Guild Wars 2

I’m on high population EU sever, but I have to say that game feels bit empty, and my guess is that people are leaving for some reason.

So, are people quitting GW2 and why, and is there a way to get them back?
Also, is there a way to check number of active players in a zone / server, perhaps an API tool or something like that?

Release a solid, full expansion with more than 1 day’s worth of content

I personally don’t think it will ever happen. I want to be proved wrong, but then again, I also want to win the lottery.

They’re not advancing the real story of the dragons….just these tiny little made up random plots that nobody even cares about the characters for…. Makes people totally lose interest. Yeah it’s something new every month, but it’s all exactly the same.

Stuff has appeared out in the world, go kill it for drops!!! Oh and there’s a new single player instance!!!

Yeah, same thing over and over again. They’ll lose tons of people with TESO.

I don’t think are particularly leaving atm.
GW2 has always had a fluctuating player base because it is a BtP game.

By fluctuating I mean: some people play all the time, some once or twice a week, weekends only or even once every couple of months.
Some players leave, new players come.
This will probably be the cycle throughout the games life.
That said I think the pretty fast story updates have pushed players into certain maps and that will definitely make the rest of the world emptier.
I don’t know how Anet is going to address this or even if they want to
The loot re-haul might be some help.

What server are you playing, if I may ask?

The guild I was with, with around 30 people, quit months ago simply because the game doesn’t really offer anything. The mostly-PvE players got to 80, did the dungeons and quit. Some return for the events, but since they only play for a few hours then leave, I guess they’re not that interested. The dedicated PvP players got bored quick while the more casual ones played a few games a day for months, then moved on. A few players quit really early on due to how leveling works. With no clear direction (quest chains), I guess it just seemed as one big grind.

The game taught a few people that previously complained about vertical progression that they liked vertical progression. For example, the same people that complained about getting 1 shot in the previous MMO due to gear now complain about not having gear to work towards, giving them the ability to 1 shot noobs.

Altogether, I’d have the say the base reason is the game is just too casual, to a point where even the people that only played a few hours a day or every few days (the casual players of the guild) finished everything in just a few months. For comparison, in a typical MMO, it would take a few months to get to that point, where you would then have to grind gear for a few months, at which point the whole thing repeats. Even though they don’t like grinding, it’s the thing that kept them playing since it gave them a goal. You could say this is where legendaries come in, but since they’re just a skin, no one was really that interested.

Like for many people, the cycle will just continue. They will hop to the next game and begin anew. GW2 was one of the shortest MMOs I’ve seen them hop to, lasting roughly 3 months (most last at least 6 months to a year). The only shorter one was Aion, which lasted about a month until level grinding the same thing over and over killed it.

Mentalhead.5721:

Also, is there a way to check number of active players in a zone / server, perhaps an API tool or something like that?

No. The only way to do that would be by getting everyone to run a program, such as the one that tracks your in-game position, and then calculate the numbers off of who’s in what zone.

What will people be saying once even they can’t seem to find many people in LA much less anywhere else on these servers. The naysayers will still be looking at the level label placed on the server and yell “but it says full! what are you talking about?!”

I almost never see anyone on my server and it’s been one of the most full unofficial RP servers I can only imagine what it’s like on a low pop server where everyones guesting somewhere else.

I also don’t understand what the delay is on the rewards system, Why are we still waiting on something as simple as that?

It’s no wonder people are talking about playing other games while they are waiting for them to take these things seriously at this point. There’s only so much patience gamers have.

tigirius.9014:

What will people be saying once even they can’t seem to find many people in LA much less anywhere else on these servers. The naysayers will still be looking at the level label placed on the server and yell “but it says full! what are you talking about?!”

I almost never see anyone on my server and it’s been one of the most full unofficial RP servers I can only imagine what it’s like on a low pop server where everyones guesting somewhere else.

I also don’t understand what the delay is on the rewards system, Why are we still waiting on something as simple as that?

It’s no wonder people are talking about playing other games while they are waiting for them to take these things seriously at this point. There’s only so much patience gamers have.

People won’t be saying anything. Most will just move on with the fact that the game is beyond dead and will play something else

The thing about the temporary content is to keep players playing. There is very much likely an expansion in the works that COULD release this year. They need it. I also think a lot of what ArenaNet says they’re going to add is being saved for the expansion.

They need one badly. There is currently no challenge in this game… only grind. WvW is fun but timezones are an issue and tiers don’t move without matchups being one sided.

They also need to badly stop adding joke content. These new armor skins are a joke, and half the stuff you can buy in the gem store is a joke as well. Super adventure box huh… totally content serious gamers want in their game….

I don’t care about steampunk Mole-People.
I don’t care about crabs attacking sunbathers.
I don’t care about silly murder mysteries in Lion’s Arch.
I absolutely loathe the idea of Pirates in a fantasy mmo.
I don’t care about temporary content.

The living story fails on so many levels. The player should always be the protagonist of the storyline and not made to feel like a common grunt/footman who’s sole purpose is doing the bidding of the NPCs.

RNG….there is nothing fun about farming for days (and in the face of diminishing returns) only to be shut down by fleeting/temporary content which is heavily saturated by RNG rewards.

Temporary content is a waste of developer time and resources. Those resources could be better spent developing lasting, permanent content that actually changes and expands the game world.

And, please, developers….make the player the focus of the storyline. The story makes me feel like I am a 5th wheel who is merely witnessing events rather than shaping them. If I wanted to simply witness the events, I can do that on YouTube.

Nothing.

The game is too far gone to ever revitalize interest in it.

It’ll go free to play, eventually.

Step one would be to stop buffing the top classes while nerfing the bottom classes.

Step two would be to stop balancing based on sPvP or split the skills every time instead of just on a handful.

Step three would be to change their main priority to making the game as fun as possible instead of being greedy and chasing some pipe dreaming of getting esport money.

The game has problems in literally every single department.

PvE: The content post release has had nothing to do with Zhaitan (who himself was a joke). Holidays and pirates are cute, but thats not really engaging content. The story should be somewhat tied together and it isnt. 1-shot fight mechanics are not fun.

How to get people back? Get back to the main characters and the story. An update that kills Trahearne would bring a lot of PvE’rs back. Go back and get rid of dodge-now-or-die mechanics in existing dungeons, dont implement more in the future.

PvP: They made huge promises and failed to deliver them in a reasonable time. Most of the PvPers are gone and wont ever come back even now that some of the promises have been met.

How to bring people back: Cant.

WvW: I am not really sure how this happened, but I think they underestimated the popularity of this game mode, they didnt support it at all just like PvP, so many players left. Look how long it took to fix culling. Thief WvW imbalance clearly isn’t a concern for them like it is for the community. No new maps or things to do other than a leveling system that basically makes players using siege into demigods, when the whole point of open world pvp is to have open world pvp and not siege vs siege.

How to bring people back: Unique, more interesting maps for each BL. Punish zerging. Remove increased range from wvw abilities.

I don’t think people are “quitting”, but rather returning their copy of GW2 to ArenaNet for a full refund of their purchase price. If Anet does figure a way out a content update that would be good, people won’t buy the game again just for 1 update. Can’t bring people back

I’ll put in my 2 cents on why I’m not playing.

Progression and visible progression is not in GW2.

The issue with me with WoW was that the best content was reserved for the 10-25-40 man groups and we all know that the majority of people cannot commit to raiding guilds or schedules. It’s why like 2% of the pop sees that content.

That is a ‘logistics’ problem.

GW2 went and solved that by making content 5 man only.

But the problem is that there is no progression in content in GW2.

I want the story and plot to continue and push me in a direction that sends me to Questlines A and Dungeon A, then in order to get to the next part I have to beat Dungeon A. After beating Dungeon A, then you can move on to the next part of the Questlines and then that leads you to Dungeon B, but you can’t do Dungeon B without beating Dungeon A. I want dungeon sets and I want hard content to get those.

And so on…I want this type of progression. And I want it at end game. I want it to be hard and so on. I want to have to have gear that is required to beat the next content.

But the issue that WoW had was the hardest part was getting all those players together.

We all know the loot grind. It’s there. But it’s part of the MMO genre. But if you don’t have the carrot, then the want to log in is not there.

GW2 has an amazing world and story, but they really dropped the ball with PvE content. There aren’t enough dungeons and the mechanics are just lacking (same with Character skills…so bored on Engineer its not even funny).

I’ve gone back to WoW and they’ve really gotten better with making sure people can see progression on their toons and also see content. Do I think they need to get rid of 25 man content..yep and focus more on the small man stuff…yep. But in there I can actually feel progression.

In GW2, I just feel like everything is just disjointed.

I had this conversation the other day with my friends and I think it’s true with a lot of us.

We wanted GW2 to be the next WoW, but with max content being 5 man. Many feel the issues with WoW are just too many logistic issues (10+ player required and not realistic for most).

Dedlaw.9130:

Release a solid, full expansion with more than 1 day’s worth of content

This. After some twinks and dungeons, what keeps players interested? Some tweak of a little story, which adds 1-2 hours of new game play? No. If someone looses interest that much, that s/he quits, it has to be something fresh that lasts. It has to be something, that can be explored in weeks and months. And there is nothing fresh and tempting as a good sized expansion with fresh and lasting content.

Living story might be something for those who still play, but it won’t get people back.

AlexisRosewood.4210:

I don’t think people are “quitting”, but rather returning their copy of GW2 to ArenaNet for a full refund of their purchase price. If Anet does figure a way out a content update that would be good, people won’t buy the game again just for 1 update. Can’t bring people back

That’s quite the claim lol. Where would one even go to evidence this? And wouldn’t returning their copy imply they are, in fact, quitting? Not sure what the quotes around quitting was supposed to imply. They are still playing but returning their GW2 copy?

Maybe a server consolidation is in order because when I play on Fort Aspenwood, I never feel like the world is empty. Maybe I just have a higher tolerance for emptiness. If I’m playing in a zone and see 20+ people, I consider it fine. Now if I’m in a zone and see absolutely no one the entire time I’m there, then that of course is a problem.

That has never happened to me, I should add.

I wonder if anyone realises that the living story is them playing with different ideas once they have a good idea of what players like and don’t like they set it aside in the MOAR stuff category.

This is what they mean by working on the core of the game.

Also development takes a lot of time. Give them time to work on stuff.

I also think it would be interesting if data was gathered on WvW population vs those that complain that the world is empty. Same with PvP population vs those that complain the world is empty.

An expansion is the only real way to bring people back. If someone isn’t playing, news of a big patch might not reach them. But expansions reach everyone’s ears. One of those would get the marketing necessary to bring in new players, especially if new classes and a new zone was added.

To bring them back Anet needs to keep their promises before game was launched, meaning to make it the best mmo ever not a mediocre one! Stop bringing monthly temporary patches and trait build patches that ruins people’s chars. Heard that mesmers and engeneers got hit pretty bad by last patch. You make a weak class compared to war or guardian even weaker? Where Is the point? Yeah a game expansion seems to be the only real way to get the game on the track. Not monthly junk updates…. And make leveling not soooo boring please. This is my third time trying to lvl to 80 and it kills me beacause of boredom. There are people who leveled like 10 chars to 80(can’t imagine how the had the that patience). Getting all pois,vistas,waypoints and the rest in a map for 1.5 silver and some junk armor ? Is this a bad joke ? There is no sense in getting all points on all maps except if you want the gifts of exploration for legendaries. Fix all of those and the game could be a better place. Could attract players to play it.

Dedlaw.9130:

Release a solid, full expansion with more than 1 day’s worth of content

Unfortunately I doubt this will happen any time soon. The devs responses in the Cantha thread make it sound like they have zero plans to do anything bigger than these living stories. The main reason, I think, is that NC$oft is publishing Wildstar.

For those who don’t know, Anet is a studio that makes the game. NC$oft is a separate company that sits on a mountain of cash and pays studios like Anet to make games. Since NC$oft is busy giving money to a different studio to make Wildstar, my guess is they are reluctant to give any money to Anet. Anet is then forced to use what limited resources they have left to simply keep GW2 afloat, which is why every content release is essentially a small festival to promote the sale of something in the cash shop.

Personally, I don’t think NCsoft wants Arena Net to release anything major this year – it could make Wildstart lose its potential players and thus lose money.

But, other than that, keep increasing the difficulty, add more different unique skins to the game (not to gem store), add more skills, add more PvP modes, increase the party size, add more instances and dungeons, the list goes on.

People keep saying the only way to get customers to come back is to provide an expansion. Well, I think SOME of the people will come back, but NOT the people that had a problem with the game already. If some of those people left due to bad game design, poor story elements, or disappointment of the direction of the game, why would they spend MORE money? If the developers don’t address the issues that turned players off to the game, why would they (the players) waste the money to get MORE of the same disappointment?

I’ve recently decided to play the game again…just piddling through the Dragon Bash content. Noticed I had to grind through a few things if I want the dragon wings. OK, fine. However, I can tell you…if they put out an expansion tomorrow, I wouldn’t buy it.

OT: I wondered why the reward for the beginning of the Dragon Bash events was 1 gold…until the next quest: you SPEND that 1 gold jumping all over the map to complete the quests! THAT is ridiculous!!!

Nick.6972:

Personally, I don’t think NCsoft wants Arena Net to release anything major this year – it could make Wildstart lose its potential players and thus lose money.

But, other than that, keep increasing the difficulty, add more different unique skins to the game (not to gem store), add more skills, add more PvP modes, increase the party size, add more instances and dungeons, the list goes on.

I agree with your assessment of NCSoft. However, I think there is a large group of players who, like myself, will NEVER spend money on another NCSoft game due to what they’ve done to this game and its players!

Saldonus Darkholme.5680:

I agree with your assessment of NCSoft. However, I think there is a large group of players who, like myself, will NEVER spend money on another NCSoft game due to what they’ve done to this game and its players!

Not just this game. I remember City of Heroes NCSoft. I remember the flippant disregard for the studio that took it and made it amazing. I remember that you are a bad company.

Saldonus Darkholme.5680:

Nick.6972:

Personally, I don’t think NCsoft wants Arena Net to release anything major this year – it could make Wildstart lose its potential players and thus lose money.

But, other than that, keep increasing the difficulty, add more different unique skins to the game (not to gem store), add more skills, add more PvP modes, increase the party size, add more instances and dungeons, the list goes on.

I agree with your assessment of NCSoft. However, I think there is a large group of players who, like myself, will NEVER spend money on another NCSoft game due to what they’ve done to this game and its players!

Blizzard messed up WoW and Diablo 3 and lost me as a customer. I still love to play Starcraft 2 but I will purchase no further expansions for that title. I refuse to make any further purchases of ActiBlizzard’s products.

Now, ANet and NCSoft are ruining Guild Wars 2. I still love Guild Wars 1 but I cannot bear to log in to Guild Wars 2 any longer. The Flame & Frost and Southsun patches/arcs ruined the game for me. Now there are pirates. I absolutely hate pirates. Pirates have no place in a fantasy, dragon-themed mmo. This unoriginal, mismatched content does nothing to inspire confidence regarding future ANet/NCSoft titles.

So I am now in mmo limbo, biding my time until some other company actually gets it right. It’s a shame, really. GW2 had so much more potential.

Elbegast.6970:

Saldonus Darkholme.5680:

Nick.6972:

Personally, I don’t think NCsoft wants Arena Net to release anything major this year – it could make Wildstart lose its potential players and thus lose money.

But, other than that, keep increasing the difficulty, add more different unique skins to the game (not to gem store), add more skills, add more PvP modes, increase the party size, add more instances and dungeons, the list goes on.

I agree with your assessment of NCSoft. However, I think there is a large group of players who, like myself, will NEVER spend money on another NCSoft game due to what they’ve done to this game and its players!

Blizzard messed up WoW and Diablo 3 and lost me as a customer. I still love to play Starcraft 2 but I will purchase no further expansions for that title. I refuse to make any further purchases of ActiBlizzard’s products.

Now, ANet and NCSoft are ruining Guild Wars 2. I still love Guild Wars 1 but I cannot bear to log in to Guild Wars 2 any longer. The Flame & Frost and Southsun patches/arcs ruined the game for me. Now there are pirates. I absolutely hate pirates. Pirates have no place in a fantasy, dragon-themed mmo. This unoriginal, mismatched content does nothing to inspire confidence regarding future ANet/NCSoft titles.

So I am now in mmo limbo, biding my time until some other company actually gets it right. It’s a shame, really. GW2 had so much more potential.

That’s a difference of opinion. To me, Air Pirates (ie: steampunk) totally fits in with the universe of GW2. I mean, look at the engineer profession; GW2 isn’t straight fantasy.

But I agree that the devs’ mis-stepped has cost players. They could, however, still fix the problem by rolling ascended gear back down to exotic stats.

I agree with the sentiment expressed by many. The Living Story has really just been smoke and mirrors attempting to make very little added content seem like it something more than that.

I remember, before launch, one of the devs talking about how efficiently they could add new Dynamic Events to the game. How a single developer could knock out a simple DE in an day, with half the day being for the initial design and the other half tweaking through iteration.

I also remember the post launch interview with Colin, where he said that adding new DEs across the game world, in order to keep every zone feeling fresh and alive, would be a primary focus of their ongoing, free development strategy. He even predicted that by the end of the first year, we could see the number of DEs in the world double or triple!

Well, I guess he got some flack from fans on the failure to deliver in any noticeable way on Dynamic Events. So, the latest is “Oh, DEs, they are really hard to develop. They take a lot longer to develop than normal MMO content”.

Really?

How did they go from being able to develop at least 300 DEs per year pre-launch, boasting about possibly adding a number more first year, some where in the neighborhood of 1,500, to “oh, that content is too hard to make”?

Not to mention that during the five years of development they weren’t just adding DEs,(and story content), to the game. They were creating this massive game from scratch. How have they gone from being so amazingly productive to what they have since become?

For every year of development, based on the amount of play I’ve gotten from the game so far, they managed to produce over 300 hours worth of playability. I think we can agree that with the live updates over the last 10 months, they’ve added just a tiny fraction to that.

Because of the nature of the game, the world and the content, it wouldn’t take an entire game’s worth of new content to extend game play another year. It would just require enough new content to keep the game world feeling fresh and alive. They had the right idea when they announced that they hoped to double or triple the amount of new DEs across the game world. Instead, we get vapid Living Story events and excuses as to why DEs are suddenly “too hard”.

These aren’t the only things contributing to active “playership” loss. The crass disrespect towards paying customers via the long odds RNG chests hasn’t helped. The lack of quality, in game, armor and weapon skins for a game that is supposed to rely on aesthetic rewards as a major carrot hasn’t helped. Retuning the first dungeon from something that was never really a suitable introductory experience into a complete meat grinder for players dipping their toe in dungeons hasn’t helped. Guild Content that was designed to destroy the viability of small guilds also hasn’t helped. (My small guild left the game after the one two punch of the AC re-tune and the Guild Content that felt unobtainable).

The game that Arenanet created during those five years of development is absolutely amazing. I’m still playing almost every day, not because of “content” floated since launch, but because of content the game shipped with.

Post launch Arenanet seems to bear little resemblance to the studio that created this game and I’m still trying to understand why!

I had thought maybe the lack of productivity and design ability was due to most of the company working on the first expansion. However, Colin then told us they hadn’t even begun any work on an expansion. If that was less than truthful, then that statement also has contributed to the decline of the game. If it is truthful and the entire studio has been working in teams on Living Story and other stuff added since launch, then the implosion of leadership and productivity are at the core of the problem.

I really think it’s way past time for a higher up at ANet to provide a mea culpa, explain what went wrong and lay out plans on how they intend to get things back on track again.

As a very long term devotee of the MMO genre, it’s beyond painful to see the first MMO to really start living up to the potential for the genre flounder with the transition to post launch development cycles. Every day I play I keep wondering how a studio that produced this incredible game could so completely lose direction post-launch. Once again, I just don’t get it.

aocypher.9172:

They could, however, still fix the problem by rolling ascended gear back down to exotic stats.

That would be an even bigger disaster to the community than when they first announced ascended gear. All that time and energy spent doing fractals, getting laurels, earning each piece… They can’t just remove an entire tier of equipment. Besides, I think it’s been well established that ascended gear is not all that hard to get, nor is it so powerful as to make exotics worthless.

Xenon.4537:

aocypher.9172:

They could, however, still fix the problem by rolling ascended gear back down to exotic stats.

That would be an even bigger disaster to the community than when they first announced ascended gear. All that time and energy spent doing fractals, getting laurels, earning each piece… They can’t just remove an entire tier of equipment. Besides, I think it’s been well established that ascended gear is not all that hard to get, nor is it so powerful as to make exotics worthless.

While I agree with you that a rollback may cause massive unhappiness to people who grinded for ascended gear, I disagree with your last sentence.

For the first part, while it’s not hard for people who play daily to get ascended gear, it’s a huge burden for the people who could only play less than 5 hours a week in small chunks. They don’t have enough time to run fractral. They can’t run most guild missions. They don’t always do a daily. They don’t have enough time to do a monthly. That artifical time gate locks them out.

For the second part, going from a fully zerked warrior with exotic zerk accessories to the same warrior with ascended zerk accessories is ~6% increase in effective power; that’s more than a superior sigil of force.

I would like to see a new advertising campaign. not really to bring players back. those that left so long seeya later and you won ’t be missed.
I would rather them show the changes as tbhey stand now for new folkif old players return so much the betterI

Elbegast.6970:

I don’t care about steampunk Mole-People.
I don’t care about crabs attacking sunbathers.
I don’t care about silly murder mysteries in Lion’s Arch.
I absolutely loathe the idea of Pirates in a fantasy mmo.
I don’t care about temporary content.

The living story fails on so many levels. The player should always be the protagonist of the storyline and not made to feel like a common grunt/footman who’s sole purpose is doing the bidding of the NPCs.

Personal opinion aside, while this is true for single player games, in an MMO where you’re supposed to be part of a world. How is every single player supposed to be the protagonist of the overarching story of the world?

Although you may not be the main protagonist of the story, you’ll still have your own stories as you do the content. The experiences you have as you play. I remember one night me and five of my friends held off a zerg from a siege camp for about 10 minutes until one of our zergs come and flanked them.

Elbegast.6970:

Temporary content is a waste of developer time and resources. Those resources could be better spent developing lasting, permanent content that actually changes and expands the game world.

Depends on what they do with the content after removing it.

If they merely just don’t use it anymore, then it’s a waste.

If, however, they’ll use the assets, content (like putting the dungeons in the Fractals) and such again in the future, then it isn’t a waste. Even if they gain something in the way of experience, it isn’t a wasted experience.

Elbegast.6970:

And, please, developers….make the player the focus of the storyline. The story makes me feel like I am a 5th wheel who is merely witnessing events rather than shaping them. If I wanted to simply witness the events, I can do that on YouTube.

The player can shape events without being the focus of the storyline. Not saying it has been done, but it can be.