Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 has quickly become my favorite game, and I play it more hours a day than I should, but it is dying. Players are leaving, my friend’s list is becoming more and more offline, and it’s because of a few simple things.

- Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have updates that the player base wants

The most recent update releasing the fractals was garbage. The Fractals of the Mist levels are very interesting, and are much better than dungeons, but the game has core issues that need to be fixed before releasing new content, let alone content that is as buggy as it is.

The rendering issues aren’t new, not being able to right click to do anything party related in WvWvW, these are issues every player has that have been there since release. It doesn’t matter how simple or difficult of a fix it is, GW2 is the only game I’ve played that has had problems that happen to everyone that have lasted this long.

Along with depressing updates, fractals completely replaced all game content. All high level materials spawn in fractals, only the best gear drops in fractals, exotics are more common, lodestones from all dungeons, and you can’t play with your friends because of the level system, nobody wants to play on a lower level than they have to.

PCGamer had the headline, “ArenaNet responds to Guild Wars 2 Ascended gear backlash”

Massively, “ArenaNet responds to Guild Wars 2 Ascended gear gripes”

Kotaku, “ArenaNet Adds ‘Ascended Gear’ To Guild Wars 2, Upset Players Grab Their Pitchforks”

The customer is always right. A very well known and common phrase, helps us understand what is going on here.

ArenaNet isn’t our parents that ‘know what is best for us’. We are grown men and women that know what our favorite foods are, work 40+ hour weeks, and pick out and put on our clothes every morning.

Very few games have replayable content that is strictly PvE, and a game where you get together with friends is an example of a game that is not one of those. World vs World is a boat load of fun, but with the lack of fixes and updates for it combined with how it used to be you could level 1-80 and have the best gear strictly in WvW, it isn’t the same anymore. It’s also not updated in a good way.

Guild Wars 2 had a good thing going, that needed a little push in the right direction with some fixes and balance changes, that every game needs. Instead content that destroys all content in the game is released, and there isn’t anything left.

A redditor said it best:

• It puts GW2 in the ‘me-too’ category of gear checking, gear treadmill games. Not only does it undermine Arenanets reputation, but it also undermines a key differentiator of the game. One in which seems to be a key factor in many people’s choice to play the game. • For WvW players, it a problem because your best-in-slot gear may now be exclusively found in dungeons. • For casual PvEers, it’s a problem because you’ll be behind the gear curve, and more hardcore players will start to exclude you because of it. This means you’ll have to keep playing just to keep up. • For die-hard PvEers, it’s a problem because you’ll be pressured to do the latest dungeon (the one with the best stats and neccessary infusions) to the exclusion of all else. Otherwise you too will drop off the gear treadmill just as you do in WoW.

Nobody benefits, all suffer, the game dies.

Please fix the game. One idea would be for dungeons to produce worthwhile rewards, update world v world to do the same, and stop the new back items from having the steep cost of 250 t6 mat, 300 ectos.

Guild Wars 1 is still played, you guys have shown you can keep this game alive and well, so just step up and make it happen.

You made a mistake, and I don’t care if you admit it or not, just fix the problem.

Log off, go play WoW or FFXIV…

After you see those messes, then come back and complain.

I’m not comparing it to other games that have fallen apart. Guild Wars 2 started out well and promising. There is no reason to lower your standards because World of Warcraft isn’t enjoyable.

Have faith in Anet. If gw2 is your favorite game then you should remember that Anet is the company that made it your favorite game. They are creating a game and putting it out there. You are playing THEIR game. It is not Anet should make the game I want b/c I’m a customer. To call for a rebirth 3 months after launch is a bit much. Things take time and sometimes you just have to wait and see how things plan out. Anet has a vision for the game, let them go with it. People are too eager to raise pitchforks nowadays; Kotaku, “ArenaNet Adds ‘Ascended Gear’ To Guild Wars 2, Upset Players Grab Their Pitchforks.”

Two X Knives Style, the moment they added ascension gear with higher stats than exotic Arenanet lost virtually all trust and faith from the playerbase.

@Two X Knives Style

To ruin a game 3 months after launch is a bit much too.

The game had beta weekends instead of a real beta, so the kinks never got 100% worked out.

ANet has just made a series of unfortunate mistakes, and they keep on coming.

Nothing major wrong with game. Type in “/age”. You are obviously still playing so what is the problem? The only people complaining about Ascended gear are the “hardcore” WvWvW players. Makes NO difference in sPvP and has a small impact on PvE other than fractals. Ascended gear is extremely easy to obtain. For one thing the rings cost NOTHING, just play the new content. You cannot disparage the developers for this update. New gear and content will always release. If this game had nothing but exotics for 6 months it would be bland. Casual players are casual. Hardcore players are hardcore.

I cannot fathom people’s logic.

It’s a bit much to say that Anet lost all trust from its playerbase and in fact I’ve seen this exact thing before. People lost all faith when ursan was introduced. People lost all faith when VoD was removed from GvG. There was a lot of these events over the years. And it was part of the playerbase that lost faith not everyone. But its a catch 22, regardless of the actions Anet takes a part of the playerbase will be upset with the changes/ lack of changes. I’m just saying the game is still young and it’s too early to call the game ruined/dead.

Well i was ok with it really. Till the gear grind and the cuts to the event farms.

Now is all about fractals, hell world PvE i even take a look at the dragons , other than that im at the city or completing daily.

People complain nobody is there doing events? Hell why would i be losing me time past the 5 daily ones with poor rewards?

Then again , like others said. This game will simple not die most likely , the forum is a vocal minority most players are just playing. granted less log every week. But im sure enough to keep it going will remain in the end.

Kakashi.9271:

If this game had nothing but exotics for 6 months it would be bland.

Actually, GW1 has had the same gear cap and level cap for 7 years, and there have been people playing it that long as well. They just introduced new skins, skills, title tracks, content ect.

1) The people who create the content aren’t the same people who fix bugs.

- Content Developers – Create Content
- Programmers – Create Tools for the Content Developers

This means that anything goes wrong, it’ll be the programmers, and not the content developers, that’ll fix it, unless it’s a case of modifying existing content. You also can’t expect content development to halt, otherwise people will leave the game down to nothing to do (when GW was first released, we didn’t have a saturated MMO market).

2) “It doesn’t matter how simple or difficult of a fix it is, GW2 is the only game I’ve played that has had problems that happen to everyone that have lasted this long.”

Well, it does. If you got one bug that you’re still trying to come up with a solution for, and 100 bugs that you know can be fixed, what are you going to do?

3) I think saying that the Fractals has replaced all other content is a tad over-dramatic. I still see people out in the world, doing events, doing the Dragons, and looking for other dungeons.

As for ‘you can’t play with your friends because of the level system, nobody wants to play on a lower level than they have to’, I can easily turn around and say ‘I play on lower levels because playing with my friends is more important to me’. You get Elitists who have a short-term memory problem, and you get the players that just want a good time, and will share a laugh and a joke when you all get owned. Same with every game.

As for everything else, it’s a ‘wait and see’:

• They’ve said they’ll be overhauling existing dungeons, creating Guild and WvW content ect.

• We still don’t know if this is going to end up a treadmill or just a step with Ascended.

Personally, I hope Ascended becomes the final tier, and they implement more fun systems of progression (aesthetic, skill and trait hunting, skill upgrading ect).

I’m with Candlejack. And after reading what he had to say I saw nothing indicating to go play any other competitors mmo.

This game started out in the right direction. It had an interesting story. A personal story that only immersed you into the game. Stats that made npcs interact with you differently than your friends.

I was in heaven. Here is the mmo I was waiting for. Seeing that all other ones I had played were kind of lose and eventually felt like a grind and time sink. This game was going to give me a close to story experience that was only found in single player rpgs.

Then I began to lvl multiple toons. The newness faded. And some bugs stood out continuously. Granted more and more were fixed in a timely manner. But I was always running into more and more game halting bugs throughout the world.

Ok I understand this is an mmo. Big world and just released. There will be problems.

Then the real unfortunate thing happened. Bugs in my personal story mission preventing me from lvling. So I had to play the actual environment.

The higher lvl zones feel like and after thought. Run back to my lower lvl toons to see if everything has gone terribly wrong. No just the areas that were never included in the beta weekends.

The lvl 1-30 zones are fleshed out with a worlds personality, fun quests, and events that lead you through almost every zone. They are a blast even now. Just don’t plan on doing any events because they are becoming ghost towns.

The game needs serious work. It should have been delayed for maybe 8 months to a year. This would have given the devs time to make the later lvl areas much more engaging. Given them the time to create end game content that would not piss off most of the fan base. Or come to late while others jumped back to whatever they were playing before.

Right now I would say that the game starts out so promising. The more involved you get the more it becomes a grinding chore.

And no I have not gotten to lvl 80 yet. (If that is a prerequisite for this community to allow me an opinion, I will jump right on that.) But after watching friends and my girlfriend run through Orr. I really see no need to continue. The zone looks like a horde mode exploded across the zone .

Shouldn’t this be exciting seeing as it is the final conflict area?

In short the game holds major promise. But it needs some serious work. There does not seem to be any thought of end game content and this is an mmo. And yes running the same dungeon over and over explorer mode or not gets old.

Candlejack was pointing out the obvious. This game is falling apart. The new content just added more problems to something that was already broken.

And seeing we are all paying customers. We should not have to settle for a half finely tuned game.

I never got into WoW…

But I played FFXIV when it first came out – the whole rebirth it’s going through now hasn’t done jack to fix any of the problems. So if you wanna reset your characters feel free, no reason to completely disrupt the game that other people are enjoying perfectly fine.

Reboots are for games that failed once, if it failed once how is it not going to fail again. You obviously just need to move onto another game if you think this one needs a rebirth. And don’t suggest that they just do what the customers want because the customers can’t agree – and they never will.

CandIeJack.9352:

The customer is always right. A very well known and common phrase, helps us understand what is going on here.

ArenaNet isn’t our parents that ‘know what is best for us’. We are grown men and women that know what our favorite foods are, work 40+ hour weeks, and pick out and put on our clothes every morning.

Actually the sad thing is a lot of players was asking for progression, for tiers and gear-treadmills. ArenaNet did exactly what you’re claiming they’re not doing and listened to those people. I don’t like it mind you and in part agree with you, but I have to point out that you’re making a rather large mistake here in considering your opinion to reflect the entire playerbase.

CandIeJack.9352:

The customer is always right.

I stopped reading here. If you’ve ever had any customer service experience you realise that the customer is always wrong and is often a jerk about it (not saying you are of course). The person who made up that phrase was a customer haha.
I understand what you really meant by it though but far too many people have the mindset of, ‘I paid money for this game! I demand that everything about it work the way I want it to!!!!’.

A lot of people need to realise that there WILL be bugs!!! Yes, they have fixed a lot of bugs already and they are no doubt working on existing bugs. People have gotta stop spitting the dummy because they didn’t fix the bug they wanted them to. I’m a programmer, sometimes big bugs take a long time to fix! Simply saying, “But I threw my money at you” isn’t going to make them go away faster. The best option is patience along with feedback.
In the meantime, you have this game forever now, if you don’t like it, take a break, try something else for a while or simply try something new in the game. Like roll a scepter Guardian! …..ok that was a joke, why would you ever do that?

Silver.8023:

I stopped reading here. If you’ve ever had any customer service experience you realise that the customer is always wrong and is often a jerk about it (not saying you are of course).

As someone who was only out ranked in customer service by regional distributors and corporate office employees I can safely say that this is totally false.

As a company you’re trying to please the customer because all those fancy ads don’t do half as good as simple word of mouth, regardless if the customer is right or wrong (in most cases the customer is right, it’s just the ones that are wrong that stick in our heads due to human nature) you need to empathize and assist them in order to maintain your companies reputation and thus further your product through word of mouth.

CandIeJack.9352:

Please fix the game. One idea would be for dungeons to produce worthwhile rewards, update world v world to do the same, and stop the new back items from having the steep cost of 250 t6 mat, 300 ectos.

You could simply write “Gimme more gold and make stuff cheaper” instead of writing this extremely long post.

kitteno: I dont think, that is what he want.

Fractaltokens, dungeontokens, mats, theses stuff is actually needed for many things in GW2, but the ways to get it is mostly boring and needs some time…

I am absolutly OK with some work for my rewards, but this ingame-work should be fun. Doing it over and over again is no fun.

Also, of course you get gear very easy in GW2 compared to most other games, you can even only play what you want and get gold and mats over time to buy/craft the gear… Whatever, to get enough gold/mats for a complete max gear needs a bit too much time for many players. It is no motivation, if there are many really active players with max gear and you can only say to yourself, “in a year i should also have max gear”…

Furthermore, you can get tokens fast and even dungeonskins are easy to get compared to other games, but obviously you have to do a dungeon over and over again and Anet said, there is no grinding/farming in GW2 needed… Many players feel betrayed…

I loved it in GW1… There were many players running around in prestige armor and with rare weapons, whatever, these were only skin. It may is a nice feeling to get your first prestige, but you had already the same good stats without it.

I personally have GREAT faith in Anet. And so should you.
This game is already awesome, there is still so much to enjoy.

Sometimes I just go to some beautiful location in the game and just relax and walk around the streets. It’s probably the only game that offered me such great pleasure and joy.

And there is so much more to come

I see that no matter what you post, the vocal community says the opposite. For example, if I posted about how much I love fractals, you would all say what I said.

To correct some of the less thoughtful statements, no I don’t want gold handouts, I said it was a common expression not a fact of life, rebirth was more of a metaphor than anything, why would I want to not be level 80 with nearly maxed out gear?

The bugs size and problem DOES NOT matter. If Armored Core had a bug where you couldn’t move, and it took a week to find and fix it, they would find and fix it because it’s a SERIOUS issue. If everyone showed up as pink and translucent, I would laugh so hard, and then it would be fixed, because it’s a bug that needs to be fixed.

The Asura ear gigantism bug was around for hours, and it got fixed. Things that are wrong need to be fixed.

Yes I know that content creation is the the same as bug fixing, but leadership tends to push employees into doing what they find as to being the priority. However, that being said, that’s a trend. I don’t actually work at ANet or anything, so I don’t know what the issue is, but somebody there does, and I hope they speak up.

When reading most of these posts that involve calling out Arenanet on making some changes, I could not stop thinking what kind of spoiled children we have become. Arenanet gives us a beautiful game with amazing textures, a great backstory, fun and interesting tasks, map-events, honest sPvP where gear is of no matter, WvW where we can all participate and much, much more. Now that the developers of Arenanet were brave enough to take a further step and give you all MORE CONTENT and something more to strive to, you bash it into the ground and instantly call the game dead. You should all be happy that you have something to fight and work for, things would get mindlessly boring. Arenanet only tried to give the yelling costumer what they want, but it seems they cannot do everything right for everyone.

It saddens me that some minor changes in a game that is still top-notch quality, is thanked with a big bag of whining poop. If you all know it that much better, make your own kitten game.

Yours sincerely,
A thankful adult.

CandIeJack.9352:

The bugs size and problem DOES NOT matter. If Armored Core had a bug where you couldn’t move, and it took a week to find and fix it, they would find and fix it because it’s a SERIOUS issue. If everyone showed up as pink and translucent, I would laugh so hard, and then it would be fixed, because it’s a bug that needs to be fixed.

The Asura ear gigantism bug was around for hours, and it got fixed. Things that are wrong need to be fixed.

I agree on this. But the point is how can you fix something when you don’t know what the problem is (code-wise)?

Anyone with a working knowledge of programming knows that it could be anything, ranging from the code isn’t up to the task, to a spelling error. And while debugging tools help, ultimately it’s up to the programmer to find and fix the problem without affecting any other part of the code.

It really isn’t as simple as saying ’there’s a bug, it needs fixing’. If you got a major bug that you have no clue of solving, but 10 smaller that you can, which ones are you going to work on?

CandIeJack.9352:

Yes I know that content creation is the the same as bug fixing, but leadership tends to push employees into doing what they find as to being the priority. However, that being said, that’s a trend. I don’t actually work at ANet or anything, so I don’t know what the issue is, but somebody there does, and I hope they speak up.

Content Creators =/= Bug Fixers

The people who create the content aren’t necessarily programmers, so how are they supposed to fix the bugs?

A lot of the resources created are created through tools developed by the programmers. So while the content creators know how to use the tools, they don’t necessarily know the inner workings, therefore they can’t fix bugs.

@Babelfish – At the risk of derailing the thread a little, I agree that a company’s best interests are to keep their customers happy. This doesn’t actually mean the customer IS right though as you said yourself
I’m just having a little fun anyway, I’m playing off the literal meaning of the sentence rather than the implied meaning.

I cannot agree with you more. I am also slowly watching this game die, and I’ve been ‘suffering’(if you can say that) the consequences of this new content. It is so hard to form for dungeons, I’ve sat for hours trying to find players just for TA, CoE, CoF, etc. I don’t want to do FoTM, I don’t want to get this ascended gear because it’s the complete opposite to what they originally wanted to make. Guild Wars 1 was not such a great game for no reason. Yet they decided to remove the best aspects of the game, and they have now decided to ruin it more by this extremely bad thought through update.

I think for me now, it’s going towards the end. And I’m thinking I will maybe come back when or IF this all gets fixed. They decided to introduce the gear treadmill, and that was something I started playing the game for because they said they WEREN’T going to be one of those games.

I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future but if it keeps going this way, well, then I’m out. It was fun while it lasted.

I personally have GREAT faith in Anet. And so should you.
This game is already awesome, there is still so much to enjoy.
Sometimes I just go to some beautiful location in the game and just relax and walk around the streets. It’s probably the only game that offered me such great pleasure and joy.
And there is so much more to come.

We are what 3 months into the game, we have had 2 large content updates, we have alot of evolving systems that people enjoy, and things are getting steadily ironed out. I’m pretty happy to play the game, and I say keep up the goodwork, every game has niggling issues but GW team have a pretty good track record for ironing out bugs and issues. If you want to just spend your time griping about the small issues instead of enjoying the game frankly thats your loss.

Soulstar.7812:

Log off, go play WoW or FFXIV…

After you see those messes, then come back and complain.

XIV is right in the middle of a rebirth actually.

@Sernius – I’m pretty sure you clicked the wrong quote there! They’re basically saying exactly what you just did!

I think all the naysayers running around claiming that a three month old game, who’s developers have already shown that they listen to feedback and a willing to try new things and/or change others, is dying are completely over-reacting.

Hermes.7014:

Soulstar.7812:

Log off, go play WoW or FFXIV…

After you see those messes, then come back and complain.

XIV is right in the middle of a rebirth actually.

They should have aborted… just sayin’