A while back, there was a thread on the MMORPG subreddit that… OK, it was a bit mean, but there’s a question to be mined there. The gamer was frustrated because his sibling was content to play an MMO – in this case, it happened to be Guild Wars 2 – without going through specific types of content he (the writer) deemed essential, like the personal story. The sibling had apparently just pushed on ahead to Path of Fire and was perfectly content to play that and couldn’t be budged. This upset the Reddit poster. “[My sibling had] no clue who Trahearne is,” the gamer complained.
OK first, really, isn’t everyone better off not knowing who Trahearne is.
But jokes aside, once we discard the undercurrent of elitism here, this seems like exactly the sort of thing Guild Wars 2 in particular was designed for, doesn’t it? Parts of the story are linear, but you can jump in and out as you like and get out of the game whatever you want. If you want to breeze through and ignore most of the story, you can. I’m not sure how having played the personal story, which has very little to do with the current meta anyway, is really an essential factor to enjoying or excelling at Guild Wars 2. The way I see it, if you can skip content that annoys you, then… why wouldn’t you?
How about you? Do you skip annoying content in MMOs?