Guild Wars 2

It’s no secret that a lot of players who no longer actually play the game still post here on the forums. Or maybe you are just burnt out and only log on once a week. My aim with this thread is to provide Anet feedback on why you left, got burnt out, moved to another game, etc. and then also give helpful suggestions on what they could change to get you back into the game.

I’ll start.

Reasons for leaving:
1. Content coming too fast. It simply burned me out. I felt like I needed to play every day just to keep up, it stopped being about fun and became about desperately trying to stay ahead.

2. Grind got too ridiculous. Grinding for a legendary or two was fine. No stat increase, take it at my own pace, just something cool to work for. Ascended weapons with their time gates, huge gold sinks and gear treadmill contributed to my burn out. I had to harvest or grind 2 hours a day just to keep up with the time gating, not fun.

3. Condition damage hate. For the last 12 months I have dealt with the fact that my chosen class is completely useless because of the major limitations to condition damage. Teq and the new dungeon were the final nail in the coffin. The fact that you are designing large group events and dungeons while completely ignoring and not even acknowledging condition specs is just a slap in the face.

How to get me back:

1. Slow down the content. I would much rather one content update a month if it meant you actually tested the content, it had an actual story, and it wasn’t always so rushed. I bought this game because of epic fights with dragons, and the rich GW1 lore. Instead what I’ve been getting is a crazy clown lady who blows stuff up “just cause”.

2. Remove time gating. This doesn’t help anyone, it just hurts everyone equally. I shouldn’t need to do anything within one day. I want to play at my own pace and complete things at my own pace. Sometimes I can’t log in for a week, but then I can play for 7 hours one day. My time played should be the measure of progress, not my number of log ins.

3. Fix condition damage. I’ve seen probably 50 good suggestions, for technical workarounds to complete reworks, to stop-gap measures. At least tell us where you are on the problem. This issue affects everyone in the game. When culling affected everyone in the game you really pulled it together and came up with a solution. This issue is significantly more problematic than culling and yet we hear nothing.

Please note that this is not a place for fanboys and the stalwart defenders of Anet to tell me why my reasons for not having fun are somehow “wrong” and that I need to accept it or leave. This is a place for people to discuss and say why they personally are not enjoying the game and what can be done to fix it. Any posts telling people they are having fun wrong will be reported.

I’ll bite.

Reasons for leaving:
1. I completely ignore LS. It doesn’t interest me, feels like nothing more but an AP grind and if I completely ignore the AP part of the LS, it’s empty and done in 5 minutes.

2. Personal story. So disappointed with it.

3. Game feels like a state-of-the-art game attempt with limited resources, rushed design and out-dated engine.

I’ll perhaps come back though, in a few months/years, to see what has been added. I still have a little hope they add a lot of GW1 to the game. (content, story-wise, quality of life updates) But, don’t think that will happen.

The manifesto said it would be everything you loved about GW1. Whilst I don’t think this is a bad game (it’s good in many aspects). Everything I personally loved about GW1 is no longer here. The only thing that is still here is the background lore that surrounds the world you play in. And that’s it.

What will bring me back?
Guild Wars 3

1.well, the first step was the condition problem
2.the 2nd one is with the Venom Aura range, it’s to kitten small to be of any “real” use in dungeons
3. countless thief nerfs, ok there were “some” buffs too, but to little compensation
4. the LFG tool in game was looong overdue
5. talking to a-net is like talking to a brick wall
6. i was lied in the manifest ….. so now i believe they are a bunch of liars
(you create your own bible …. people read it, then you break the rules, do you expect me to still follow??)
7. WvW and PvE skills were not split, causing unhappiness on both sides

list can go on and on and on…

For me, I enjoy variety. Ascended gear, dungeon token nerfs, and karma nerfs have made it more difficult for me to gear an alt or change builds. This more than anything else will ruin the game for me.

So, I need a way to be able to play different classes and different builds on a regular basis. I don’t know how to reconcile that with people who enjoy “working” toward a long term goal.

Reason 1 is funny.
Are you one of these guys who need all achievements or what?
In most updates u only need to play maybe 3 hours to be through the new content.

Hm, what’s wrong with condition damage in the new dungeon?

Reasons for leaving

1. Downstate and horrible pvp overall

2. WvW being a PvE zergfest

3. Lack of build diversity

4. Lack of PvE challenges

How to fix

1. remove downstate

2. make WvW more of a small skirmishes pvp experience instead of grinding NPCs in empty castles

3. Start listening to the community or play the kitten game AT LVL 80. It is easy to see what needs a desperate buff/nerf.

4. Either instanced hardmode content WITH COSMETIC ONLY REWARDS SO THE CASUALS DON’T QQ or redesign legendaries/ascended staff – make them challenging to get, not just time consuming.

Instead of “defeat X boss 100 times” please “defeat X boss without getting hit” or within a minute, or without using healing skills, or without dodging, or defeat him after taking 100 000 damage. Use the brain.

I haven’t quit yet, but I’m taking a long break and plan to only pvp/wvw when I finally reinstall. Reasons for leaving:
1. Community changed. After the recent patches from August, gw2 is nothing but farm and accumulating enough gold for a legendary, ascended and whatever. Seriously, I log on and I only see ‘FE 4 min, lf 2m ac speedclear, Teq up in TC.’ The game I played 7 months ago is no longer existent and the conversations and interactions within, come down to mere farming.

2. Grind. I started the game loving gear progression. I wanted the gear, I wanted to base my goals around stats, I wanted to own with an unfair advantage, I wanted to grind those dung, bosses for rewards. but after a few weeks I learnt what GW2 was REALLY about and truly enjoyed what the game had to offer. Despite having full ascended trinkets for 3 characters, I really enjoyed just playing the game for a good 4-5 months until Anet finally gave in to the addicts who play 8-10 hours wanting gear grind. Just disappointed.

3. Class imbalance. I main-ed an ele, and Anet has failed all of us elementalists. We’re broken in almost all aspects of the game, but Anet has continued to ignore. It’s either the devs are extremely ignorant, disregarding all ele forum posts or are extremely incompetent. Nerfing is not the solution anymore, improve other classes. Revert the ele back to its original state last year.

4. Overpowered AIs. This is not a problem in pve, but in pvp/wvw, when a build have AIs doing 70% of the work… there is a problem. Common examples: MM necro, spirit ranger.

AtoBoss.2906:

3. Class imbalance. I main-ed an ele, and Anet has failed all of us elementalists. We’re broken in almost all aspects of the game, but Anet has continued to ignore. It’s either the devs are extremely ignorant, disregarding all ele forum posts or are extremely incompetent. Nerfing is not the solution anymore, improve other classes. Revert the ele back to its original state last year.

I can only assume you mean in PvP? In PvE Elemenatlist is effing awesome. It’s my new favorite class. In PvP Eles get owned.

Reasons for leaving:
1. New LS content with no substance, too much sub par suff. Zephyrium was cool, the rest not so much.

2. Grind wars 2 or Farm wars 2. It’s optional, but it’s the only thing left to do. So for me there is no content left. We are not hero’s we are farmers.

3. Bosses have too much HP. I mean if there was a combination of things or condition you could do to take down the HP faster sure that would be cool. But now it’s just hack away at million HP.

4. Camera.

How to get me back:

1. Fix the Camera.

2. New lands, new map content. Anet should have thought out map completion better if this is holding them back.

3. Progress the story to other dragons, it’s already been a year.

4. Epic boss fights. Not HP x millions.

Stopped playing because of profession (un)balance and the extremely boring and repetitive spvp game mode (conquest)

I would come back if sPvP became enjoyable instead of frustrating.

A just simple action:

reverting ascended tier
Proving they have the courage to admit their worst mistake will get most players back.

I can wait for balance and stuff.

AtoBoss.2906:

I haven’t quit yet, but I’m taking a long break and plan to only pvp/wvw when I finally reinstall. Reasons for leaving:
1. Community changed. After the recent patches from August, gw2 is nothing but farm and accumulating enough gold for a legendary, ascended and whatever. Seriously, I log on and I only see ‘FE 4 min, lf 2m ac speedclear, Teq up in TC.’ The game I played 7 months ago is no longer existent and the conversations and interactions within, come down to mere farming.

2. Grind. I started the game loving gear progression. I wanted the gear, I wanted to base my goals around stats, I wanted to own with an unfair advantage, I wanted to grind those dung, bosses for rewards. but after a few weeks I learnt what GW2 was REALLY about and truly enjoyed what the game had to offer. Despite having full ascended trinkets for 3 characters, I really enjoyed just playing the game for a good 4-5 months until Anet finally gave in to the addicts who play 8-10 hours wanting gear grind. Just disappointed.

Now all that people do is swarm the very few most profitable events in the game, this creates zergs and champ trains, where the only goal is to amass wealth. Long gone are the days where i would wander in a given zone to do any event, team up with pugs and engage in conversation.

I guess it’s just that the gaming community has been burnt out by the game itself, and the resulting bitter social interactions that usually arise from this kind of gaming mentality are very different from what i used to experience in the first few months.

What would bring me back?
It’s no secret that people farm queensdale / frostgorge, world bosses, etc… i’m sure Anet is entirely aware of this. What they need to do in my book is make the rest of the world events equally rewarding in regards to time spend/reward in order to spread the population across the beautifully crafted maps and get rid of the mindless zerging of people watching their favourite tv show with their finger on the 1 key.

I mean Anet has created hundreds of world events happening everywhere at any given time, yet they are entirely ignored by the vast majority…

Reasons I’ve mostly left (I log in when I’m REALLY bored).

1. Loot drop rates. Diminishing Returns is a petty hack to push players to play the game the way Anet wants them to. I prefer to gather my mats for my crafting needs, even if that means farming for them. DR forces people to farm where Anet wants them to (other than buying gems, the best way to get T6 mats is to farm gold and buy them off the TP, thus you farm anyway, but where Anet decides you farm).
2. Crafting turned out to be good for a few levels and not much more. There is no reward for crafting in the game other than the XP. You can’t craft an item and have a chance at something rare come out of it, and you can’t craft things that are better than the drops you get at a given level. Many times I’d craft an item to wear, and then get a better drop a day later.
3. Gimmicks. Dodging is a fantastic part of the game. One-shot mechanics are a cheesy gimmick that tries to force importance into dodging that it already has. It’s as if the attitude at Anet is “we’re going to force you to play our way”.
4. “table filler” loot. Got tired of hearing “all shiny” when receiving utter crap. Yellow medallions or whatever the heck they are are worthless, and do nothing but pollute the yellow table with crap so Anet doesn’t have to hand out as many truly “rare” items. It’s childish and no better than a bait-n-switch.
5. Precursors. There have been a hundred threads on the stupidity of making end game content slot-machine-gated.
6. Boredom. When considering buying GW2 I watched a lot of videos about the game (but had no knowledge of GW1). When seeing people open the map, the world looked huge, and I accepted that some of it wouldn’t be accessible because it was likely slated for expansions. The dream of seeing new zones once in a while is quite dead, and out of the entire map, we have hardly any of it to explore. The lack of diversity in landscape beyond foliage is disheartening. We have mountains with snow, mountains with jungle, mountains with temperate. We have plains with scrub, plains with snow, plains with grass. And then we have everything with dead coral. People at Anet need to visit Bryce Canyon sometime, as well as Arches National, Austria, Australia, and any other of the widely varied locations we have. At the very least we could use a desert region (multi-zone). The world of GW2 is much smaller than I had thought it would be.

That’s probably a short list. What can bring me back?

1. Get rid of DR. If I want to stand in the same spot killing the same firefly for 4 hours straight to get venom sacs, I want the option to do that. I want to be able to find mobs that drop specific T6 mats, and actually farm them for that specific mat.
2. Actually let mats drop. There are only 3 zones where they drop, the amount of time it would take to gather the mats manually is unrealistic, so everyone is forced to farm gold to buy the mats.
3. Quit nerfing loot drops because people discover a spot to get certain mats.
4. Change precursors to an item that you craft and remove them from the standard loot drop tables. Make them about as difficult to craft as an ascended weapon, not something stupid hard. Players already go through the entire map and often play in area they don’t want to play in order to get the pieces for their legendary.
5. More 80 areas like South Sun. Let the reward of getting to 80 be the ability to explore areas that you can’t get to otherwise. Make entire zones that you can’t get to without achieving something that takes a legendary weapons worth of time to access, and make the rewards worth gaining that access.

I’m one of the few people that thinks ascended crafting is really well implemented. I think time gating and account (note: ACCOUNT, not soul) binding items is an excellent way to level the playing field among play styles. Attaching “better gear” to this method was the big issue. Introduction of the ascended stuff brought my back a little because of all this. It involved crafting materials that could be obtained consistently (wood/metal), and it involved some work to get to where you need to be in order to make a weapon. Aside from the impact that not playing much has had on it, I am just 11points away from being able to craft my first Ascended, and it’s been a nice goal to have. It will be rewarding when I finally have it made. Unfortunately, as listed way above, I’ll have to grind gold to buy the T6 mats required.

And my complaints are the least of the problems with this game. There are plenty of other things people want changed that would bring players back in large numbers.

Reasons I’ve mostly left and suggestions:

(1) Living story feels rushed and unpolished. At first I enjoyed the idea of the Living Story, but as a vehicle for telling epic tales it is lacking. We get very few story details during each release, and many important ones are left to blog posts and interviews. More story telling needs to be done in game and more development time is needed between releases. You should consider taking on a more manageable schedule. Do small quality of life changes for one to two months, then hit us with a Living Story arc that is epic and more complete (i.e., it doesn’t feel like I’m catching ten minutes of a 2 hour movie). As a result of this overly ambitious schedule larger content releases seem to be off the table despite you claiming everything is on the table. Many MMOs do take much longer between releases, but they are adding more polished and larger content; such as new epic tales, permanent dungeons, and permanent large-scale zones with multiple quests.

(2) New content lacks the world impact that made some of the original dynamic events great. Many liked Scarlet’s Invasions, Queen’s Gauntlet, and Southsun settler events; but some did not (¹,²). The invasions didn’t need to occur in the zones they occurred in as there was no rhyme or reason for why they occurred there. The zones were not impacted in the slightest by the invasions. Scarlet’s minions just sat there waiting to be killed. There were no objectives to defend from her invasion. Completing or failing the invasion had no effect on the zone. If you review your manifesto content like this was the target of the criticisms you leveraged against other MMO’s quest content.

Going forward before you introduce new dynamic events, whether it be huge invasion type content or small events like hunting an arctodus so Edmund can get a new rug; you should be asking yourself:

• Does this event and surrounding environment give enough story context for why the player is performing the activity?
• During the event, should a player arrive late; is there spoken or text dialogue that can catch a player up?
• Are the NPCs acting appropriate to the context of the tale you are telling with the dynamic event?
• Can the NPCs make meaningful impact on the world around them should players succeed/fail at the task at hand?
• Does the impact have lasting effects on the surrounding area or the zone at large so that the players feel like they did something meaningful?
• Can those effects be changed back to the previous state by player and NPC actions or are they on a timer? If the latter, try to go for the former. (cont’d)

¹ – Are we trading Dynamic Events for Rifts?
² – Does ArenaNet Regret Dynamic Events?

(3) Dynamic events fail to make the players feel like they’ve made meaningful changes on the world. Whether it be the epic dragon fights or smaller centaur incursions, the events repeat too frequently and many times without cause, removing the immersion and reminding players their actions don’t matter. I know it would upset the loot/achievement/farming motivated players, but I’d prefer a more organic world where player and NPC actions matter, as opposed to one where things run on predictable schedules so that people aren’t denied access to their loot pinatas.

To make the world feel more organic NPC actions and reactions need to be logical and whenever possible, off timers. If we succeed in winning an outpost from the centaurs, it should open up new events to fortify that outpost from the centaurs. Making it harder for them to take it back. In response the centaurs will have their own “events”, where they must gather resources to build up their attack, descry new combat techniques or spells, scout out the player controlled encampments for weaknesses in the defenses, perform guerrilla attacks on bases elsewhere, and perform assassinations on key players that wander outside the safety of the encampments. Players may interrupt these centaur “events” to make their reclamation of the fortress harder still. To ensure the centaurs aren’t always pushed from the maps, you can add centaur type “break out events”, where the centaurs get a powerful boss to rally to their aid occasionally. This type of dynamic scaling need not be on a timer either, but can be based on how many successes the players of that world have been against the centaur incursions (³). The idea here being that a warlord doesn’t enter the fray unless necessary. The more event choices we as the players have to help shape the ebb and flow of a zone the better.

Similar changes can be made to the big boss events, like Tequatl(⁴). Tequatl shouldn’t be entering the fray unless the players are doing really well at controlling Sparkfly Fen. After he is defeated players should have to perform events necessary for combating his eventual return, and his minions should be doing things to aid his return. If Tequatl wins, he should do more than corrupt the shore and then flee. He should stick around aiding his minions in capturing objectives around them map in an invasion style event. If the players fight back this invasions to the shores again, they get another crack at Tequatl. Again, NPCs need behave in context with the tale you are trying to tell.

(4) Vertical progression. I don’t find it terribly motivating and more of a nuisance to have to increase arbitrary numbers to do content that doesn’t actually possess new skills or mechanics to overcome, but rather just larger arbitrary numbers than the previous content. It’s a simple gating mechanic put in by lazy developers to extend the longevity of their games. What happened to measuring your game’s success by how fun it is (⁵) as opposed to how long you can keep people obtaining new gear, and thus, increasing your revenue?

³ – Scale-Dynamic-Event-Difficulty-on-Success
⁴ – Sad part? This event will die soon.
⁵ – Is it Fun? Colin Johanson on how ArenaNet Measures Success

Reasons for leaving.

1 – WvW The direction it was heading, The horrible skill lag/zerg fests/the lack of rewards for defending.

2 – The addition of ascended items.

OP,

Very Interesting thread!

I agree and support everyting you stated

Reasons for losing interest:

1. The overall combat and game play. It feels redundant and simple. Things need to be more complex and should feel like there’s an impact. I would like to have that sense of weight where every skill makes a significant difference. Where enemies react to every unique skill differently. Where pulling off combos feels rewarding etc.

2. The rewards mindset. I hate, absolutely hate, how rewards (consumables, gear etc.) seems to be the main focus of the game. There’s nothing wrong with having them, yet there is something wrong when everyone plays strictly for them. It’s destroying this community by making everyone overly selfish and egocentric.

3. Story is lacking. I’m trying to get into the story, mainly to try and counter my dislike for the first two problems I listed. Yet I can’t get into it. There needs to be more grey. Things are not black & white, that’s just utterly unrealistic. There’s a lack of depth to all aspects. There’s a great story to be had, yet it feels dumbed down. It’s like if Disney suddenly took over the Game of Thrones franchise… Disgusting thought. Now I certainly don’t expect GW2 to be like GoT as far as adult content goes, however, it definitely needs to be taken more serious.