PeterD

The more I hear about this game the more it sounds like Anarchy Online -- which is not really a good thing to be honest. I certainly hope people who choose the neutral faction get better treatment than people who did so in AO.

If Guild Wars 2 can capture even half the things Guild Wars did well while giving us new options and experiences it will be a fantastic game.

[tinfoil hat]

It is pretty baffling that there were absolutely no gold spam safeguards in the game at launch. One might almost suspect it was intentional, since without a free trial each gold spammer equals a box sale and possible subscription.

[/tinfoil hat]

Just to respond to your comment about the starting areas -- my understanding is that they're simply having all players on each side start in the Chaos/Empire starting areas regardless of race, and will then be focusing development time on improving the starting area in that pairing. Nobody is getting dumped on the front lines separated from everything else. Nothing is stopping you from grabbing a flight master to the old racial starting area. They're just trying to consolidate all their players in a tighter area since, as anyone can tell you, WAR is no fun without other people around.

That said, I think it's too little too late. WAR could have been a great game, and I really wanted to like it. I like the concept of it, but the actual execution leaves much to be desired. WAR should have been the next big thing, but some dubious design decisions compounded with a final rush out the door resulted in a game that just seems to be missing . . . something.

It does seem odd to make a bunch of PvE changes to territory controlled in the most strongly PvP area in the game . . .

Bioware is generally very good at using words to describe their features.

Personally I'm not really sure why they're even bothering to make another support set at this point -- you can already make strong support/healers using telepathy and sorcery. I'd much rather see them add something entirely new, like an energy based melee set. City of Heroes had tons of them (stone melee, energy melee, fire melee, dark melee, and so on) yet CO (made by the same people) only has weapon based melee sets and Might (Superstrength).

Every time a developer claims some feature of their game is too awesome for words I immediately write their game off as a gigantic piece of crap.

How is this F2P if you need a subscription to not be gimped? That's like calling games with a free trial F2P. Omg, WoW is F2P!

I've done every mission I could find and have bounced around all the different zones. I did desert crisis up to the last mission, then switched to canadian crisis and cleared it. I did canada, then the desert, then MC, then back to the desert, and now in Canada. Despite that, I'm level 21 and all of my missions are level 22 or 23, and it only seems to be getting worse.

So yes, the content gap is real, not imagined. I think some people don't see the gap because they killed more mobs in the course of doing their missions, or spent time doing PvP. If you efficiently do the missions you'll rapidly fall behind.