I love Guild Wars, make no mistake, but there are certain elements that were later added to the game that make me cringe, the biggest one being grind.

In Factions, it started small. You had to gain 10 000 faction points in order to advance in the story. While at first it seemed cumbersome, it’s quick to see that there are many ways to gain these points, the most fun being alliance battles, and these points are gained account based so you only gain once these points for all your characters.

Alas, troubles showed up with Nightfall. You have to gain points again, not only Sunspear point but Lightbringer ones as well, and unlike Factions where these points are account based, it’s not the case anymore in Nightfall: you have to gain all these points for each of your characters. Technically, if you’ve gained all expansions, preorders, and used all your slots, you should have around 9 characters. This is a lot, and this without counting those who have bought extra slots like me and/or have multiple accounts.

But it’s really Eyes of the North that has digged the hole with the Hall of Monument, a supposedly hall where our characters in GW 1 could leave their trace and items to their successors in GW 2. Unfortunately, the hall in question has turned into a hall of achievements only accessible to the hardcore players, where the numbers of things being accepted in the hall are very limited, which force people to only play a few of their characters and grind like crazy over titles and expensive armors.

This is my biggest gripe over Guild Wars, the developers are slapping in the face the casual players and patting the hardcore players. The game is about grind now. It’s not as grindy as other games of course but it is a deviation that should be taken seriously and make us worry about the state of Guild Wars 2. I am a hardcore player, I play a lot, I have 16 characters, but I much prefer trying classes, builds, following the story, than grinding for titles and armors for the Hall of Monument. I also do not care about the worth of armors, I only care about the look of armors, many expensive armors are plain, ugly and even creepy. Many of my characters wear outstandingly dashing inexpensive armors and I would prefer seeing my characters wearing their outstandingly dashing inexpensive armors in the Hall of Monument then having to grind to make them wear horrible expensive armors. Looks like my characters won’t have anything to put in their Hall of Monument. A gigantic disappointment!

This is a past blog entry from my gaming blog on Multiply.