For a game that I was extremely excited for, Guild Wars 2 ended up being a bit of a disappointment. This isn't because of the game itself (well not completely), but because of the way my friends reacted to it. Since the Old Republic, my friends and I have been routinely playing together (on Wednesdays and Thursdays) for quite some time. We did TOR, and then Tera, and had a blast with both games.
For one of my friends, he was against the game from the start, and I'm still not sure I understand why. Well, no, I'll take that back. I do know why. Though he no longer has the time for it, he is a hard-core MMO raider. He is into the gear grind, endgame, and progression. And ultimately Guild Wars 2 doesn't have that in the way that he wanted. And because of that, he just wasn't that interested in even hitting 80 because at that point he was already 'done'. In that regard, the game was never going to please him in the way he wanted...and I'm sure that he was not the only one with this problem.
In addition to that he also had two other problems with the game. The first was that the game did not really promote grouping while leveling. This one seems odd on the surface--GW2 is very forgiving with working together on quests with random people. But, heart quest progress isn't shared in groups; and for every other type of open-world encounter you receive no real benefit for being in a group. And in fact, due to the somewhat distracting nature of the content, formal groups of people tend to get pulled in different directions because of the distractions. That is, if one guy sees some new event and goes off that way, inevitably not everyone would follow.
The second problem he had was the level capping. This is designed to keep the entire game challenging throughout--you can't overpower content at any point. But in reality, rewards are always worse in lower-level areas and the level capping mechanic tends to make the feeling of power progression non-existent. And this in turn is made worse by the fact that you unlock your weapons and skills so early.
Another of my friends had a more ambivalent approach to the game. He was interested, and played, but ultimately he had absolutely no interest in grouping up in it. The game was too easy, he said, and you get no real benefit from grouping. This was often quite frustrating, but emphasizes to me the way certain players interact with the game. Because leveling content was so easy, there was never any incentive to actually group up--it didn't speed things up at all, and in fact grouping often seemed burdensome in the game because you couldn't just go off and do things at your own pace.
Another friend absolutely fell in love with the game, and to this day spends almost every non-working moment playing. He has numerous characters, many of them at high level, and he massively enjoys virtually every aspect of the game. I think he is a perfect example of the type of player this game specifically caters to--someone who is interested in exploring, and performing a wide variety of different activities and challenges without any real sense of grind. Guild Wars 2 excels in that above any other MMO I've played.
For myself, I got a character to level 80 (an elementalist), and greatly enjoyed the game. But, as I continued to level and my friends mostly stopped playing as a group, my interest began to wane. MMOs, even good MMOs, aren't that interesting to me as a solo activity and the group just wasn't interested in doing things together. After spending some time grinding at 80--dealing with Orr, which I slowly grew to hate--I realized just how pointless it was. Orr is buggy, and a pain in the arse to navigate, and the major events presented nothing but frustrating repetitiveness. Maybe things have gotten better there, but Orr was just not a very good end-game experience for me. And so after a few weeks at 80, and puttering around with other characters, I just stopped playing and moved on to games like Borderlands 2, and XCOM.
Finally, I want to mention something about the dungeons. The dungeons are basically the main grouping content in the game. And they are relatively hard. Now I say that with a bit of a grain of salt here, because as has been very obvious with my friends for a long time, not all of them are very good at that sort of experience. And since we were just 4 people instead of 5, and certain members just didn't want to include a 5th outside of the group, we were forced to do these dungeons a man down. With people who were not properly geared, and weren't necessarily good at that content in the first place. To put it bluntly, attempting these was a disaster, and it was just an exercise in frustration--certain individuals in our group just couldn't adjust to the difficulty, and didn't have the patience to try to learn the dungeons. As such, our attempts were mostly a failure and in fact to this day I haven't actually seen many of the dungeons.
I mention this because I think it would have been nice for them to include a more casual mode--even the story mode dungeons are pretty hard for a very casual group (which we were), and explorable mode was mostly out of the question. Some form of dungeon-finder tool would have been nice as well...for the most part I found it very hard to find groups and those groups I did find universally couldn't complete the dungeons either. I think this was because of the difficulty difference between the dungeons and the rest of the content--there seemed to be less patience with the dungeons because everything else was so easy.
Overall, Guild Wars 2 is the first MMO I've played that I've really enjoyed, but completely stopped playing less than 2 months after release. And it shows me just how much the social aspect of an MMO can be--while the game is fine, good (even great), without the social aspect its just another single player experience. And as a single-player experience Guild Wars 2 doesn't have any benefits over any other game. Sad, perhaps, but true.
