Silver or Bronze.

In MMO "X", once the bandit Apple thieves have been killed to the proper quota, nothing actually changes.

In GW2, Events can lead to other events in ways that make sense based on the logical consequences of event success or failure.

If players succeeded in the above event and stick around, they may hear a conversation from a couple of the Apple Farmers about the harrowing experience and the close call they had at almost losing their entire crop to bandits. They may decide that they need to send the apples off to market asap and load up a pack animal and cart with the apples. This would spawn a new Dynamic Event where players can escort the Apples to the nearby village, fighting off determined bandits and other threats along the way.

If the players failed, they may instead hear the Apple Farmers begroan the loss and frett about how the village may starve during the coming winter if the apples can't be recovered. This would spawn a new event where players can raid the Bandit camp, with the opportunity of driving them out and claiming it for the local soldiers. If they succeed, they drive the bandits out and the farmers send a cart to fetch the apples, which then spawns a new escort event to escort the apples from the bandit camp to the local village. If players fail, eventually the bandits will raid the Apple Orchard again.

Aha! So the effects on the world are not permanent! Well, of course not. If all events played once, it wouldn't be long before there was no more content left to do. No company could ever produce content efficiently enough to keep up. However, rather than the event just repeating based on some timer, it is tied to the state of the bandits in the local area. Driving the Bandits from their camp pushes events in a direction where players may be able to push the bandits farther and farther from the Orchard and village and put off any future Apple Raids unless, or until, the bandits manage to take back their camp.

Players actions do effect how further events play out and can have a great impact on the state of the zone at any given time.

I've detailed a simple, linear Event Chain that may move back or forth through a few steps that can proceed in either direction, up or down the chain, based on player success/failure. As you get deeper into the game, Event Chains can become branching chains, one event state can effect the direction of another near by series of events, or a zone may contain a complex web of events that can interact with and influence each other in some very complex ways.

This is not an exact event, I tailored the scenario to address the misinformation presented in the diagram presented above, but events like this do happen in the way I've detailed. I've participated in a number of them.

So, stop with the disinformation, whether it's done knowingly or as a result of ignorance. Do not miss out on this game! It's a true gem in the genre and does indeed represent a new paradigm for the genre. Unless you prefer "kill ten rats" linear, quest hub driven MMO quests, in which case this game may just be to much for you to handle.

(BTW, players do still get rewarded for a failure, but it's a lesser reward than a success, so it's worth fighting a battle you aren't sure you can win and you won't find that you've wasted your time if those sneaky Apple Thieves do manage to make off with all the apples)!

That was a brilliant and execellent summary of just why they're different. Yes, underneath the questing they're 'the same.' But to say they are 'just the same' is either massive ignorance or a lie. The complexity of the execution of otherwise standard quest archetypes in GW2 is amazing.

It's like the difference between a Hemmingway story and some piece of crap written by a low-talent freshman in English composition..

Creslin321 · July 2012

Originally posted by MosesZD
So, first, there are only a limited number of ways you can, in any game in this genre, advance thorugh PvE.   So we have five basic quest archetypes:

Collect somthing

Find something

Kill something

Defend something

Deliver something

Most MMOs do some combination of those five.   Though some don't even do all five.   If your complaint is that those five archetypes are in this game, you don't have a point. We already know these archetypes are the game. (NOTE:   There are some uncommon quests that most MMOs don't use -- puzzle/knowledge/lore quests -- but I'm just dealing with the basics here.)

What the troll infestation DELIBERATELY fails to understand it's not what the quests are but it is how they are executed.   In traditional MMOs the quests are static. You go to a quest hub, click on a man and receive a quest that is a shopping list that, usually, has to be performed in an exact order:

Kill 10 rats.

Kill 20 more rats.

Kill 40 more rats (or 10 elite rats if they're really going out of the box).

Kill rat field boss.

This is an inherently passive involvement with the environment. You are given orders.   You fill them. You move on. You never actively search for a solution, but just mindlessly kill things like your a machine in an XP grinding factory. Or perhaps a fast-food clerk punching picture buttons on a register.

In GW2 we really don't get a lot that quest.   It's not like it never happens. It's just the unthinking, passively accepted laundry-list execution is not the primary vehicle of execution.  What we do get is something that allows active, intellectually engaging (I'm not talking post-modernist deconstructions of War and Peace, just a little bit of active thinking here) game play, for example:

Heart quests.   When you're by a heart you are automatically informed you are in a zone where someone needs help.   There is very little guidance given and the experienced, actively thinking MMO player will start (at that time) to do things so he can move the progress bar.   Some will be helpful. Others will not.   Some will, by themselves, have enough impact to complete the entire task, others will not.   The gamer gets to pick from a group of tasks, not all of which are obvious or involve shopping-list killing, that are not rigid or clearly defined.   The gamer may be required to solve the puzzle of what needs to be done and how to best execute it because these become progressively more difficult to complete as the area levels up.

We also have dynamic events which are both more complex (a chain of events that requires patience and awareness to complete) and simplier (the tasks necessary to complete tend to be singular and not multiple in the solution) in execution.

TL:DR

Let me put it this way....   Hemmingway wasn't a brilliant writer because he used a large vocabulary (he didn't) or because he wen't on and on and on forever (he had clean, terse prose), or wrote in different language making him cool (it was plain old English).   It was the execution (through his writing) that made those words into the stories that were so brilliant:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/41444129/Hills-Like-White-Elephants-Complete-Story

Brilliant. Just brilliant.   And the trolls would complain about that story if it were a game...   "Not enough big words. Too many big words.   Too much dialog. Too much metaphor.   The issue is not clear. Need pages of descriptive text describing the environment. Blah, blah, blah..."

Well said.

I really don't see how anyone who at least vaguely enjoyed the WoW quest model at some point in their lives, cannot see the benefits to GW2's execution of questing. As you say, the objectives of quests really are never going to change, all that changes is basically their presentation and method of discovery.

And in GW2, both presentation and method of discovery are way different, and IMO, better.

MosesZD · July 2012

Originally posted by Nilenya
there are so many zones to do events in, you skip any heart quest you feel like. I was already lvl 35 by the time I entered the first lvl 25-35 zone, and was scaled down, the whole time.

I allways do my race starter zone moving from sp to sp, I will skip several hearts. - then I take a trip to the charr and norn equivalent areas and hunt all the sp's for those as well, then I go on to kessex hills, the lvl 15-25 zone for humans, do events and some hearts here (not many) but hunt all sp's and most events, and then repeat this for charr and norn. - This way I have all the epic skills I want by lvl 35, and I have no grind in the heart quest department. I also have alot of materials for crafting, and gain a few levels just from that area of the game, skilling up 1 craft skill.

Anyone forcing themselves to finish heart quests, not out of desire to 100% complete, but to catch up with a personal story quest, is doing it wrong! - You have all these other zones, with tons of skillpoints to grab, and lots of events you havent tried. Unless you intend to make 5 alts, you really have no reason to treat them as offlimits, and even if you dont want to replay them with alts, you are restricting your skill access by artificially lowering your access to skillpoints.

Dont do heartquests if they bore you. EXPLORE other maps for other races and grab skillpoints and events in those areas as well.

A lot of people in my guild do that too... I'm more of an area completionist... I want to find every little thing, complete every little thing, experience every little thing.

I was major dissapoint when I discovered I missed this totally cool, and extremely difficult, hidden boss in the Asura starting zone. Sure, I found a lot of cool stuff that most gamers would miss... But I missed that boss...

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so far the questing has been really lame

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so far the questing has been really lame

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