"in every single successful rpg released in the past few years"... guild wars didn't have a gear treadmill.
i think you'll find this is a sequel to that game.
ta-da!
oh and people were still playing guild wars hardcore and competing in PvP years after it was released. i wonder why that is? hmmm. if the only incentive for you to play is to get new epics, you will forever be chasing something you do not have. just look at WoW. get all the gear and then 2 months later there's a new instance and you're just farming mindlessly for the drop-% of new gear again. do you never stop to ask yourself why? just why you are spending all of your time doing it? you never get any 'better' as a player, and the instances never really get any 'harder'. you're just hooked into this pattern of upgrading your character's gear. it's a pointless distraction away from the fact that the pvp/pve itself is lacklustre. for myself personally, as soon as i had the rank10+ gear in WoW's PvP, the gear become totally sidelined and ancillary; it wasn't the point. i didn't continue pvp'ing after reaching my desired rank because i merely 'had the best gear'. i carried on playing because the competition itself was fun. why don't you feel that way?
the incentive to continue playing in guild wars is to get more skill and become higher-ranked in PvP. to distinguish yourself by skill and not by how much time you've spent locked into a zoned-instance farming the same bosses over and over. again, if you want to distinguish yourself by gear, there will be shiny items that will give you /braggingrights to all other players. except getting that gear doesn't = auto-win button in gw2. it still conveys the prestige of being a 'good' player, but you still have to try and actually
be good in PvP to win fights. what's the problem? shouldn't be so difficult for you if you're a skilled and hardcore player, one who knows how to play his class. no? having the gear do all the work for you is lazy.
guild wars has plenty compelling reason enough to play for a long period of time. gw1 had an excellent community long after its release and it
wasn't even an MMO.
Last edited by Uzique (2012-04-19 03:47:50)