Guild Wars 2

Recently, there was a post on reddit.com/guildwars2 that expressed a lot of what I’m currently feeling about the game. It stayed on the front page for a bit and generated a fair amount of discussion. It’s largely criticism of the game, but also largely polite and thoughtful. And, while it’s a small sample size compared to the total population, I believe it resonates with what many players have been saying there, here, and in-game. I hope that players and Anet employees will read it, with an open mind, and not dismiss it out of hand for being criticism. Please remember to keep any discussion civil and thoughtful!

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1orl7x/i_am_becoming_progressively_more_disappointed_in/

I agree with most, if not all, of what he said. He did leave some very important aspects out which I think need to be addressed though.

Rewards is one of them. I feel absolutely no joy at completing a 3 hour-long event because all I get at the end is one ugly backpiece or a minipet that I will never click on. Rewards were screwed up big time, and it was made worse because all Anet did was add more mediocre rewards. It’s not the quantity of rewards that people want. It’s quality.

More, better looking armor is another aspect. I can’t even describe my feelings when I first bought the game after it had been out for 3 months, logged in, checked the TP, and saw such a limited amount of armor. I realize that it was only 3 months in, but it has now been nearly a year and still almost no armor has been added. Ascended armor is coming, but it literally looks like something my kid would draw at school with crayons.

Everything else he says is spot-on.

Seems to sum up most of the criticisms of the game nicely. People can scream about how the grind is “optional” until they are blue in the face, but the fact is if you aren’t busy grinding for something then you probably aren’t playing the game. There is very little actual content to play, just HUGE time and gold sinks everywhere.

We need less frequent updates with more substantial content.

I just finished reading the reddit post and this is exactly why I have been distancing myself from GW2 for the last 2 months.

Quotes I liked the most:

“Classes seem to be balanced around PvP, which almost no one plays, leading to issues in PvE and WvW. And some seem to be favored by the dev team, like warrior, while in a recent talk they couldn’t even find a ranger minor trait that many people run and which hasn’t moved since launch. Engineer has many bugs from launch which are still unfixed. In GW1, I played a ranger, a monk, and a mesmer, and each class felt like it had a unique and important role to play in both PvE and PvP. And the builds for each were so much more varied; there were many more possibilities for how to play each class.”

“Every balance update seems to introduce more bugs than it fixes. The improved tool-tips from the latest patch look very good, but they contain so many inconsistencies and inaccuracies that I think I would have preferred those resources go to fixing existing bugs. We’ve been promised a major re-working of trait lines that has yet to happen. For a game that promises you can play how you want, most (or all) classes are pigeon-holed into a small number of builds/roles at more skilled levels of play.”

“Communication with the community is abysmal. Anet keeps its people on a very tight leash. They do not interact much with the community on the forums or anywhere, and when they do, it’s usually in the form of canned, sanitized responses. There is much ambiguity and very little honesty. They frequently announce changes which garner a large negative reaction and implement them anyway, without discussion or modification.”

ANet your game is in crisis, I hope you all know that.

I’m new here, and I’m a little disappointed that my post was moved from “General GW2 Discussion” to here. I thought it was appropriate to post it where I did. If I had simply copied and pasted the text of it, rather than linking to the discussion also, would it have been acceptable? Is this an attempt by the moderator to bury criticism? I don’t get it.

Jonn, don’t worry about They move all post with links to linksville or the gutterville.