So I have been playing since about three days now and some observations...
º Crafting.
Maybe there's a reason and I'm not yet aware of it, but we can only have two active professions at any given time, ok. But... the progression I make in any other professions is being saved so I can just switch whenever I feel like it. I can use the materials I found to increase the professions' levels and... yeah. So basically all professions are available, but only two active at a time, even though the bigger picture is pretty much that they're all "active" anyway... I just need to walk to specific profession NPCs and do that whole "activate-this and deactivate-that game", which itself is ultimately just a loss of time and unnecessary.
So, what's the point? It really doesn't provide any additional "depth" to the crafting system itself. I mean I could just... you know, have all professions at once as being "active" without necessarily labeling them as such. I just don't understand why, or maybe it's a gold sink of sort in the game's economy. I mean the whole professions switching being the gold sink, not the professions themselves (or maybe the professions themselves are, too, but that ain't the point anyway).
Anyone cares to explain? If there's an actual reason to that I'd be happy to learn of it. I'm really just curious and I genuinely want to know, maybe I'm just not aware of it but for the moment it seems to be useless.
º The scaling of enemies / players.
I'm not sure if I like it or not, but I think that on paper and technically speaking it's almost there... done almost right. It's rather common in other MMORPGs of course to have lower level zones being steam-rolled God mode-style by higher level players coming from higher level zones with the respective higher level gear. And of course in such games more often than not the players whom are trying to actually level up in those lower level zones see that happen and either they are happy about it because it saves them time, or they want to kill the higher level guy(s) because he/she/they just interrupted their quest and they have to start over again.
I have played many such MMORPGs myself and I never understood the point since there was no fun nor rewards for the higher level player to just pass by Level 10 zones at Level 50 to one-shot every single mobs that perhaps once made his day a tour in Hell. Even if that was the case it's the past now, you're strong and those mobs are just A.I. without feelings you won't exactly get actual "revenge" by going there and one-shooting them... but anyway... to each their own "fun" I guess.
Now in GW2, you are for example Level 20 and enter a Level 1 to around Level 15 zone or so. Let's presume that you enter a specific area in which the highest leveled mobs are Level 12 (but your actual Level is 20). That means that you'll be scaled down to one level ABOVE that of the highest leveled mob in the zone in question. It's a scaling down from your actual level, but it's still a scale UP from the zone's highest leveled mobs. Now, obviously, it's nothing to be just ONE level above that of a mob when in other similar games you can be 50+ Levels above and just look at the poor thing not even touch it and it'd dead in a second.
But that's "nothing" only if you compare that scaling down to similar games. That's the obvious part...
The not so obvious one is that within GW2 itself, without comparisons with other similar games being made then the accumulated players coming from higher level zones present in sufficient numbers in a lower-level area WILL, ultimately, make everything much easier for everyone regardless of the area or the mobs in it. That's at least the observations I have made from what I've seen so far. I am aware that perhaps in higher level zones that kind of difficulty reduction ("forced" by the presence of enough players) is decreasing, and the power "gap" between mobs and especially bosses (between them and the players) is much lesser. I do actually hope that's the case for those higher level zones that I have yet to see.
What I mean is... ok you have a boss, he's say... Level 15. If the conditions are met then really, the scaling down won't change much. It DOES help a little bit. I'm not saying that the scaling down system in GW2 is doing literally nothing per se. But basically the point is that if a Level 15 boss is literally overwhelmed by a group of a dozen Level 16 players especially if some of them have skills that they opened at higher levels still being activate despite the level scaling (and stats scaling too) I mean... yeah the boss WILL effectively become overwhelmed in all senses of the word. It still makes things too easy.
Should it make things "easier"? Yes, I believe it should obviously help the situation if there's more players assisting in a battle. But they are STILL higher level than the boss. The "scaling down" works when you look at it from the point of view of the player's own actual level, but not when you look at it from the enemies' point of view (PvE). It's my main complaint so far.
Just taking one example, I can't recall the exact location's name by now I'd have to look at it again, but I was Level 11 (Guardian) and came by some Event on a frozen lake I think it is, where some boss appears and you have to beat waves of lesser mobs until the boss eventually fights us. Well anyway, it took... what maybe 6 or 7 players total, and no more than around 2 minutes and the boss was gone. I mean the WHOLE Event from the moment the first lesser mobs wave starts to the moment we loot the final chest... done in about 2 minutes? Maybe 3 at most? It was short and it felt... well it was easy let's just put it this way.
º Overall difficulty (A.K.A lack of it)
I guess that, overall, my only "real" negative complaint I have about this game is that is it simply easy. I DO hope that in later zones things will become challenging. I do consider myself some sort of a "newbie'ish" player in MMORPGs. I don't consider myself a veteran (or maybe I am but I remain modest anyway). The first one I ever played was Star Wars Galaxies, but I only played it for maybe a month and a half (and I still own the original vanilla Galaxies CD-Rom and the retail box).
Then I played mostly F2P MMORPGs of all types, 2D, side scrolling, top view, 3D... many of them. The latest ones on my list are City of Heroes, then tried Allods Online (very popular in Russia, not so much here in North America) then moved to Champions Online, then more recently DC Universe Online. I know how MMORPGs work, the basics at least (and of course most of them adopted or tried to imitate most of the basic mechanics from World of WarCraft). I've participated in end-game content, been in end-game (and very competitive and strong) guilds in many of those games. I've seen my fare share of challenges and what I could also consider "spoon-fed entrainment" (I.E. easy games).
I never played the original Guild Wars, but GW2 so far is one of the easiest MMORPGs I've played. Not *the* easiest but... anyway I was expecting something more. I have not been in a single party so far. I've played alone and all Instances I've been in were completed by me in pure solo (I think they were only related to "My Story" instances). I have died a few times, yes, but mostly because I made stupid mistakes and couldn't use my skills properly or didn't have the reflex to kite around enough.
Honestly I don't know exactly what is - or are - the causes of it. It has to do with classes and overall game balance to some extent, surely, but certainly it's not the whole story. I think that it has to do also with that "almost done right" scaling down system. In my opinion, if scaling down people has to occur by the philosophy of the developers of this game and what their goal seems to be for it, then they need to force same-level scaling, not one level below, not one level above, but the same level and same stats perhaps as well.
If you see a boss and he's Level 15, and if your level is also 15... you'll think twice. Now of course if there's 20 players at Level 14 or 15 it will be "easier". I agree, and it should be. But the point is that on paper, by statistics I am convinced that if we'd look at the actual numbers we'd notice how much it really doesn't actually help to maintain the challenges *up* by allowing too many players of higher levels to come in and assist for the same Event(s).
Solution? I'm not sure... difficult to think of one and I'm sure that the GW2 developers brainstormed it to death and came up with the system we see right now as their final "best" approach out of many possibilities that they must have looked at... but still...
Maybe there should be some sort of a limitation of players imposed by the instancing of boss-related zones. What does it mean? Well for MMORPG veterans it should be clear already. For others out there perhaps not familiar with instancing, it would mean that above a certain threshold any zone that contains a boss (or Event with a boss) would be newly instanced for another maximum set of players, and no two groups of players can interact because they'd then be "enclosed" in their own instanced zone.
For example, you roam around some area where there's no bosses but only regular mobs, that's fine, no instancing needed, there can be literally a hundred players or more, fine. Now let's say there's a boss in the same area instead (as an example). That means that within this area there can be no more than say... 6 players (just an example!). What would the 80+ other players do? Nothing different... they would still fight the boss if they find themselves in that same "instanced" area, the only thing is that the game would dynamically instance the area to contain all the players within maximum groups of that 6 players limit until all the players in the area have been instanced. So everyone would get to fight the boss and no one would ever see more than 6 players fighting the boss at any given time even if the entire "zone" has a total population of 100 players.
It's just one way to look at it and there might be other solutions.
But anyway, yeah I know the devs looked into it I'm sure of it. But, I myself must say that I am not completely satisfied with this scaling down system, enemies can be too easily overwhelmed anyhow, it doesn't change much. Although I DO prefer it as it is right now despite the downside (I.E. making things too easy more often than not) when I compare this system to other similar games. I do NOT want to see a Level 40 (unscaled) player just God-modding his way in "my level zone" killing everything and wrecking apart my own fun, that would have been a big No No, and fortunately it ain't the case. So yes ultimately it is almost a good middle ground, the devs did find some sort of a solution but there's still balancing to do with it, in my opinion.
Overall
But, as a whole, the game itself? It's definitely one of the best MMORPG game I've played. And... oh man the soundtrack, Jeremy Soule... what can I say more.