Guild Wars 2

Hi there everyone, I would like to use this thread to point out my concern of the way this game is evolving. I would like to do this by looking back at the updates we’ve had since launch, divided into 3 years: from launch till August 2013, September 2013-August 2014 and September 2014-now. I will only state the major things, for those who want to read the precise information: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Release
A click on the date of the release or the name of the release should bring you to the notes. Be warned however: this post contains over 6000 words and 30.000 signs so if you plan on reading it, take your time, I’ll try not to waste it by giving my sincere opinion and alternatives. Know that I have spent way more time into writing all of this than you need to read it xD
Ps for the first readers: give me some time since I’ll need to copypaste it into around 9 posts.

In year one: there were 16 releases, of which the first one at the end of the second month which was a good thing because players had to get used to the game first and some minor issues needed to be fixed. Anyhow, keep In mind the 16 releases in 10 months.

• 1 – 22/10 – Shadow of the Mad King (116 AP): H’ween event with the haunted doors, labyrinth, reaper’s rumble, lunatic inquisition and the clocktower. Added costume brawl, skritt burglars and some jp’s + mini-dungeons along with achievements and the “bosses-category”. Adding karma reward to daily + monthly.

• 2 – 15/11 – The Lost Shores: Southsun Cove has been added along with Fractals, the first ascended rings and backs and a new Pvp-map. Big ending with the Legendary Karka event which was a good concept but the servers couldn’t handle it and left a lot of people with empty hands. Daily and monthly pvp added.

• 3 – 14/12 – Wintersday (165 AP): Christmas event with snowball mayhem, bell choir, toypocalypse, infinerarium and winter wonderland.

• 4 – 28/01 – Flame and Frost: Prelude (147 AP): beginning of the flame and frost arc, ascended amulets. Changes of Orr events and, again, a change of the dailies.

• 5 – 26/02 – Flame and Frost: The Gathering Storm: ascended accessories, added spirit watch to Pvp, major overhaul of AC endboss fights + minor tweaks for other dungeons. Added guild missions. Yet again: change of dailies.

• 6 – 26/03 – Flame and Frost: The Razing: Wvw overhaul: titles, passive abilities and achievements.

• 7 – 01/04 – Super Adventure Box (106 AP): old school platform game with new skins.

• 8 – 30/04 – Flame and Frost: Retribution: molten facility and custom arena’s.

• 9 – 14/05 – The Secret of Southsun (235 AP): new minigame and rare mini’s to farm for

• 10 – 28/05 – Last Stand at Southsun: introduction of the Karka Queen. New Wvw dailies.

• 11 – 11/06 – Dragon Bash (195 AP): dragon ball and moa racing.

• 12 – 25/06 – Sky Pirates of Tyria (193 AP): story dungeon, not so secret jumping puzzle and new condition: Torment as well as AoE looting.

• 13 – 9/07 – Bazaar of the Four Winds (255 AP): New zone, new activity: belcher’s bluff and sanctum sprint, new stat combo: celestial. Added rewards for every 500 account wide AP.

• 14 – 23/07 – Cutthroat Politics (200 AP): Aspect Arena + Southsun Survival, candidate trials (Ellen vs Evon) where players have a direct vote in upcoming content.

• 15 – 06/08 – Queen’s Jubilee (174 + 220 AP): Crown Pavilion, Queen’s Gauntlet and a Wallet for dungeon tokens and other currencies. Unique 1v1 arena-style fights with the gauntlets and gambits to push yourself as much as you like.

• 16 – 20/08 – Clockwork Chaos (195 + 10 AP): reinstated use of karma boosters on karma containers for a limited time since the removed usage caused some havoc. Clockwork invasion.

Y1 revision: During this first year, every release came along with tweaks to skills and traits which were frequently updated to clear out some bugs or unintended effects. All in all: a fantastic year with loads of new content, even on a 2-weekly basis since March. A constantly evolving game and 2211 AP that could have been gathered by temporary content. I, and I think a lot of others, had the feeling that there was always something to do, whether there were new areas, new mini-games to farm some achievements or some special loot to farm for, you just couldn’t be bored during this year.

Onto year 2 which had 19 releases spread over 12 months.

• 1 – 03/09 – Super Adventure Box Back to School (96 + 260 AP): added a new world and a tribulation mode, magic find is no longer an equipment stat but an account bonus. Introduction of ascended weapons.

• 2 – 17/09 – Tequatl Rising (65 AP): Complete overhaul from tequatl event with increased rewards. Made one of the 3 dragon-events worthy to be called a dragon. Probably still the most all-round rewarding event with around 15k karma, numerous event completions for exp and about 25 loot-pieces, all for a 15min event. Used to be a challenge before april ’14 but more on that matter later on. LFG-tool added to the game.

• 3 – 01/10 – Twilight Assault (25 AP): the fw/up path got replaced by Aetherpath. Pretty much the first thing which, in my eyes, was quite odd. Every dungeon has 3 easily completable paths so why change that for a dungeon which, along with AC, CM and SE, is vital for new players to experience dungeon mechanics? New players which aren’t 80 yet and play with fine/masterwork gear will leave this path laying aside. Would have been better to add Aetherpath next to the existing 3 paths (and add such a path to the other dungeons as well in the future). No influence on new players trying to get the hang of things and assembling tokens for their gear and an extra challenge for veteran players.

• 4 – 15/10 – Blood and Madness (107 + 405 AP): H’ween comes back with the events of the previous year. Start of Wvw Season 1 running till 6/12.

• 5 – 29/10 – Tower of Nightmares (76 AP): Kessix Hills became hostile territory.

• 6 – 12/11 – The Nightmares Within (68 AP): Able to enter the tower and fight your way to the top.

• 7 – 26/11 – Fractured (95 AP): Added 5 new fractals. Boss fractals now appear in every fractal run instead of just in the even numbered ones.

• 8 – 10/12 – A Very Merry Wintersday (194 + 57 AP): Wintersday is back in town with its known events. Conclusion of the fights at Kessex Hills.

• 9 – 21/01 – The Origins of Madness (135 AP): temporary boss fight (Marionette) and temporary added world boss (three-headed wurm). They clearly wanted to start the new year with a bang with 2 new fights that required coordination from the community to complete them. Just as with tequatl: you could see the servers competing against eachother to get the kill. However, compared to tequatl, the wurm lacks in rewards: no noteworthy karma gain, not many separate events and about equal amount of items but takes about twice the duration of tequatl to kill and much more coordination. Marionette was probably one of the most fun encounters. Got sort of reinstated with Vinewrath but lacks the little group fights in the end which are more zerg-like in Vinewrath. Since it’s lanes are still on the map of Lornar’s Pass, it ‘d be nice to find a way to bring Marionette back to life, even though Scarlet is gone, maybe it’s learned to function on its own…? :-)

• 10 – 04/02 – The Edge of the Mists (40 AP): introduced as some kind of waiting room for Wvw, which was a good thing. However, what was intended to be a waiting room, is now used to farm experience with low lvl characters along with karma and champion loot boxes and lots of Wvw exp. Could use an overhaul to be less rewarding since the map isn’t used anymore as how it’s intended. Zergs are avoiding eachother on purpose to maximize loot/exp gain while a waiting map for Wvw is supposed to promote fighting one another.

• 11 – 18/02 – Escape from Lion’s Arch (109 AP): invasion of Scarlet

• 12 – 04/03 – Battle for Lion’s Arch (102 AP): another nice boss event which required coordination from everyone involved.

• 13 – 18/03 – Battle for Lion’s Arch: Aftermath (300 AP): Lion’s Arch remained as a wreckage and WvW spring season started 28/03. (fyi: when is the contested waypoint at Lion’s Arch going to become uncontested again? You might as well remove it from the game…)

• 14 – 15/04 – April 2014 Feature Pack: Remember I said I’d get back to April ’14 a bit ago? Well, here it is. It pretty much marks the end of an Era. Between 26/03/2013 and 18/03/2014, we’ve had pretty decent, if not wonderful, updates every fortnight. The feature pack broke that rhythm and to my concern, they’ve never picked up where they left off, or when they did, it was just temporarily but I’ll get back to that in my revision of Y1-Y2-Y3. I’ll handle the biggest changes one by one now.

Traits: changing the 30 point system to 6, ok, nothing big so far. 40 new grandmaster traits? Ok, might turn around a few things here and there. New rate of obtaining traits and change of tier unlocks (not by manuals anymore): that’s where things are starting to show a bad influence.

New system: adept unlocks at 30, master at 60 and grandmaster at 80. Trait points per lvl: 30/1, 36/2, 42/3, 48/4, 54/5, 60/6, 66/8, 72/10, 78/12 and 80/14. Which means you cannot use a grandmaster trait until you’ve reached max lvl and you reach half of the possible traits at lvl 66.

Old system: adept unlock at 11, master at 40 and grandmaster at 60. Trait points were award 1/lvl starting from lvl 11. To keep things clear, I’ll already convert the 30 trait system to the 6 trait system to be able to compare. Traits per lvl: 15/1, 20/2, 25/3, 30/4, 35/5, 40/6, 45/7, 50/8, 55/9, 60/10, 65/11, 70/12, 75/13 and 80/14. In this system, you could already use grandmaster traits at lvl 60 and you reached half of the possible traits at lvl 45.

What does this mean? It means that you throw away build diversity and the ability to try out different things while you’re lvling since you can’t use your most vital grandmaster traits and you just lack trait points in general because they are awarded at the end of your lvling curve. This also means that low lvls, newer players, are even less wanted in dungeons than they already were. Why? Because they can’t make a decent build, even if they’d want to and know how to do it: they just can’t because of the system.

Maybe this would still be open for a debate, but the last trait change isn’t: EVERY single trait was locked behind a ridiculous challenge. How on earth do you want NEW people to try out different traits if everything is locked away and they have to complete the uttermost annoying things to unlock them or spend their precious first money to unlock them along with the skillpoints they need to unlock their utilities? All in all, I don’t think this was thought through very well and it seems that with the complete trait-overhaul, you guys finally figured that out what I’ve been saying in my guild chat for the past year. It was just plain stupidity. I’m confident that the new system will be better, please don’t make me regret that confidence in the future.

Ferocity as a new attribute to influence Crit Dmg, celestial stat increase and rune/sigil changes along with some minor skill and trait changes: good changes. Account wide dye unlocks, good as well, legendary and ascended weapons/armor become account-bound instead of soul-bound: good change as well, the wardrobe system? Hmm, it would have been better to introduce the wardrobe for common armor only and leave out the weapons that require the mystic forge to be obtained. In my eyes, the wardrobe devaluated the skins that are harder to earn. I’ll pick myself as an example here: when I made my bifrost, my ele was my main. However, I used my necro to command World Bosses and I also liked playing my mesmer at the time. Guard was out of the question since I didn’t really use staff there. In the end, I’ve put it on my ele and choosing which char to give it to was part of the fun. Today, I can just put it on all 4 of them, even the guard that I would’ve never considered. Since everyone can, a legendary is as common as any other exotic weapon, which I think, is a shame and should not have been allowed, making them account-bound would have been enough (and the mystic forge exotics soulbound). (fyi, I don’t just copypaste them on all my chars for what it’s worth, even though I have 500+ transmutation charges :-) )

Another change made to daily an monthly achievements which added with their Pvp-counterparts, at that time, they were already changed numerous times and I wondered when they’d finally find a system and stick with it.

Nonetheless, the worst update from the entire feature pack, and then I speak about veteran players since for new players the trait-one is probably the worst one, was the megaserver system along with world boss changes and I’m deliberately mentioning these two together since you can’t talk about one of them without mentioning the other.

First of all: is the megaserver bad? Well, as much as I hate to say it, it isn’t, but there’s an “if”. It’s a good concept IF (yes, here’s the if) it would have been a separate system next to the, at that time, existing system of home servers. “How?” you might ask? By implementing a button somewhere in your login screen or on top of the server list where you could choose to play on the megaserver or on your home server. By forcing the megaserver on everyone, the existence of home worlds has been rendered pointless, it only matters for Wvw, which is completely screwed since the free transfers to certain worlds. The active Wvw community from the lower servers all transferred to the high ones that were free to transfer to which made the difference between servers way too big, but that on a side-note. Fact is that worlds used to compete against eachother, even for PvE content that required coordination. Now, they can’t anymore. You can’t obtain any “glory” anymore as a server which is a nice aspect that’s been thrown away. Besides that, there’s the world boss issue. The old system, with variable timers and server specific, caused people to encounter the bosses by chance or in smaller groups, which made the fights more attractive and, often, with a certain degree of difficulty. Today, megaservers already throw people together and stow them onto full maps, and on top of that, the bosses have a fixed timer so everyone concentrates on that point which renders the fights completely useless. Instead of 15 people fighting a boss, you have 100+ players fighting it while there weren’t any particular changes to keep the fights interesting. Some people might like it, because they can just afk, watch a movie or a series online, auto-attack when the boss is up, pick up the loot and go to the next one, but shouldn’t a game keep the fight interesting, giving you that urge to compete in it? I used to command world bosses from 10am-noon before megaserver and we chained everything, from temples to minor bosses like maw to the major ones like jormag and that on Underworld, pretty much the crappiest server there was at that time. So it’s not like the fights were too difficult, if we managed to do it at that hour on that server, anyone could. And besides that, would it be so bad to fail a world boss every now and then? That’s why they’re called “world bosses” right? Cause they should be challenging. Well, since April ’14, none of them is challenging anymore, the only exception being Three-headed wurm. I’m deliberately leaving out Tequatl since it’s no challenge anymore either, you can join a map 5mins before and still be 100% sure of the kill if you’re not too lazy to tag up yourself. It used to be challenging but there hasn’t been any follow-up on it. Decrease the timer by 5 mins and you’ll have a challenging fight again.

Another thing to keep both player bases satisfied (the afk’ers and the ones who like a challenge), is again, to reinstate home worlds next to megaserver with the option to choose on which one you’d like to play. Megaserver stays on the current system, new players or lazy people can use that to pick up their loot or get used to the bosses. Home Worlds with the old system of variable windows, so the PvE commanders can come back to life and have some challenging fights with people who like to do more than just press on that auto-attack. I could also state how stupid the fixed windows are (like bosses from xx:30 that last too long and make you miss the boss at xx:45 and bosses at xx:15 taking just 5mins, leaving 10mins of emptiness until the next boss at xx:30 but I think that’s an obvious and known fact already.

Anyway, enough about the April ’14 Feature Pack I guess, after a year of 1 update every 2 weeks, there weren’t any during the month before so they’ll pick up again where they left of right..? Well, sadly: no…

• 15 – 20/05 – Festival of the Four Winds (116 AP): Crown Pavilion and the Queen’s Gauntlet came back for a bit. Same (popular) content from the year before after a month without new content.

• 16 – 01/07 – Gates of Maguuma (38 AP): Introduction of Dry Top (Prospect Valley), start of LS 2. Yet again, after a month of releasing zero new content.

• 17 – 15/07 – Entanglement (50 AP): Ambrite weapons + new Dry Top areas.

• 18 – 29/07 – The Dragon’s Reach: part 1 (65 AP): mysterious vine and, noteworthy: a fix to AC p2 stalling issues. Well, today we’re about 9 months further and it still bugs out A LOT. Even p1 and p3 still bug sometimes. If you’d give me a chance to double 100g to 200g if I bet that I won’t have a bugged AC path during next week, there’s no chance in hell that I’d do it since there’ll definitely be one that bugs out, without a doubt. It is the first dungeon available to players and it’s the crappiest one of them all in terms of bugs: fix it, really.

• 19 – 12/08 – The Dragon’s Reach: part 2 (105 AP): new Dry Top area + Mawdrey, finally some use for all the bloodstone dust you get.

Y2 revision: year two continued by following the path where year one left of, updates every two weeks and always something to aim for. In January, we got a blast of overwhelming things to do with Marionette and the new three-headed wurm which united the community. A few months after that, we had the battle for Lion’s Arch which, again, required coordination from everyone on the map. However, once Scarlet has been defeated, it seemed like there wasn’t any follow-up on it. The April Feature pack certainly had some good ideas or intentions behind it but in my eyes, a lot of them weren’t thought through very well and seemed a bit rash. But also after the feature pack, the only update in two months in a half was Crown Pavilion and the Gauntlets. It’s great content, not going to doubt that, I love the gauntlets as well, but with all respect: it wasn’t new content, it was already existing temporary content. They finally seemed to pick up the rhythm again with the start of LS 2 but the 4 updates of July and August weren’t that great at all. Yes we got new areas, but is the map that interesting? Now it is for those who want to get a slot in the beta but without that, it’s not that great. The stories were very short as well and to me, it felt like 1 good update was cut into 4 minor ones. Oh, and the achievements system is totally rubbish. Having to complete the story once to unlock them and then putting in achievements that are contradictory towards eachother so you have to do the stories another 2 times (that is if you don’t fail them) is just… well, I was going to say “lame” but that word isn’t even strong enough. It is like you are saying “yes, we know that we lack new content, so go on and do it over a few times to keep yourself occupied”. AP wise, there were 2508 AP to be earned by temporary releases compared to 2211 in the first year. A small side-note to that is that 705 of those 2508 AP were earned in WvW season 1 and 2. Are we going to count temporary WvW achievements towards the AP earned by living story? It doesn’t feel like we should but I’m not sure either, anyway, without them, it would be 1803 AP. So a little more with the WvW achievements added, a little less without them. No biggy I guess.

Let’s get Year 3 rollin’

• 1 – 9/9 – September 2014 Feature Pack (9 AP): hey wait, didn’t we just have one in April? And wait, we didn’t have any content updates again for a month? What’s going on? Well, they added collections, changed a bunch of skills (which they used to do just during the regular releases), oh they unified guild chapters from different servers into one (actually a good update, cheers). Trading Post overhaul has been a good update as well. Commander tags from 100g to 300g and making them account-bound instead of soul-bound? Good. Rolling everyone who already has a tag into the new system? Very very very (at a few more very’s) bad. Especially the part of announcing that everyone will be grandfathered into the system. Because what is going to happen if a lot of people are in doubt of buying something and you announce that you’ll triple the price next month? All of them are quickly going to buy one ofcourse. Result: even the most annoying selfish players have a tag, and not on just one of their characters, no, on ALL of them. Instead of just adding the colours, why not link certain things to it?

Just going to brainstorm here: people with WvW rank 250 unlock the ability to buy a blue tag, rank 500 unlocks red, rank 750 green and rank 1500 black. Every colour is 100g and you have to buy the previous one to be able to buy the next. Account-bound, not useable outside WvW. Yellow tag: Guild upgrade that unlocks a yellow tag. Add a checkbox with the guild ranks to allow certain ranks to use it. Useable in PvE and WvW. No gold fee but let’s say it takes 250 merits and 500k influence to unlock it. For PvE, you could use the same colours as WvW or others, whatever, but you use the same principle: account-bound, have to possess the previous to be able to buy the next and most importantly: add a condition of skill. First colour: must have slain 1000 world bosses (and let’s say opening temples counts as well), second colour: 2000, third colour: 3000, fourth colour: 5000. That way, people with tags would know what they’re doing, guilds would have a tag to distinguish themselves from regular commanders and if you’d want the 2 last tags, it’d be 800g so you probably won’t by them for your selfish ego but only if you want to help the community. People would also know that you “sacrificed” quite a bit and have experience in what you’re doing so they’ll probably think twice before they start kittening around.

Anyway, the other big thing about the September Pack was ofcourse the new reward system for lvling, even though most rewards are pretty useless, I guess it might be fun to get a reward every time you get a lvl. But locking away weapon skills, utilities, secondary weapons etc.. Really? What’s the point of forcing a way of how to do something onto everyone? Not everyone is the same so just give everything that’s available and let people experience it on their own pace, there’s nothing wrong with that is it? It’s by doing and trying something that you learn it, by locking away skills and other stuff, you just postpone the learning curve. Felt a flashback there? So did I, same mistake as with the traits in April ’14 Pack. On a side-note: you also cause veteran players to stay away from those lower areas because they will now use a lvl 20 scroll and some tomes (of which you get kittenloads in PvP anyway) so they’re around lvl 40 and don’t have all to worry about all the lock-out crap. On a side-note of the side-note: remove those lvl tomes from PvP rewards, I’m not even a regular PvP’er and I have around 300 tomes banked and it’s not like I don’t use them, got 24 lvl 80 characters…

Anyhow, on 12/9, the WvW Fall Tournament kicked off as well and you could earn a stunning… 9 AP, in like… 5 mins? I have to say, the previous two WvW tournaments really got me hooked into WvW, this one didn’t.

• 2 – 21/10 – Blood and Madness (124 AP): after another month and a half with zero content updates, it was time for H’ween which ofcourse, brought along the same content as the previous two years. Oh and right, the market of weapons that required a discontinued h’ween recipe got screwed since recipes for those recipes were introduced. Too bad for those people, sorry guys.

• 3 – 04/11 – Echoes of the Past (75 AP): Silverwastes part 1

• 4 – 18/11 – Tangled Paths (50 AP): SW part 2

• 5 – 02/12 – Seeds of Truth (80 AP): SW part 3 Pvp change, hotjoin/solo queue and team queue become practice/unranked and ranked.

• 6 – 16/12 – A Very Merry Wintersday (203 AP): The known wintersday festivities (Bell Choir ftw!) along with another overhaul of the daily and monthly achievements. Adding rewards to each daily like WvW exp for WvW dailies, ok, not really necessary but it’s nice. Standard amount of AP for completing just a bunch of them? Silly. Removing monthly? Plain stupidity. Introducing daily login rewards: you’re seriously going to use such a low strategy to try and get people login every day? If you would have been worrying about your content like you did until April ’14, you wouldn’t need the worry about them logging in since they’d be hooked onto it.

But seriously, over time, how many times did the daily and monthly reward systems change? I’m not even going to look this part up, just going to state what I recall… PvE and PvP separately, together, first just 5 dailies if I remember correctly? After that maybe 12 or 16, first for a fixed amount of AP (a large amount if I recall correctly), then 1 each. Anyhow: the amount always changed and the according AP as well. The monthlies were never monthlies to begin with, they were just veteran dailies. Why did you never give them an upgrade? Like kill 50 Giants, complete every JP (or like 2 less so the people could leave the 2 most annoying ones out), there’s so much content that people don’t do because it’s not rewarding: put those into the monthly category and add a nice reward to it. Would have been a tenfold better than just removing them. And now the dailies, awarding the full 10 AP for just completing 4 of them. You know that before that, when 1 daily meant 1 AP, a lot of people completed every daily just for that and put quite some effort into that right? Doesn’t that mean anything? How many times are you going to change it in the future? How about the Daily and Monthly caps? People with a long term vision thought “ah well, I’ll cap it out over time”. Now suddenly, the monthly cap is locked away. Why not merging it into the daily one?

• 7 – 13/01 – Point of No Return (85 AP): SW part 4: Vinewrath. I didn’t go into depth of the previous 3 SW updates since just like with Dry Top: they feel like 1 good update that’s been cut into 4 pieces. The stories on the short side as well, though some were quite fun, gotta give you that. By the way to all of you guys with lvl 80’s out there: don’t forget to quickly do the first step of Echoes of the Past if you have 2-3mins while you’re waiting for the next world boss, for example after wurm or maw when you have at least 10mins. Kill the 2 first guards and just run past the other 4. Gives you 3 free ecto’s and sometimes a T6 mat. And if you’re a keyrunner, Tangled Paths can be done in like a solid 30 minutes and give you a key. Might be nice if you have a lvl 80 that you don’t play often anymore and want to play again. Anyway, getting the luminescent set was quite nice. I liked the gathering you needed to do and a little bit of grinding. Vinewrath is fun as well, same mechanic as Marionette which was awesome (and better due to the smaller fights in the end in my opinion) but still, keeping the bastions, defeating the bosses underneath, followed up by Vinewrath is the best content we’ve had the past year. The only thing is: after two days of doing Silverwastes, I had collected everything I needed for my Luminescence set and had nothing left to do there. Where are the molten jetpacks, holographic wings, mini southsun kasmeers and desert roses to farm for?

• No content but noteworthy: 16/03 – First-person view, but more importantly, a patch that has been postponed due to bugs introduced.. (you’ll never guess it..) bugs, loads of them. From a skillpoint in bloodtide coast, to guild chat that didn’t work unless you went invisible and back online, to people getting 31 HoM points for creating a new character and getting a free GWAMM-title. Not to mention the other bugs you’ll find listed on the forum. In the almost 3 years that I’ve been playing GW2, I’ve never encountered so many bugs after an update, I wonder what the damage would have been if it would not have been postponed. Oh right, 1 good thing: the “walking-down-the-stairs-insta-death”-thingy has finally been solved. How long have all of us been dying while just walking down a staircase? I don’t even dare to say it, let’s keep it at “way too long”.

Anyhow, today we’re 01/05 so I’ll conclude Year 3 here.

Y3 revision: In 8 months, we’ve got 7 updates of which one feature pack, 2 holiday events and 4 content updates which are in fact just one: Silverwastes. Total AP to earn: 626 AP. Do I even have to state how crappy Year 3 has been so far, compared to the first two years? How many updates will there be until August? Three or four? Possible AP gain might go from 626 till around 1k? Content-wise and AP-wise, that’s 50% of the other two. In other words: bad, very bad.

So… well, time for a final summary I suppose. I really enjoyed this game during its first two years. There was always something to do, new content kept coming in, there was always something which could keep you occupied, and if it wasn’t the new content, you could try to grind something rare or if you were up for a little challenge you could do some world bosses. Today, there’s no input of new content anymore, none at all. And quite a few of the changes did more harm than good. I haven’t even spoken about dungeons yet, where stacking is the key to everything and berserker is the only armor to wear. This is so easy to solve, there are power caps on tequatl and the three-headed wurm, why not use a low power cap on some dungeon bosses? Make 50% of them immune to critical hits. You could even do something opposite as a power cap, like a toughness cap maybe? Give some bosses an insta-wipe attack for people that are below a certain amount of toughness (dodgeable attack or not, I’ll leave that in the middle). And those dungeon sellers, is it legit, is it not? Get rid of the doubt and implement a lock that requires at least 4 people to pass like the 4 braziers + gate in cof p1 (yes, you only need 4 since a ranger can send its pet to kill the gate controller while he himself remains next to the brazier) or all the CoE paths where you have those 5 thingies to switch off the laser (of which you can do 2 at the same time by standing in the middle of them). If you want to reward people for doing something solo: make a solo path for each dungeon with enhanced rewards. If you want to reward advanced group play, make a longer path for every dungeon just like aetherpath, but then without removing one of the original ones. And by speaking of CoE, why can we still do those 2 controllers by standing in the middle? I doubt that this was intended from the beginning (like let’s make 5 controllers but let’s make sure 1 guy can do those two at the same time, I don’t think so). So why didn’t you update that in the past 3 years and put them further away from eachother? Why is AC still bugging out so much? Why does one of my guilds have over 1500 merits and gets more of them every week? Since you unified guild chapters, we shouldn’t earn any more of them as long as they’re above the cap of 250 but we still do. Yes you might be busy with reworking the traits, yes you might be busy with an expansion which should give you extra money. Does that give you an excuse for the crappy past year? No, definitely not. Get your sh$t back together, you’ve shown in the past what kind of amazing things were possible so get back to those core values.

You know, before I played GW2, I’ve played Runescape for like 8 years. Suddenly out of the blue, they decided to revamp the “PvP-zone” called the Wilderness. People were so shocked by it that they were forced to hold a Poll with the choice to rewind or not. Over 90% of the people voted to rewind, but a lot of the damage had already been done. After that, they wanted to offer better graphics while the old school ones were what made the game so appealing and everybody left. So did I, and I bought Guild Wars 2 when it was released, two months after I quit RS. For the past few months, I’ve been having that same feeling as I had back then, the updates are making things worse instead of better, and more and more people are desperately waiting for new enjoyable content which isn’t coming. Do something about it before it is too late and cherish your playerbase because if you don’t, they’ll leave, just as easy as they came. The only reason people are still hanging in there right now, is because they don’t know what HoT will be bringing. But if the release will be too far away, a lot of people will give up on it, and if HoT isn’t what the remaining players expected of it, those will fade as well. So don’t put all of your luck into HoT, it’s a very big risk, focus on what you’ve accomplished in the first two years, get rid of those bugs that are still in the daily content and give people something to do.

I’ve put quite some hours into writing this so I hope that it at least makes you think about a few things. I don’t know if people who are on these forums share my opinion, but I know that a lot of players on my friends list do, they just don’t want to write it all down since there’s a lot to write about, and all they, and I, want to do is to play. Whether it is GW2 or some other game that’s coming around the corner..

For those who read this until the end, I hope I was able to show you the general path this game has walked so far. Or freshen up what you might have forgotten. If you feel the same way, or not, speak up, cause else nothing is going to change.

I agree with OP on almost everything. They should have maintained same direction as during first year but I guess it wasn’t profitable enough.

My sincere apologies. tl,dr

Best of luck, though. =)

Royal.2693:

I agree with OP on almost everything. They should have maintained same direction as during first year but I guess it wasn’t profitable enough.

But the company was criticised as much as it is now for the its first year, whichw as much a test for them as anything else. That first year was not a popular time for a lot of people and yet is now looked on with fondnes. Personally I enoyed it, but I look back and see how it was lacking in foresight for the future – ie no replayable season1 and a confusing mess of a story we have for new players now which is likely extremely off putting. Something that was warned from many quarters at the time.

I disagree some of the OP’s megaserver comments. Having the home server and megaserver separate options would not be viable and defeat the purpose and we’d have complaints and fights about people unable to get into a home server.. It’s all in or not at all and the gains we’ve got from the existence of the meagserver outweigh the server identity positives.

The example I give in this case it Lotro. Server Gilrain – one of the most well rounded communities developed to the point it became like a large guild rather than a server. Fun, friendly, high community spirit. What happened to it? It got abandoned as players searched for servers with more players. In the end the servers with the least identity became the highest population servers.

Server identity is great, but never for long. It can’t maintain a population. Only people available playing the content can and that’s what the megaservers give us.

[cough]China[/cough]

That was the beginning of the end…

Should look into the sociology of the player base.

In their defense, the last year probably had less content added as they were working and holding onto it for the expansion.

Nice work, evlover. Whether they agree or disagree with the opinions expressed, I think everyone here on the forums would benefit from reading it.

Eponet.4829:

In their defense, the last year probably had less content added as they were working and holding onto it for the expansion.

The expansion isn’t even half done. They are still actually coming up with most of the ideas, so I seriously doubt they have been “holding onto the content”.

@ Randulf, whether megaservers and homeservers could exist next to eachother, I don’t know, I think they could (and use megaserver as the original overflow for homeservers). But even if they can’t, they have to change something because implementing megaserver completely destroyed the world boss mechanics which haven’t been adressed for over a year now (I don’t call buffing the HP/toughness addressing the problem). That’s what I meant by stating that those two issues have to be considered as one. Do the test, go to any world boss (and no, not tri-wurm or teq), press your autoattack once and go get something to drink. When you’re back, you won’t have died and you’ll have your loot, is that a world boss…? :-) Maybe they could expand the guild kickstart thingies to every single world boss so smaller groups could chain all of them if they’d want to, that would be a cheap way out cause well, it wouldn’t fix anything for the large groups, only for the small ones. Then again, they should raise the Guild World Event-token limit and make them cheaper to produce but w/e. There are a lot of possibilities to fix it or do something about it but my point is: they just implemented it without thinking about the consequences, they saw how it destroyed the mechanics (hence the HP/toughness buffs), but they refrained from addressing the core problem. That’s what bothers me, not the megaserver in particular, maybe I could have written that part a bit different. :-)

@ Eponet, I’m going to quote myself: “Yes you might be busy with reworking the traits, yes you might be busy with an expansion which should give you extra money. Does that give you an excuse for the crappy past year? No, definitely not. Get your sh$t back together, you’ve shown in the past what kind of amazing things were possible so get back to those core values.”

Producing an expansion should never ever affect the current game state for even a month, here the issue started like 8 months ago so I doubt the two things are related and if they are: they shouldn’t.

Quite the read, guild master xD but i agree on most of the things. i would love to get some autonomy for the home-servers again.

hijack incoming
And if I may add the mac-difficulties and lack of general support to the list? I know they can’t answer everything but this is ridiculous. I can’t figure out, for the life in me, why they made a client for an other system, if they don’t plan on supporting it and generally keep ignoring it. (it’s a mall player-base but it renders revenue as well).
Bugs on mac took even longer to be addressed then the others. They were painstakingly hard-won battles, trying to get some attention on the forum (only to be dumped again).

I remember the first year being pretty underwhelming. Temporary everything except Southsun, which was terribly boring and empty. I’d rather wait longer for good content than get some gimmick every 2 weeks.

evlover.6270:

So… well, time for a final summary I suppose. I really enjoyed this game during its first two years. There was always something to do, new content kept coming in, there was always something which could keep you occupied,

Thats why i’m still one of the few that prefer LS1 very much over LS2.

Yeah it was temporary .. but when it ended you also were mostly sick of it and
something new was coming. Now LS2 .. its not temporary, but i have no interest
to play those solo instances with annoying endless mob fights that drop no loot
more than once .. not even for the achievements.

So in the end for me its even worse than temporary .. only that Silver Wastes is
a little better as a new zone than Karka Isle was.
Dry Top .. i think i spent there less time then in the Battle of Lions Arch.

Eh… I’ve had issues with the game’s story from the start (Things seemed far more interesting pre-release), and LS S1’s quality did nothing to correct that. At least the earlier parts that is; I was so disinterested in it (and the concept of temporary achievements) that I left the game for a year.

I remember during the first Flame and Frost bit when there was supposed to be all this devastation, yet… everything in the world (even in the relevant zones) carried on like nothing happened. You had a few refugees walking by and some annoying/repetitive portal events, but 3 feet over, you’d have a Norn lodge going about its business with no reference to the supposed problems.

But anyway… Coming back and doing LW S2, I can say that it at least feels more relevant to Tyria at large, even if I do still have issues with some of the writing (and I’m not too keen on the whole Mordremoth aspect being a thing as it stands). And while I hate the style of Silverwastes and Dry Top (was fun for about a week), the zones at least have a better design to them than Southsun.

So, while I’m not going to say I love the direction things have gone since, I do feel a lot of the additions since S1 have improved.

It’s truly laughable. Announce an expansion, realease nothing new for the next 4 months and hope that players will still play the game, because of hype they did. During those 4 months release new info rarely (I think there was a month of nothing new and then recaps of what everyone read 100 times).

I can only thank ANet for killing guilds this way, because I doubt there are guilds who did not see any changes in their members activity. It’s also funny that I’m actually playing for the whole week 2-3x times less then I’ve played in a one day back in 2013 and sometimes in 2014.

This was a pretty good read, and while I agree strongly with some points, I disagree with others. For example: I like regular content, I’ll agree that would be nice. However, when that content could be the infamous “fix signs for two weeks, while crowd-control spamming enemies spawn in starter zones” – I’ll pass on it. The Living Story Season 1 updates were plentiful, but were temporary and often poorly done – mechanics-wise and plot-wise. While Season 2 is much further spread apart, and still has its flaws, it’s definitely an improvement in my eyes.

Now, for the non-living world updates: I’m in almost complete agreement. Feature packs have nearly killed the game for me, mostly because they did so for my friends. I won’t go into specific details, since those have all been covered.

For me, personally, I’d like to see the Living Story cover side-plots, uncovering the rest of Tyria. One team could work on this, providing small, frequent, permanent updates to the game. Not giant zerging loot fests, not a new map every fortnight, but also not just fixing signs, etc. Expansions could cover things like Cantha, Elona, going underground with the dwarves, etc. I find it hard to believe that in a living world, the entire population are only going in one direction at any one time – giving us a few different stories overlapping would be lovely.

On a finishing note: any update based on metrics, making the game simpler, or just tinkering with core mechanics in general needs to be thought about properly. These types of updates have had significant negative impacts on the game and felt incredibly poorly done. Completely broken personal story? Go to a zone twice your level for a trait? Stuff like that should not be happening.