Guild Wars 2

Jski.6180:

TwoBit.5903:

So as long as one popular criteria isn’t met, then D3 can’t be an MMORPG? I see! Well then, I posit that GW2 can’t be an MMORPG because it lacks the trinity. Every since EQ1 and WoW the trinity has been a def feature of MMORPGS. The design of MMORPGs simply leads to the trinity. It is a highly specialized type of play to supplement gameplay in the open world. GW2 also lacks raids. Raids are why only a small part of the overall gamer population play MMOs, because Akittengg around people while using one or two abilities is highly specific type of play.

Then you cant call most mmorpgs that DO have the trinity system an mmorpg. See how measly it can get? There is a vast different between have some different ways of playing a game such playing an fps in an mmo environment such as PS2 Its not an rpg but it still mmo and has an open world that keeps going even when your not there. The fact thakittens not an rpg dose not effect if its a true mmo. Now when you have games that have NO open world that keeps going when you cut off the game but are still online is not an mmo because of this and this alone.

D3’s auction house keeps going on even when you’re not there It’s persistent.

Can’t we just say that D3 revolutionized the MMO genre by removing player zergs?

Furthermore, it just struck me that GW2’s maps aren’t really persistent. They’re just large enough to hold a set amount of people. Ignoring the lack of trinity and raids, shouldn’t GW2 be called a KLORPG, or kind of large online RPG?

d3’s auction house is the official excuse for the always on drm…get use to it

TwoBit.5903:

D3’s auction house keeps going on even when you’re not there It’s persistent.

Can’t we just say that D3 revolutionized the MMO genre by removing player zergs?

Blizzard is going to have to re-write a heckuva lot of history to try to call D3 a MMO now. Wikis, reviews, press releases, 1000s of game sites. This is funny

Karizee.8076:

TwoBit.5903:

D3’s auction house keeps going on even when you’re not there It’s persistent.

Can’t we just say that D3 revolutionized the MMO genre by removing player zergs?

Blizzard is going to have to re-write a heckuva lot of history to try to call D3 a MMO now. Wikis, reviews, press releases, 1000s of game sites. This is funny

Not so hard. Blizzard can simply go back and provide “clarifications.” ANet does the same with GW2.

D3 is nowhere near a MMORPG. It is an action RPG that supports 4 player co-op. It revolutionized Action RPGs by having an Auction House.

Most Diablo players consider it to be a single-player game with co-op capabilities.

Calling D3 a MMO is the same as calling Borderlands 2 a MMO. As we know, Borderlands 2 is not a MMO…. Same applies to D3.

TwoBit.5903:

So as long as one popular criteria isn’t met, then D3 can’t be an MMORPG? I see! Well then, I posit that GW2 can’t be an MMORPG because it lacks the trinity. Every since EQ1 and WoW the trinity has been a def feature of MMORPGS. The design of MMORPGs simply leads to the trinity. It is a highly specialized type of play to supplement gameplay in the open world. GW2 also lacks raids. Raids are why only a small part of the overall gamer population play MMOs, because Akittengg around people while using one or two abilities is highly specific type of play.

Actually it’s not “a popular” criteria, it’s been the criteria all along. Lobby games aren’t MMOs because you’re not actually PLAYING with the masses. Trading with the masses is something else entirely.

The point of a persistent world is that hundreds or thousands of people are all playing at the same time. Even Anet has said Guild Wars 1 wasn’t an MMO, in spite of the fact that you could have 100 people standing around in a city…but they couldn’t PLAY together. They couldn’t use skills, quest, or do anything other than chat or trade. Sell some stuff.

Anet’s devs said Guild Wars 1 was a CoRPG (a cooperative RPG). They said Guild Wars 2 would be a true MMO.

The industry standard wasn’t designed by people on this forum. It was designed by people who make the games in the first place. If you spend any amount of time researching this, you’ll find that coop games aren’t generally considered MMOs, because you can’t PLAY WITH the masses as the same time…even if you can trade with them. And even that’s not true.

You can only trade with one person at a time.

Karizee.8076:

It made news in Time again.

http://techland.time.com/2013/08/16/guild-wars-2-nabs-fastest-selling-western-mmo-crown-looks-east-for-more-records/

That link shows a bit more.

Well, so Anet asked another company to do some math for them. This by itself is a bit dubious in my book, but I don’t think anyone can deny that GW2 has sold very well indeed and they may have been the quickest at reaching 3 million, though obviously not the first and only one.

What will be interesting, with falling sales is how the game continues to do. I know, China is coming but that’s outside the calculation.

Please note it is the fastest selling MMO in the WEST. Asia is not included.

Another side note is that it’s the only MMO in the west with a big name that started without a sub model but has a box price. And this side note does make this claim of reaching 3 million copies a bit faster than other MMOs a bit tricky.

The lack of a sub model is more interesting to a broader audience. The gemstore is not pay2win so that helps a lot of people also. In essence you could argue that by itself should make the game an interesting choice for a lot of people.

I do not know how it is in other parts of the world but here in Europe, as far as I can tell, GW2 still has a pretty high box price for a game that’s a year old roughly. It is of course their main source of income and an important one because every game loses players continually and you need to bring in as many (or more) new players compared to how many you lose.

For the financial side, the gem store sales can help against losing players, but it doesn’t help against how filled the servers are, which is arguably one of the main features of an MMO: having other players to play with.

It’s great that they sold over 3 million copies of the game in a relatively short time, for an MMO at least, but I do wonder why it’s measured over 9 months instead of a year. Perhaps, it was chosen because sales are dropping and if they did it later they wouldn’t be able to maintain the claim. Personally, if they had waited a month and calculated it over the full year, I would’ve found that a more logical measuring stick.

And I would’ve given this measurement more credit if Anet hadn’t ordered it themselves but if it had been an external initiative. Still, no one can argue that selling 3 million copies in the first year is a not good number for an MMO.

Now if they could just get people to keep playing the game once it has been bought that would be great.

just saw this:
Anet made a new clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=Sin5E5vGr78

“ArenaNet has partnered with a market research firm…”

Guys, seriously? You all believe what’s said in commercials too I bet, like those with some actor dressed as a doctor holding some charts up and pointing with a pencil on some large bars, saying “According to our newest research, Oil of Quaggan makes your skin younger than any other product on the market. See, here, proof…”

nexxe.7081:

arjeidi.2690:

hype sells, content doesn’t. Their marketing division is way better than their developing one.

Servers are still busy with people. That means content does sell, or else they would be merging or closed down.

Wrong. Most MMOs don’t merge servers for a very long time even if there are dead ones. Merging servers is a flag that the game is not doing that well. So it’s better to leave the dead servers up and at least show they have X amount of servers rather than merge early and have a small number of more populated servers. Just look at Age of Conan if you need an example. Half those servers were ghost towns for a year+. The only really 2 active servers were Set and Wiccana and it took Funcom like 2 years to merge servers down.

Box sales don’t measure a games success. Retained players do. Look at Warhammer. that game had a HUGE box sale at the start and due to the devs/designers, the game died. Look at Age of Conan, that too had huge box sales and died due to lack of “care” from devs/designers. The saving grace to this game is that it has no monthly fee. I guarantee if this game had a monthly fee, you’d see A LOT less players here. Of course another saving grace for this game is that there really isn’t anything else in MMOs out. There are a few titles on the horizon kinda like FF14 reborn, ESO, EQ Next and prolly a couple others I missed but I don’t really follow too many anymore. So while this game might boast about sales, remember it’s hype that lures people in but it’s content that keeps people playing.

Sauzo.6821:

Wrong. Most MMOs don’t merge servers for a very long time even if there are dead ones. Merging servers is a flag that the game is not doing that well. So it’s better to leave the dead servers up and at least show they have X amount of servers rather than merge early and have a small number of more populated servers.

There are quite a few games that merges servers quite fast after release if they are unsuccessful. TOR is a good example, so is TERA.

And the fact that ArenaNet have increased the server limits several times (including again today or yesterday) would point towards the fact that the servers are far from dead.

Forget server mergers. SWToR laid off half their staff when it was a younger game than Guild Wars 2. TSW laid off a third of their staff in less time than Guild Wars 2 has been out. And Anet is hiring. I know this because I know someone who lives in Seattle, who’s daughter interviewed at Anet.

I also remember Rift….it didn’t actually have server mergers…what it did was give people a free server transfer once a week and made the lowest pop servers test servers, without closing any servers. How long did that take? Less time than Guild Wars 2 has been out for now.

It’s okay not to like the game, but facts are facts. By the time Warhammer was this old, everyone knew it was over.

Vayne.8563:

TwoBit.5903:

So as long as one popular criteria isn’t met, then D3 can’t be an MMORPG? I see! Well then, I posit that GW2 can’t be an MMORPG because it lacks the trinity. Every since EQ1 and WoW the trinity has been a def feature of MMORPGS. The design of MMORPGs simply leads to the trinity. It is a highly specialized type of play to supplement gameplay in the open world. GW2 also lacks raids. Raids are why only a small part of the overall gamer population play MMOs, because Akittengg around people while using one or two abilities is highly specific type of play.

Actually it’s not “a popular” criteria, it’s been the criteria all along. Lobby games aren’t MMOs because you’re not actually PLAYING with the masses. Trading with the masses is something else entirely.

The point of a persistent world is that hundreds or thousands of people are all playing at the same time. Even Anet has said Guild Wars 1 wasn’t an MMO, in spite of the fact that you could have 100 people standing around in a city…but they couldn’t PLAY together. They couldn’t use skills, quest, or do anything other than chat or trade. Sell some stuff.

Anet’s devs said Guild Wars 1 was a CoRPG (a cooperative RPG). They said Guild Wars 2 would be a true MMO.

The industry standard wasn’t designed by people on this forum. It was designed by people who make the games in the first place. If you spend any amount of time researching this, you’ll find that coop games aren’t generally considered MMOs, because you can’t PLAY WITH the masses as the same time…even if you can trade with them. And even that’s not true.

You can only trade with one person at a time.

The terms are evolving with the genre.

Innovation often involves scrutiny of the zeitgeist and everything that contributes to it. We’ll never get anywhere if we allow a select group of elites to decide how and what everything should be.

Vayne.8563:

Forget server mergers. SWToR laid off half their staff when it was a younger game than Guild Wars 2. TSW laid off a third of their staff in less time than Guild Wars 2 has been out. And Anet is hiring. I know this because I know someone who lives in Seattle, who’s daughter interviewed at Anet.

I also remember Rift….it didn’t actually have server mergers…what it did was give people a free server transfer once a week and made the lowest pop servers test servers, without closing any servers. How long did that take? Less time than Guild Wars 2 has been out for now.

It’s okay not to like the game, but facts are facts. By the time Warhammer was this old, everyone knew it was over.

Fact is that Anet have been “hiring” for ages now. That you know somebody who says that someone went for an interview is not factual data for us. It’s hearsay at best.

I can put on a “now hiring” sign but not actually hire anyone so I am not sure what that means other than that they say they are hiring people.

On the other hand it is known that these other MMOs did lay off staff and that populations did dwindle quickly in all the games you mentioned. They all went to adding f2p options to bring people back which seems to’ve been successful as well.

But please, do not mix some facts with non facts and then make a general reference to facts. That is a tad misleading.

GW2 is not in danger of server merges as much as the other games were in my view because of the overflow trick they used. A very handy trick btw, I don’t mean that as a negative. Population in W2 probably has stabilised a bit by now and the bigger problem is that players are too spread out, but that’s another topic.

But the fact that matters here if you ask me is that Anet asked another company to make some figures for them. That’s something that makes this harder to take at face value. SWTOR also sold more than 3 million copies but what’s the significance of 9 months. A year would be a fairer indication. GW2 has sold pretty well I’d say, but this just feels like hyping again…wonder if it has to do with China opening and the 1 year anniversary of the game.

I think this is just all hype to get more people to try the game as sales are slowing down. Try GW2 for free…but hey, marketing is part of business.

Don’t all active game companies look to hire new talent? From what I can tell there’s a good deal of turnover for employees depending on the needs of the company. From what I’ve gathered GW2 did something similar by moving more resources towards its live team (or some other team, too lazy to check) in winter, though now they seem to be focusing on content so I’m not really sure.

I think a good question to as is whether or not the people laid off in Funcom and EA be relevant enough to keep if the games worked on succeeded? What did they even do?

TwoBit.5903:

Don’t all active game companies look to hire new talent? From what I can tell there’s a good deal of turnover for employees depending on the needs of the company. From what I’ve gathered GW2 did something similar by moving more resources towards its live team (or some other team, too lazy to check) in winter, though now they seem to be focusing on content so I’m not really sure.

I think a good question to as is whether or not the people laid off in Funcom and EA be relevant enough to keep if the games worked on succeeded? What did they even do?

No, not actively. Especially not in the MMO market. It is quite usual to hear about company X firing people or shutting down offices if MMO Y was not successful enough.

This is all just a marketing ploy to ramp up interest for release in China. I mean c’mon guys how gullible can you be? What other company gauges numbers in a 9 month time frame. Regardless if the game is doing well or not, this is clearly just a marketing campaign.

Deamhan.9538:

I think if Blizzard were to come out with a ‘sequel’ to WoW, ANet’s record would be blown out of the water.

quite possible, and?

Algreg.3629:

Deamhan.9538:

I think if Blizzard were to come out with a ‘sequel’ to WoW, ANet’s record would be blown out of the water.

quite possible, and?

And so this record is nothing to brag about.

Actually at over 1.3M likes on their facebook, vs the less than 1M likes of GW’s, TES Online is already on their way to beating it.

Actually they hit 3 million sometime in January, 2 million in September.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/09/13/guild-wars-2-breaks-the-two-million-sales-mark/

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/01/15/arenanet-sells-three-million-copies-of-guild-wars-2-looks-to-th/

I knew the second I saw this, nothing good could come from it :P

Deamhan.9538:

And so this record is nothing to brag about.

Actually at over 1.3M likes on their facebook, vs the less than 1M likes of GW’s, TES Online is already on their way to beating it.

That is of course assuming that
1: Everyone who have bought GW2 likes their FB page
2: Everyone who likes TESO’s FB page will buy TESO.

Both which are unlikely.

lordkrall.7241:

Deamhan.9538:

And so this record is nothing to brag about.

Actually at over 1.3M likes on their facebook, vs the less than 1M likes of GW’s, TES Online is already on their way to beating it.

That is of course assuming that
1: Everyone who have bought GW2 likes their FB page
2: Everyone who likes TESO’s FB page will buy TESO.

Both which are unlikely.

That may be true but then there is this…

http://www.dailytech.com/The+Elder+Scrolls+V+Skyrim+Tops+34+Million+Retail+Sales+in+First+2+Days/article23293.htm

Edit:

Just wanted to add this…

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/04/10/oblivion-records-record-sales-1-7-million-and-climbing/

Which is dated 10 Apr 2006

Oblivion’s release date was 20 March 2006

Deamhan.9538:

lordkrall.7241:

Deamhan.9538:

And so this record is nothing to brag about.

Actually at over 1.3M likes on their facebook, vs the less than 1M likes of GW’s, TES Online is already on their way to beating it.

That is of course assuming that
1: Everyone who have bought GW2 likes their FB page
2: Everyone who likes TESO’s FB page will buy TESO.

Both which are unlikely.

That may be true but then there is this…

http://www.dailytech.com/The+Elder+Scrolls+V+Skyrim+Tops+34+Million+Retail+Sales+in+First+2+Days/article23293.htm

No doubt, I’m sure ESO will have a great launch and I wish them well.
But as of right now, as of This Moment In Time, Guild Wars 2 holds the record.

Deamhan.9538:

That may be true but then there is this…

http://www.dailytech.com/The+Elder+Scrolls+V+Skyrim+Tops+34+Million+Retail+Sales+in+First+2+Days/article23293.htm

Edit:

Just wanted to add this…

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/04/10/oblivion-records-record-sales-1-7-million-and-climbing/

Which is dated 10 Apr 2006

Oblivion’s release date was 20 March 2006

Indeed, and yet based on what have been seen (at least a while back) people that actually likes the Elder Scrolls series don’t seem to find TESO interesting, especially since it is created by a company that haven’t made any earlier ES-games.
One should also keep in mind that IF TESO decides to have a sub (I don’t remember if it was announced or not) they would most likely also lose quite a bit of those people.

Gehenna.3625:

Vayne.8563:

Forget server mergers. SWToR laid off half their staff when it was a younger game than Guild Wars 2. TSW laid off a third of their staff in less time than Guild Wars 2 has been out. And Anet is hiring. I know this because I know someone who lives in Seattle, who’s daughter interviewed at Anet.

I also remember Rift….it didn’t actually have server mergers…what it did was give people a free server transfer once a week and made the lowest pop servers test servers, without closing any servers. How long did that take? Less time than Guild Wars 2 has been out for now.

It’s okay not to like the game, but facts are facts. By the time Warhammer was this old, everyone knew it was over.

Fact is that Anet have been “hiring” for ages now. That you know somebody who says that someone went for an interview is not factual data for us. It’s hearsay at best.

I can put on a “now hiring” sign but not actually hire anyone so I am not sure what that means other than that they say they are hiring people.

On the other hand it is known that these other MMOs did lay off staff and that populations did dwindle quickly in all the games you mentioned. They all went to adding f2p options to bring people back which seems to’ve been successful as well.

But please, do not mix some facts with non facts and then make a general reference to facts. That is a tad misleading.

GW2 is not in danger of server merges as much as the other games were in my view because of the overflow trick they used. A very handy trick btw, I don’t mean that as a negative. Population in W2 probably has stabilised a bit by now and the bigger problem is that players are too spread out, but that’s another topic.

But the fact that matters here if you ask me is that Anet asked another company to make some figures for them. That’s something that makes this harder to take at face value. SWTOR also sold more than 3 million copies but what’s the significance of 9 months. A year would be a fairer indication. GW2 has sold pretty well I’d say, but this just feels like hyping again…wonder if it has to do with China opening and the 1 year anniversary of the game.

I think this is just all hype to get more people to try the game as sales are slowing down. Try GW2 for free…but hey, marketing is part of business.

Just take a look at all the positions they have posted. I don’t know why any company would post positions if they didn’t actually need them. Of course, that might make sense if you’ve never run your own company.
http://www.arena.net/

I think what you’re trying to say about the figures is that they’re misleading which is true. However, I don’t think they would be allowed to lie about them. Yes, this marketing research firm has been paid by ArenaNet but marketing is more than just advertising. It’s about determining what the current conditions of the market are like and how receptive it would be for any given product. I think ArenaNet was using this company to determine how the game could fare given today’s MMORPG market. No doubt assessing the Chinese market was one of their jobs. It just so happens that the numbers they got could be used to further advertise their game.

lordkrall.7241:

Sauzo.6821:

Wrong. Most MMOs don’t merge servers for a very long time even if there are dead ones. Merging servers is a flag that the game is not doing that well. So it’s better to leave the dead servers up and at least show they have X amount of servers rather than merge early and have a small number of more populated servers.

There are quite a few games that merges servers quite fast after release if they are unsuccessful. TOR is a good example, so is TERA.

And the fact that ArenaNet have increased the server limits several times (including again today or yesterday) would point towards the fact that the servers are far from dead.

Both those games merged servers well into a year in the game. I actually played Tera from beta all the way to well after a year into the game before I came here and that game bled out so many players cause of the RNG with enchanting weapons and gear to +12 and needing high enchanted gear to do dungeons as well as the lockout on dungeons, that it had no choice really but to merge and condense down servers. ToR too didn’t merge till well into a year as well and well if you played that game, you know that the story was the only thing good the first time around. Raiding in that game was meh and the raid gear you bought with the dropped tokens and molds were kind of meh as well.

But again the point is it took 1+ years for them to merge servers which was my point even though certain servers were dead long before that. Also is there hard proof they raised the cap on servers(was it announced by Anet) or is it just speculation from players cause they look at the full/high/med/low meter? Raising the cap on servers is easy to do to make a game look booming since they really aren’t doing much to the server which is already up and running. Now if they added more servers, that would take more work and would be proof of a booming game since they would need to bring online a whole new server and not just raise the cap. Regardless, you would have to be blind to think this game has even half the people it had on release or shortly after. Plus raising the cap across the board doesn’t mean there still aren’t dead servers. Just means that the full servers have more room for people to transfer off the dead servers thus making the dead servers even more dead.

Like I said in another thread, this game hasen’t bled out a ton of players cause there is no monthly fee. If there was, I guarantee that this game would be losing players….but that’s another discussion which doesn’t really pertain to the OPs title.

A few new MMO’s are scheduled for this year. When ESO comes out, it will tell the tale imho. I think there will be a large drop in logins for GW2. We’ll see if the people that migrate come back. One strange thing is NcSoft has reported box sales are up, but revenues are down… O.o It seems they are banking on being a success in China.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/07/19/guild-wars-2-outlines-china-release-new-rewards-in-dev-update/

Maybe they are sinking the cash into another project that they deem more of a moneymaker. And yeah when ESO comes out i’m sure GW2 will take a little hit. You gotta also remember that since this game doesn’t have a monthly fee, it’s a bit hard to really calculate a drop or not since once you actually buy the game, you never need to spend cash again which makes it hard to track the player base. Trying to do so it with accts is hard too since you don’t lose your acct after X days. The only way really would be to track last log in times to gauge player activity.

I think they are gonna have competition in the east with the rerelease of FF14 reborn as well as Blade and Soul…assuming that ever comes out.

Sauzo.6821:

Maybe they are sinking the cash into another project that they deem more of a moneymaker. And yeah when ESO comes out i’m sure GW2 will take a little hit. You gotta also remember that since this game doesn’t have a monthly fee, it’s a bit hard to really calculate a drop or not since once you actually buy the game, you never need to spend cash again which makes it hard to track the player base. Trying to do so it with accts is hard too since you don’t lose your acct after X days. The only way really would be to track last log in times to gauge player activity.

I think they are gonna have competition in the east with the rerelease of FF14 reborn as well as Blade and Soul…assuming that ever comes out.

I think this competition is what is actually driving the Living Story updates. ArenaNet realizes that the traditional strategy of releasing large content updates through expansions isn’t as viable anymore. They are focusing all the resources on releasing smaller chunks of content on a regular basis in order to address the changing market right away.

Unless you have access to the raw data, take these kinds of things with a grain of salt.

Guild Wars 2 Fastest sales ever*

*Over a nine month period.

Information is only going to be released through kinds of mediums when it generates buzz. Don’t get caught by the hype, get information from an exhaustive scale of views and make your own decision. We should all have learned that much since betas to release up to now.

9 months would be squarely in the middle of the second quarter of 2013. They wouldn’t have sale data for the third quarter of 2013 which would contain the 1 year anniversary for the actual game.

That’s why it’s 9 months.

Gehenna.3625:

Vayne.8563:

Forget server mergers. SWToR laid off half their staff when it was a younger game than Guild Wars 2. TSW laid off a third of their staff in less time than Guild Wars 2 has been out. And Anet is hiring. I know this because I know someone who lives in Seattle, who’s daughter interviewed at Anet.

I also remember Rift….it didn’t actually have server mergers…what it did was give people a free server transfer once a week and made the lowest pop servers test servers, without closing any servers. How long did that take? Less time than Guild Wars 2 has been out for now.

It’s okay not to like the game, but facts are facts. By the time Warhammer was this old, everyone knew it was over.

Fact is that Anet have been “hiring” for ages now. That you know somebody who says that someone went for an interview is not factual data for us. It’s hearsay at best.

I can put on a “now hiring” sign but not actually hire anyone so I am not sure what that means other than that they say they are hiring people.

On the other hand it is known that these other MMOs did lay off staff and that populations did dwindle quickly in all the games you mentioned. They all went to adding f2p options to bring people back which seems to’ve been successful as well.

But please, do not mix some facts with non facts and then make a general reference to facts. That is a tad misleading.

GW2 is not in danger of server merges as much as the other games were in my view because of the overflow trick they used. A very handy trick btw, I don’t mean that as a negative. Population in W2 probably has stabilised a bit by now and the bigger problem is that players are too spread out, but that’s another topic.

But the fact that matters here if you ask me is that Anet asked another company to make some figures for them. That’s something that makes this harder to take at face value. SWTOR also sold more than 3 million copies but what’s the significance of 9 months. A year would be a fairer indication. GW2 has sold pretty well I’d say, but this just feels like hyping again…wonder if it has to do with China opening and the 1 year anniversary of the game.

I think this is just all hype to get more people to try the game as sales are slowing down. Try GW2 for free…but hey, marketing is part of business.

I’m not referring to not facts. It’s a fact that Anet is hiring. It’s a fact that different jobs have been advertised at different times. And while I can’t say that Anet didn’t lay off anyone, I can say with certainty that if a mass layoff had happened, we’d most likely have found out about it.

The game is doing fine. This bit about it being the fastest selling MMO…. I don’t care about that one way or another. But people are saying the game is dead, that people are leaving in droves, that the game is in trouble for a long time and in a lot of threads…and that’s what I’m addressing.

As always, you want to try to twist what I say into something I"m not saying. Unlesss you say Anet is lying directly, then they’re hiring.

what worries me about the Time article is that it claims Anet is going to make a huge push to get GW2 into China. Hopefully Anet doesn’t pull an ActiBlizzard when trying to open in a new market.

With Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard took the setting out of Medival Fantasy and into Asian Fantasy, alienating players who enjoy western MMOs. The almost Disney like Panda’s and introduction of Pokemon pet battles made a blatant grab for a new, younger generation. Eastern countries were given shorter raid lockouts, making World Firsts for pve content almost irrelevant. This was ontop of previous design changes like equalizing 10man raiding, effectively killing large guilds, and the LFR system, which meant raiders had to (or at least should) raid the same content multiple times each reset (thus, faster burnout). Not to mention a huge increase in grind, between dailies and the massive amount of new reputations. They rebuilt the entire game for Asia and it cost them a lot of their community.

GW2 is not immune to these same self-defeating design changes. A couple more grinds like legendaries, a few more patches/fractals/temporary dungeons that have nothing to do with the story setting, a few more months with no variety in WvW maps, a few more months of making sure guilds dont matter by only introducing content that any pug zerg can do thanks to out of party buff mechanics, and they really wont be much different than Pandaria.

my faith that some silly patch saying “all these meaningless stories ARE PART OF THE SAME CONSPIRACY” can fix things: zero. MMO’s dig their own graves.