That said, we're all aware of some problems. I counseled a friend last night to wait to purchase it, since he was new to MMOs. The issues we've been facing might be severely off-putting to someone with less desire and/or patience.
I was selling the game to the same friend, and said that if he joined a few weeks later, it wouldn't matter so much, since our higher level characters would be bumped down if we came to run with him. This is true and not true, as Zubon posted over at Kill Ten Rats. And Zubon's post came from SynCaine's post about the same thing. The main points are:
- You downlevel not to the lowest level of the content, but the highest.
- Higher level characters will have more skills to choose from..
- Higher level armor will still protect more than lower level armor.
- Higher level weapons are more likely to have damage increases that won't be nerfed by the downscaling.
The gap closes as the lower character rises, however. And more importantly, I think real-world friendship can still bridge a lot of that gap. Is power-leveling so bad? We did it in Borderlands, and it didn't break our enjoyment of the game. And even when it wasn't to our advantage, we often came back to help lowbie alts in WoW. I don't think it's going to be a problem in GW2.
Other problems are still being ironed out by Arena.Net. Logins were spotty this morning. They've taken the in-game mail down a few times for some reason. The trading post has been down pretty much since the second day of headstart. Overflow is still wonky. But I've had an epiphany about that.
Each "zone" has its own capacity and overflow. The starter zones were chock full of new players, so of course everyone spent a lot of time in overflow trying to get their party together. But as time goes on, and people spread out into all of the zones, we should see less people being sent to overflow. That should make it much easier to party up. I'd say in another week, maybe two, it won't be an issue.
The queues for WvW are still somewhat disturbing, however.
So there are a few flaws. But then every game has them. And this game is far from "over". It's not shipping and then laying off its staff. It's a living game, and they're constantly working to make it better. And since it's already pretty damn good, that's good enough for me.
