Just saying now, I told you so, to all the people who kept screaming for an expansion for years, and the white knights claiming HoT would be a huge boon for profits and the number of active players.
Expansions, unless in widely-popular subscription games, do not make money. Microtransactions for cosmetics do, and focusing on important things like gameplay make any content droughts much more enjoyable. Games like League, which has an astrononical budget know this; almost all profit comes from skins and their tight gameplay mechanics and good balance, with a very occasional new champion/content release.
ANet has failed repeatedly to provide us with a quality, detail-driven gameplay experience as a whole for well over a year, now. Most aspects of the game which were once great selling points have been stymied, while an excess of attention has been put in all the wrong places in hopes to expand their bleeding playerbase via niche markets. Unfortunately, the real, hard truth is that the existing greatness of the game is being continuously tarnished through negligence, and in many respects, blatant ineptitude of maintaining such a great experience.
If every MMO has a failing, it’s lack of content. The fact is the model is designed for players to spend a lot of time at it, but in the process they rapidly burn through content and find themselves wondering what to do next. It’s the big content patches/expansions players look forward to at that point.
You seem to be suggesting that instead of developing the HoT expansion, ANet should have focused on class balance. In other words, the game was almost perfect and should have been left that way (more or less).
Are you primarily a PvP player? Because that actually makes a lot of sense in the PvP realm. PvP players are far more sensitive to balance issues. New content is great, but ultimately you’re there to compete against other players and you can’t do that very well when they drop a bunch of overpowered elite specs that only half the players have access to into the mix.
However, on the PvE side of the coin, these forums are full of players who dislike HoT and probably wish it had never happened. But do you think before HoT released they were looking forward to nothing but minor balance tweaks and the odd content release every now and then? Not likely!
PvE players want content. They always want content. Balance is great, but they play the game cooperatively or by themselves rather than competitively (for the most part). They aren’t sensitive to the razor’s edge on balance issues the way PvP players are and they don’t get as much replay value out of the combat itself as AI is far less dynamic.
You referenced “League” (I assume league of legends?). I’ve never played that one, but is it primarily a PvP game? If so, do you think perhaps their model of maintaining and refining class balance with only minor content upgrades would be a good fit in a heavy PvE game like GW2?
I primarily play(ed) WvW (quit on the 7/26 patch), which is the objectively most stale and most neglected format in the game. Quite frankly, I’ve been playing almost every day since before release, and still got enjoyment out of the game’s mechanics and the capacity for players to shape how events unfolded. Out of necessity to uphold my 2g/hour food, I did PvE. A lot of it. Dungeons were a great start to the game and offered substantial replayability in respects to the content design. The AI, as you said, wasn’t there, but it’s nigh impossible to make good, fast-performing AI that will extend the lifespan of the content dramatically before being figured out.
Which, in all seriousness, is the entire purpose of MMO’s in general: players shaping the world. Ask yourself if you’d rather play a single player game for its story or progression or gameplay or have the community of a guild/group/clan with a shared interest. If you’re only here for story, you’re playing the wrong game (sorry, but GW2’s story hasn’t been brag-worthy), and quite frankly, the wrong genre of game. It’s like complaining that there isn’t enough character development and interaction in FPS games.
Honestly, anyone pretending like making PvE MMO’s is a profitable endeavor doesn’t understand that unless the game is designed to take the players years to reach endgame, it’s going to lose money because the interest in PvE will wane due to its players beating content faster than what the game’s publisher can generate, unless it happens to get an absurd amount of financial backing and player support. ANet doesn’t have these resources. Pretty much nobody does; WoW being only close to an exception (and WoW also undergoes content droughts). Simply, it’s not even feasible to expect AAA quality coming at a rate as fast as players can consume it. Especially if the idea is to keep the game accessible by B2P or free.
GW2 marketed itself heavily as the play-as-you-wish, casual-friendly game in 2012 with a good amount of support and lots of developer interaction, which most Eastern imports cannot boast. The figures do not lie: ANet made back its development investment costs in the first year out of this ideology, and did well for itself within a level of expectation almost deliberately until HoT efforts began. The game was intended to be community-heavy, with extra bells and whistles thrown into things like character dyes, town clothes, and as of the early trailer/game ideals, character personalities and how they could affect aspects of gameplay or story. The core game was meant to be (and is) very deep, with a plethora of hidden secrets for people to discover, as to keep them entertained, with a diverse cast and in almost all respects, many, many options on just how players wished to play the game and be relatively/appropriately rewarded. They pushed for good profession balance with the dev transparency and attention to e-sports to monetize and gain support to turn more of a profit, since well-balanced games tend to do better than poorly-balanced ones (I.E. what we’ve been seeing since a little bit before HoT).
As far as balance goes, PvE is much more vocal about it and has gotten much more attention to their issues than the PvP/WvW side. Almost all major public releases of number-crunching, the whole “berserker meta” nonsense which largely got us into a horrible state of balance, talks over class viability, etc. via numbers come from the PvE community. In fact, I’d actually argue the exclusivity of the PvE community min-maxing has led to a large motive as to why players are so often chomping at the bit for new content: a few min-maxers post the next FoTM build or comp on a major website/stream, and the “hardcore” players copy-paste the build thinking nothing of it, and rush the content down.
The few weeks after launch were chaos in the absolute best ways, and some people I played with at level 80 didn’t even know what traits were, and most players were in greens and a few rares, with maybe an odd exotic. The few people who had figured anything out didn’t have the time and popularity to just let people copy-paste their builds, and the infrastructure of such sharing sites like metabattle or GW2skills wasn’t there, either.
The small episodes of LS every two weeks were icing to keep things fresh as to give both more hardcore and casual players a reason to keep coming back and keeping up with the game, but this cadence proved both unsustainable from a business perspective, and difficult for the players due to a constant dependency of needing to log in for an episode’ s period, which could not be replayed. So they dropped the concept.
GW2 was not meant to be a new-content-churning, hardcore PvE game.
I worked for a Korean grinder and this was quite literally a development strategy: .0000X% of a level per monster kill at the high levels just to allow patches to flow together such that players which play roughly 7 hours a day doing just grinding would reach the level cap roughly by the release of the next increase of the level cap. It did this because it was the only affordable way to guarantee their more-than-casual player-base wouldn’t just churn through content that took months to make in a week.
And this model objectively fails in the west. Western gamers don’t like being led on by a carrot on a stick, and don’t like to see that people with too much spare time end up on the top of the charts for no other reason than that spare time.
League of Legends is a PvP game. But that’s where the money is in multiplayer games. Unless development costs in terms of time/money are negligible, only PvP multiplayer games will turn massive profits long-term if the intent is to keep supporting them indefinitely. Games like those in the Souls franchise demonstrate this; long after the co-op online play dissolves, the PvP community is still going, despite no patches. After a DLC comes out, the PvE players come back in droves to beat it, maybe replay the content five or six more times, and then withdraw. The PvP community still trudges on for years afterwards.
Realistically, how else do you keep PvE players entertained while new content gets developed, all while turning a profit? It’s simply not possible on the AAA scale without just stumbling into huge amounts of money. The underlying gameplay just has to be so good to keep people invested in general. If that collapses, everything will.
Which is why you have so many people in PvE complaining about profession balance, too. The gameplay since launch has gotten stale and crippled, and rather than trying to fix it, we’re seeing massive resources go into niche markets like raids, over-designed maps, bug fixes to give programmers something to do, and ever-increasing in quantity, and inversely quality, skin releases.
The pillars which made GW2 amazing at its start have largely crumbled, and ANet’s negligence and/or incompetence has been responsible for its bleeding of players and subsequently profits, and such a lack of keeping the core tenets of the game well-maintained will be its demise.
