I read other game forums sometimes. It’s interesting to see what are problems in other games and to watch the forum blow up over issues X, Y or Z. I’ve yet to see any forums that doesn’t have people sadly or angrily leaving because the Devs have betrayed the game or watered it down or didn’t fix issues X, Y, or Z fast enough. After awhile, all the forums posts look the same. It’s just a shuffling around of what is the outrage of the day.
You’re right.
During season 1 i got tired of seeing my guild mates run off, and of having to chase around achievements all the time, so i stopped playing for half a year. I tried several MMORPGs during, but all were lacking, specially after playing the awesome combat system of GW2. So i pretty much just stopped playing MMORPGs, finally got into LoL, and got to playing stuff out of my Steam library.
Then i got back to GW2 when i started hearing about positive changes to the stuff i was disliking, and i’ve been playing the game again for over a year now after my break.
And yeah, look at other game forums and there will be discontent…
But thing is, we can’t just close our eyes to the backtracking imposed onto the game by HoT.
And yeah, like the OP said, its not the expansion in itself, its changes to core aspects of the game that downgraded them with the expansion.
Dungeons and fractals were kittenized, one lost its rewards, the other lost what made it unique – the randomness (and the rewards are crap too), fractals were nice because each run was unique, you never knew what was coming from them, and even inside a dungeon you could have multiple paths. Now you always know what’s coming, and honestly, given the way its set up they’re pretty much saying, no more fractals will be coming any time soon (because each lvl already has a fractal assigned).
WvW was neglected for the last 3 years with only minor changes, and now they bundle up positive changes with some of the worse stuff they did to WvW.
Not only are the new maps not that great, but they also turned what should have been the best improvement to the game as of yet, the guild halls, into a blatant Resource sink, and not happy with that they tied said resource sink so heavily into WvW that no small guilds will participate in WvW. My guild would do small roamer raids every weak, capturing camps, cutting off supply lines, capturing towers when the enemy was otherwise engaged, etc. We were playing a guerilla game, and having fun with it. Now? Now i’ve been to WvW twice since HoT, the first time i went i realized i couldn’t capture a camp for my guild mission, and pretty much only went there to buy stuff i needed from the main camp.
They killed it for smaller guilds. Not only do you need to kit up a war room, no small feat for smaller guilds, but then you also need a high lvl scribe to use the bonus we used to get somewhat easily from just playing as a guild.
They focused so badly on adding resource sinks to the game that they ruined not only guild halls, but also legendary crafting, scribing, the new stat armor and weapons, etc.
Everything costs absurd, but utterly absurd, no where a sane person would ever contemplate this, and i worry that this got into the game. I mean who the hell even thinks its sane to create an alternative to acquiring precursors that is simply worse than any of the already existing ones. Only someone blind or completely ignorant of the game crafts one of the old legendaries through the new system.
The PvP is gutted, it used to be fun, and i used to be able to encourage my guild mates to use their own builds to play the game, and help them be effective with them. Now? Now if you’re not using a meta build with an elite spec, you’re dead, and if the enemy is using Tempest or Chronomancer, your gonna have trouble, if your team lands a thief or two, you know you’ve lost.
Nowadays having a higher number of thieves or warriors than the other team is a lost game from game start, especially if the other team has tempests, chronomancers or heralds.
The new league system still encourages grind, the guilds thing is a joke. The whole MMR is borked, playing as a single player is a nightmare, i’ve never had less fun in PvP since i started playing the mode.
The story is short, it changes pace completely after you reach auric basin, and feels more and more rushed after that area, and still its probably the most positive aspect of the whole expansion.
The maps are nice, but grow insanely complicated without masteries the further you get closer to dragon stand, and unlike what we were expecting masteries don’t “open” quirky areas, they’re simply there for you to be able to navigate the maps in a timely manner, everything that was proposed about masteries failed, especially the jungle ones.
All those systems that should provide “horizontal” progression, are crap. No “metroidvania” feel is in place, its just obvious content gating that adds nothing to the game, just increases frustration.
Like all those areas gated behind poison lore mastery. Its just that, a couple areas you can’t get to without that, and mostly just for mastery points, after that, you gain nothing from the mastery, you just have it, without it affecting you any further. You don’t feel any progress. The only masteries that are remotely well done are the glider and the pact commander ones. All the others feel heavily forced.
In fact the whole implementation feels forced, with us having to level them up, then spend points on it. You should level to acquire points to spend on masteries, not have to unlock it twice.
So TLDR:
Arena Net focused so much into implementing time and resource sinks to try and keep us hooked into the game, that they forgot what the main thing that hooks people into the game, which is having fun.
In order to try and hook people into the game they made it more frustrating which is driving more and more people away from the game.
So, although, yeah people will complain, there is cause for it atm, and while there’s always some nay sayers in games, its mostly about volume. And in this case, the volume is high. To the point that Anet themselves kinda stopped even addressing those concerns, i doubt it is from malice or grudge, but simply because they’re realising that they messed up so much that feedback from every single point they need to fix is impractical, and best just fix stuff than talk about it.
Which ultimately is what caused all this mess in the first place.
