Guild Wars 2

An area this game has great potential for is large scale combat, but the current versions of it are low quality or broken.

In the open world large scale combat either comes down to being trivial or difficult for the wrong reasons.

Much of the content just isn’t designed to deal with the massive amount of players around. For the majority of content the enemies have trouble killing a single player, let alone the 50+ that can be around. The few players that do get killed can easily recover via revives or way pointing and running back.

When it comes to challenging content, the bulk of the difficulty comes not from the combat mechanics, but from lower forms of “artificial” difficulty, such as timers before an automatic defeat, and group coordination. Rather than the objective of the fight being how well players can utilize their given skills, respond to the enemy with them, and the ultimate objective being wiping out the group of players completely, the fights have degraded into DPS marching bands.

WvW fights are mostly one-sided and this issue is furthered by imbalanced populations.

EotM is the worst PvP format I’ve ever played. People just run around as a massive group, taking one building after another. You can do this for large periods of time without running into the opposing blob of players, and when you do it’s almost never a fair or even remotely interesting fight. Nobody cares about the core objective or to fight other players; they only go there to farm.

The borderland and battleground maps suffer from some of the same core issues. Players like to run around in massive groups creating one-sided uninteresting fights, one server is often much stronger than the other 2 ruining any fair competition, but that can only happen when people are actually playing it. In the low to mid tier servers you can’t even find people to play with much of the day and if you get enough people you can run around taking everything unopposed.

Both of these areas seem very poorly designed, which is a shame seeing how much of the game they make up, especially for veteran players.

I know some of you still enjoy this content, but even if you do, you can’t be blind to issues like these which push some of us away from the content completely.

/rant