Guild Wars 2

I’m thinking about quitting GW2 atm. I wanted to give some last feedback to Arenanet. This is gonna be a big post, respect to anyone who actually bothers to read it if nobody does then well… I at least tried.

1. sPvP

sPvP has been one big disappointment to me. 5 years of development and all they could come up with is 4 capture point maps? Without even ranking, guild versus guild, spectator mode, or a stat panel at the end of a match? GW1 had the best PvP I ever saw, and the only game I had hope for getting close to that was GW2. That hope got smashed in the first 2 days of release. I did continue to play it for weeks, because friends were playing it, and with them it was at least some fun. (They all quit the game though). But in the end, I hate the 5 man capture point matches. I hate the downed state for sPvP too. It’s required in PvE, but has no place in competitive PvP.

2. WvW

WvW started out as a promising feature. Siege weapons and supply mechanics are pretty cool. 3 faction battles are great, and in that regard they did something right that many games before GW2 did wrong. (I was getting tired of the number imbalance in 2 faction battles, elyos/asmodian, guardian/defiant, sith/jedi etc) However, they made two fundamental flaws in WvW imo. The first is that nothing really matters. No matter what you achieve, even if it’s taking the huge Stonemist Castle in the middle of the Eternal Battlegrounds, 5 minutes later your zerg will be gone and an enemy zerg will arrive and take it back. This makes everything feel like you haven’t really achieved anything. In Aion (just an example), if you took a fortress your side would be happy. The fortress would only be up for taking again a day later. You took the fortress for at least one day, not 5 minutes. Also, every fortress was used to gain access to an instance or a zone, and finally, taking a fortress gave you medals which were needed for gear with PvP defense. Because of these 3 things, people felt like they achieved something, taking a fortress was a big thing. Now in GW2 none of this will ever be implemented, but they could at least add more rewards for defending, so defense actually happens and fortresses aren’t flipped back 5 minutes after they’re taken. Which leads me to the second fundamental flaw: WvW has no significant reward anywhere. Taking even the biggest keep won’t get you anything more than a dynamic event reward, which you could get in 2 mins outside WvW.

3. PvE

PvE is getting boring to me. Regular dungeons are either easy, then people want to run them, or hard and/or long, and then nobody wants to do them. This is simply because the harder paths have no extra reward, and people will always choose the easiest way to their reward. Dungeons also give nothing I personally want and/or need, so I have no reason to play them. General PvE is nearly pointless at the level cap. You are forced to play in Cursed Shore, because every other zone in the game has less good rewards. Arenanet made a huge world, but failed at placing interesting content in that huge world, so GW2 ended up like every other MMO where everyone 90% of the PvE people play instances and the other 10% play in a single max lvl zone. This really disappointed me. Why every game developer seems to think that instances are the only way for end game MMO content, I’ll never understand. This leaves one aspect of PvE undiscussed: fractals. Ignoring the fact that it’s again an instance, I think they set a step in the right direction with fractal mechanics and difficulty. However, yesterday I asked myself: would you keep playing GW2 just for fractals? The answer came quickly to me: absolutely not. RNG and bad luck made me quit a few other MMOs. GW2 didn’t learn from this and made the most important drop currently available (ascended ring) an RNG dependent drop from a single boss in fractals. This alone is enough reason for a lot of people not to bother with them, and I’ve already seen some frustrated players in game who couldn’t progress further because they didn’t get their drop yet.

All these problems would still be fine, if the overall gameplay would be very fun and interesting. To me, it couldn’t have been further from that. Main issues:

4. Builds

With GW2, Arenanet chose to give players a small skillbar, like GW1 rather than other MMOs, but then they removed the customizability that GW1 had. This results in boring, always-the-same builds, and boring gameplay. When I play GW2 I am 90% of the time using skill 1. I’m pretty sure I could do any content in the game by using only skill 1, heal and dodge. How Arenanet thought that was good game design, I will never understand. I found GW1’s skill system the best, but I would still prefer a generic 100 button MMO skill system over GW2’s .

5. Classes

Of all MMOs I played, GW2 has the least interesting classes. There is no class I really like. I think this has something to do with the general active combat, skill and build mechanics. While I like the lore and general design of some classes, I don’t really like any of them in game. Compare to for example GW1, where I played every class because I found them all awesome to play. I was the biggest elementalist fan around. Then came GW2, and I didn’t even hit lvl 10 before I got so tired of it that I rerolled to warrior. Which wasn’t any more fun, but at least stronger.

6. culling/rendering issue

This just ruins every large scale battle for me. I’d rather have a 1 FPS slideshow than only see 10% of what’s going on. I’m so sick of wondering in every battle, “is that spot over there empty, or is it filled with enemies that haven’t loaded yet?”. It happens in Orr, it happens in WvW, it happened really bad in the karka event (champions oneshotting you before they are even rendered). It’s a game breaking issue at the core of GW2, and it’s taking them way too long to fix.

7. Minor but obvious MMO features missing

Stuff like an LFG tool, PvP rankings, a stat window at the end of a PvP match, item preview in the trade post, the ability to sort light/medium/heavy armor… all sorts of small convenient features are just missing. Arenanet are gamers, they know the MMO world… they have to know every one of these features. So why are they not in the game?

Conclusion

GW2 may have done a lot of things right, but it did at least as much wrong, and it seems Arenanet didn’t learn from the success of GW1 at all, since all its important features were left out. The Manifesto trailer was hope giving, but everything in there was a lie. I listened to it again while writing this post, and not a single thing they said in there was actually fully true.

Now I understand that Arenanet is working on changes, fixes and other updates on a lot of these issues, but it’s simply too late. The game has been 5 years in development. There is no excuse for taking 5 years and then saying after a month of release “oh we didn’t think of that… but we’re working on it now!!”. So I will leave this game, and if they really do improve I may return somewhere in the future…

That’s good feedback. Hopefully they’re working on all that, but I’m not really confident. People have been bringing these issues up since the Beta weekends…

I’m not sure where the priorities are at ArenaNet anymore. They don’t appear to be putting much effort into making this game really good. Rather, they seem to just be adding rush-job content to a game that wasn’t even close to “when it’s ready” at launch.

But who knows…maybe one more disappointed fan bringing up all the same problems will be the wake-up call. Meantime I’m with you. The game is not fun. I don’t play it. I check the forums from time to time to see if they’ve fixed this game, but so far I don’t see anything promising. The only reason I even bother with that is because I loved Guild Wars so much.

Good luck out there! If you find any PvP that’s as good as Guild Wars used to be, let us know!

Edit: spelling

It’s good feedback and I have some similar complaints, but I’m not leaving over it. I still like the game’s positive qualities and I find many of the professions to be fun. In particular though I love how vast crafting is (cooking is amazingly fun).

Very good read OP i have to say i agree will all of it , I was also a gw1 pvp player and the difference between the 2 games is like chalk n cheese . But its still early im pretty sure most if not all of your concerns will be implemented at some point . I will keep playing n hoping sooner rather than later

I got your respect, read through the whole thing!
And I pretty much agree with everything you said. I quit about 2 months ago after i did all jumping puzzles, completed all dungeons, finished 100% map completion and finished my dungeon gear. After that there was really no point in playing for me.

Then Karka came, I jumped in for few days, and after the event nothing really changed its the same boring thing.

I miss “sense of progression” some drive..something that would make me log in because I would have some goal..other than “kill 1000 skirt” -.- that aint no achievement…

I certainly appreciate your points and I shall not defend the game, but will merely say that it is still young and i’m quite positive they shipped the game with a skeletal structure (even though i’m loving it at the moment anyway) that has lots of content but it is highly repetitive.

Maybe (hopefully!) check back later and Anet should have a lot of this stuff cracked. You put across your points very well and you are the kind of player i’d like in the game

Lots of if, buts and maybes there I know, but good luck with your endeavours!

Good post and not the whine fest I expected.
sPvP is imo easily the biggest disappointment for the game, especially how much they hyped up they want it to be an esport. Say what you will about the WoW battlegrounds but at least they had variety of game types and you could do different ones depending on what pvp mood you were in. Here its all the same, unless I am missing something.

The little things missing are little but they add up. To some extent the game is new and lfg and preview type features can be added in but these arent ground breaking concepts. They are pretty standard and people expect them. If nothing else the devs need to say YES we are getting these features in. They could have burried down on page 5 of someone complaint thread but how many are going to see it.

One thing I will disagree with you on is instanced endgame. Unfortunately its required to be challenging. The more players you get the more the power ramps up so devs can control that by instancing and then they know roughly what power levels the party brings. Otherwise you get the dragon events which are a joke as are most of the cathedral events in orr. Because we do not have a currency to manage in combat (mana or rage etc) then it comes down to a question of just getting everyone up who dies faster then the monsters kill us. I get annoyed sometimes if there are too many people around an event because then its just too easy.
The only other option is to give the NPCs a ridiculous hit point pool (cathedral of balthazar fight, or the ancient karka) and then the test is the players endurance to put up with it, not their skills.

Good post.

I 100% agree with the WvW section, could have been so much more than it was.

The SPvP is really bad, I played about 2 games of that before I got bored, mind you I don’t think they should have implemented it in the first place because I have never seen an MMO do arena combat better than any of the other genres. Apparently GW1 did it well but I can’t comment on that as I didn’t play it sadly.

On builds and classes, yeah agreed too, I don’t know why they flaunted the class system as been better than what came before it seems the same except with more broken skills to me. I don’t think its a fault of the classes exactly but more the general game systems they have in place are extremely simple and have little to no capability for creative use.

PvE, never really found PvE in MMO’s to be fun I was glad it was reasonably short in GW2 until the mid November patch.

I completely agree with all of the points, and I was most struck by the WvWvW section. I love to PvP, especially when there is a goal in mind. That said, sPvP does not do it for me, because it is mindnumbingly repetitive. For example, you see the same class combinations in the game (flooded with Mesmers, thieves, ele’s and guardians), the same strategies, and the same game play over and over and over again. Heck even LOL has the same dang map and it is still more random than the spvp fights in gw2 due to diff class combos etc. Here its the same classes, running the same kitten builds over and over. SO, after doing that a bit, I got bored, and tired of being beat not by skill, but by the lack of balance of some classes (I will spare you the details of my frustration with 1 hit button classes)

So then, WvW seemed like a good idea (thinking back on DAOC days), so ill give it a go. However, just as you pointed out, it does not mean anything. You take a camp, 1-2 mins later, the camp is taken back or taken by the third faction. You can choose to stay in there, but usually its a huge zerg just on a diff rotation around the map. Zerg movement is predictable, and mostly goes in a dang circle. Aside from camp taking, you have keeps and towers, that don’t give you ANYTHING when you take them, but the amount of exp,karma,silver you get for doing PVE events. You’re not achieving anything for the good of your lands, etc., and all you did for an entire day, is gone the next day due to the servers that maintain a night zerg. <—not that imp
In addition, its the same classes dominating in WvW, 10000 mesmers, guardians, and thieves, with a few eles running around. Warriors are less frequent, followed by engs and necros. The same imbalance in spvp is existent in wvw.

The last problem is, there is no reason to be in a group in wvw, at all. Just run with the zerg, blah blah blah, hit buttons, run around, tacits go out the window, and numbers win. Sure, smaller coordinated groups take out slightly larger uncoordinated groups, but mostly its about the zerg. The lack of a dependence on group play, just makes it mindnumbing. You don’t need to be in a group to help out, and for the most part, people don’t run groups that much. Some guilds do, sure, but its not really that beneficial, which in my opinion, takes the fun out of it.

On more minor point that I think does affect group play, is that I actually miss the holy mmo trinity. I miss tank, dd, healer, because forming a group was great, you wanted to stick together and help each other, etc. Here in gw2, why be in a group, you don’t gain anythign by it other than Cntrl-T, because any group dynamics goes out the window due to the randomness of beneficial aoe effects.

So moron running next to you will likely get the buffs before your own group, or hell, his pet gets it sometimes. Don’t like this aspect of gw2, i miss the trinity, because you had a roll to fill, and people took pride in beign able to fill the role. I don’t take pride in anythign because it just ends up being a massive slam dance where my aid is so spread out that it does no good to those I WANT to help.

Agree with most.

Like what you say about WvW. Guild have nothing to own (for more than a day). It makes the whole thing pointless.

Agreed and I hope they look at feedback like this and makes changes for the sake of the game’s longevity. Fingers crossed that they make significant changes before it’s too late.

Cant comment on sPvP not much of a PvP player myself but I feel some of the stuff you mention are issues with the players rather then with the game!

Example: "5 minutes later your zerg will be gone and an enemy zerg will arrive and take it back. " How is that an issue with the game? Its players who decide to to move enmass from objective to objective! its even bad strategy! leaving a small defence force is enough to defend a keep, the game even rewards you for defending, in the case of the castle, it rewards you massively! what more can it do? Lock the castle once you take it so as to ensure everyone will definitely ignore it because its safe now no matter what? that would be going the opposite direction you’re asking for imho!
Worst yet taken objective isnt really meaningful in WvW, holding them is! The game really did everything right to prevent what you’re saying but alas some players dont understand what WvW is about and just are looking for the action or something!

The PvE issues you mention are also coming from players themselves! something that really puzzles me is the appearantly large number of players that claim to love horizontal progression but turns out they all flock to vertical progression the moment it was made available! Horizontal progression isnt about power, its about having tons of content to play! Gw2 certainly has that but like you yourself said some people will never stray from content that rewards the most! thats vertical progression mentality I need to get more reward to get better and better! Gw2 implement both game play styles and to do that made sure all content is doable no matter what armor tier you have! Wearing rare armor you can get in a day allows you to play all of gw2 content but I guess some people just cant live without having the best possible armor and the best rewards! that means they will always flock to one place until that is nerfed cause no matter what anyone does there will always be that one place with the best rewards! always!

Disagree with the classes comments as well. Classes are truely diverse, not just in terms of skill but also in the way you have to play them!

You’re voicing all our opinions Veldan, thanks. Hope anet will hear us out.

Veldan.4637:

3. PvE
(…) GW2 didn’t learn from this and made the most important drop currently available (ascended ring) an RNG dependent drop from a single boss in fractals. This alone is enough reason for a lot of people not to bother with them, and I’ve already seen some frustrated players in game who couldn’t progress further because they didn’t get their drop yet.

You are guaranteed to get ascended ring after finishing last boss in fractal lvl 10. It’s not the chest drop but additional one in your right corner similar to daily rewards. Likewise you are guaranteed to get infused ring in fractal 20. So you don’t need luck and getting your first ascended ring is not RNG dependent.

Agony damage appears in lvl 10 and, yes, you need to do it without any resistance like any other player who do it for first time(unless he/she spend fortune on quiver/books back pieces). There is no chance to get ascended ring from lvl below 10.

dont know if that +1 button does anything but I pressed it anw. I kinda left the game now too. You cant actually leave GW2 cause of the lack of sub-fee but anw. Not logging in as much. Agree on all counts except maybe classes. Especially sPVP. I started sPVP a week ago because im not a big fun of the grief 5vs5 matched cause. I was to bored of aimlessly walking around the map so I said lets try it. The first thing that bugged me was the lack of statistics window in the match. Then I noticed what you get from sPVP.. nothing.. skins.. which outside sPVP you got them already. There are no unique reward for sPVPing. And as you said WvW is actually pointless. Ok the buffs that you manage to get stay there but they are so small that dont actually make a difference. Unless you are dominating all week and you get like 300-400k points .

To everyone: thanks for all the replies people, they are appreciated.

Jairlyn.1429:

One thing I will disagree with you on is instanced endgame. Unfortunately its required to be challenging. The more players you get the more the power ramps up so devs can control that by instancing and then they know roughly what power levels the party brings. Otherwise you get the dragon events which are a joke as are most of the cathedral events in orr. Because we do not have a currency to manage in combat (mana or rage etc) then it comes down to a question of just getting everyone up who dies faster then the monsters kill us. I get annoyed sometimes if there are too many people around an event because then its just too easy.
The only other option is to give the NPCs a ridiculous hit point pool (cathedral of balthazar fight, or the ancient karka) and then the test is the players endurance to put up with it, not their skills.

I also get annoyed when events are too easy because of a high number of players. But I don’t think this means open world endgame is impossible. For example lets look at the Claw of Jormag. This event pretty much never fails. But what if the devs decided that it should be more challenging? What if they added a champion elemental to the first phase, and placed 3 champion icebrood wolves in the second phase instead of 1? What if the corrupted ground damage would affect anyone in the area all the way up to the camp, rather than only the people right under the dragon? There are many ways to make these fights more challenging. I think Arenanet simply did not try, because the challenge was meant to be dungeons and not events.

Galen Grey.4709:

Cant comment on sPvP not much of a PvP player myself but I feel some of the stuff you mention are issues with the players rather then with the game!

Nice post, yes there is truth in what you said. Player mentality does indeed decide how WvW and endgame are handled. But does this mean Arenanet didn’t do anything wrong? Do you suggest that Arenanet had no way of knowing that the average player goes for the easiest reward, or that with the current WvW mechanics zergs are a lot more likely to roam around than to sit in a castle? If they put any thought into this, they simply must have known. And they can’t change player mentality, but they can change game mechanics. That’s why I think that in the end, it’s still a game issue, even though you were not wrong.

mapokl.3167

You are guaranteed to get ascended ring after finishing last boss in fractal lvl 10. It’s not the chest drop but additional one in your right corner similar to daily rewards. Likewise you are guaranteed to get infused ring in fractal 20. So you don’t need luck and getting your first ascended ring is not RNG dependent.

This is simply not true. I completed the lvl 10 fractals twice myself, both of the time it completed the daily but I did not get a ring. I asked about it the first time, and two out of five people got one. A guildie of mine who was active in fractals got the ascended ring on his 19th daily in the 10-18 bracket.

I would say, alot of those feature “should” come in the first quarter. I remember playing GW1 the first few months and got bored, then I came back an only then started enjoying it as alot of changes were put through.

I think that’s a big strength of a subscription-less game. You can quit any time, but you can also come back any time.

For sPvP (unless you have not been on top of the news) there is alot coming in januari and februari (read: probably March if you want to be sure =P). It has indeed a long way to go like you said.

For WvW alot of changes are coming in at that same time or in december. (I honestly forgot)

For PvE alot of changes are on the line and alot of improvements should be coming, but it’s fairly unclear to me what comes when. (other than Wintersday obviously)

Class customisation is fairly extensive and fairly broad, that you don’t see the particular depthness all too much is (I think) that you can always change every trait, or that you have to pay 3silver 50 copper (max) to change it around. (which isnt too much if you play enough, It’s about two green lvl 80 drops (ranging from 1s39c to 2 silver in merchant value)

But you’re right, alot of things have to be done. But Also alot of things are coming. This doesn’t mean you need to keep playing, this means you can do whatever you like until that time. Then you come back and can see what has changed, for the better or worse.

There’s as much quitting this game as much as there is quitting skyrim ( for example)

Just take a break now, and come back later!

(So have a nice GW2-vacation :p)

There are some things I agree with here, but man. Some of the people who are “quitting” have ridiculous expectations.

1. sPVP – I agree about the downed state. But you know, a certainly other popular MMO didn’t even have PVP maps at launch. Why not give them a chance to add more in? I don’t think they’re planning to just stop right there.

2. They did mention they have plans to update and improve WvW.

3. I think to fix PvE and repopulate the world, you can have dailys and monthlys completed out in the world, instead of just doing fractals and things like that.

4. I’m not sure why you only use skill 1 – as an engineer, I find myself using all of my skills ALL of the time, especially since situations vary so much.

5. This is subjective.

6. I’ve never had any issues rendering anything – though I’ve heard it is a problem and needs to be worked on.

7. I agree, some features would be nice to have added – but how many MMO’s can you name that launched with everything? At some point, you need to quit and get the game on the market and evolve it as it goes. I’m sure these things will be added over time.

Veldan.4637:

Galen Grey.4709:

Cant comment on sPvP not much of a PvP player myself but I feel some of the stuff you mention are issues with the players rather then with the game!

Nice post, yes there is truth in what you said. Player mentality does indeed decide how WvW and endgame are handled. But does this mean Arenanet didn’t do anything wrong? Do you suggest that Arenanet had no way of knowing that the average player goes for the easiest reward, or that with the current WvW mechanics zergs are a lot more likely to roam around than to sit in a castle? If they put any thought into this, they simply must have known. And they can’t change player mentality, but they can change game mechanics. That’s why I think that in the end, it’s still a game issue, even though you were not wrong.

Its a tricky proposition. As for Arenanet anticipating this… I honestly don’t know! I was genuinely surprised by the reaction to Ascended armor as well as how people just refused to leave Orr just cause it was more profitable!

Turns out there are two kinds of Horizontal progression players and before Gw2 I could have swore there was just one! I though everyone who loved Horizontal game play loved it because of the freedom it offered, because they didnt want to care about having the best gear, they cared about the wide variety of content they had to play and the many different ways you could go about that! So I cant really blame if arenanet though the same thing can I ?

And I dont know, I am not convinced that what you describe is truely horizontal game play! I mean at level 80 you have the whole world to play in! Any zone I go in I can have fun doing the DE, get rewarded for it and still risk getting killed. Yet just cause it rewards more these players stay in this one zone doing this one dyanmic event chain! thats the opposite of Horizontal ! I mean even WoW can probably be considered a lot more horizontal then that! Seems like this more like a hybrid, players who have vertical progression mentality but want the easy way of aquiring the best gear that horizontal progression generally offers and yes I think Arenanet might have missed that category of players ! I completely did! didnt realise until Gw2

as for WvW yes why would sitting in a castle guarding be such a bad thing! in EvE online that was taken to far greater lengths! for Aliances that controlled 0.0 it was normal to have patrols and even groups guarding gates hours at a time! And in Eve most of the time nothing happened, in Gw2 its almost guaranteed especially if we’re talking about castles / keeps on border of 2 or 3 servers they’ll be constantly under attack! And its great fun too! I was involved in long defence twice! once it lasted 4 hours and the other time 2 hours. in Both cases we were a small force, the bulk of our forces were taking other smaller objectives while we held back a force many times our numbers for that long! its pretty satisfying not just cause you succesfully defended and got rewarded everying 8 minutes but also because you know you bought the time that allowed your zerg to capture more objectives while your enemies wasted so much time after the carrot

Its a lot more fun in my opinion than taking over an objective and then thats it, untouchable for 24 hrs! This is way more organic! I am not a fan where the game has essentially got to enforce things for you! as a horizontal progression player I just want the choice to play as I want ! enforced gates such as a 24 hour timer Is not something I like! Honestly I think this design is better!

A very strong post, OP.

The only thing I strongly disagree with is your point about the professions. In other games I could easily discard the majority of classes right off the bat. There are typically one or two that interest me at all.

In GW2 I’m interested in all but one profession, and have a terrible time deciding which one I want to play at any given time.

I have hope for the big WvW update to come at the beginning of next year, as that is the one area of the game outside of open world PvE that I am very interested in. They’ve got a foundation to build on. I’m looking forward to seeing where they go with it.

It’s really the one area that no amount of testing was going to work before launch, and it takes time to make changes. They’ve had three months of data and feedback, and they’ve got another month or two to finish working on whatever changes they’ve come up with based on that. We’ll see come Jan/Feb.

FrizzFreston.5290:

So have a nice GW2-vacation :p

thanks, I will ^.^

Galen Grey.4709

Its a tricky proposition. As for Arenanet anticipating this… I honestly don’t know! I was genuinely surprised by the reaction to Ascended armor as well as how people just refused to leave Orr just cause it was more profitable!

Turns out there are two kinds of Horizontal progression players and before Gw2 I could have swore there was just one! I though everyone who loved Horizontal game play loved it because of the freedom it offered, because they didnt want to care about having the best gear, they cared about the wide variety of content they had to play and the many different ways you could go about that! So I cant really blame if arenanet though the same thing can I ?

For the sake of this argument, let’s go back to before the Lost Shores patch. A lot of people hit max level, and wanted some form of progress. Legendary was the main option there. Now legendaries did not have a stat increase, nor was it known that they were going to get one, so they were truly horizontal progression. You say that you thought most people who loved horizontal progression, loved it because of the freedom it offered. I think this is true, but proves exactly my point. You may like this random zone, say, Kessex Hills. Now if you play here, you will never (realistically) get your legendary, because the mobs in Kessex Hills will give you a lot less money income, and have 0% chance to drop the T6 materials and lodestones that legendary needs.

So yes horizontal progression players may love freedom, but if you actually want the progression it turns out this freedom is very limited. I think that’s the problem.

Galen Grey.4709:

Cant comment on sPvP not much of a PvP player myself but I feel some of the stuff you mention are issues with the players rather then with the game!

Example: "5 minutes later your zerg will be gone and an enemy zerg will arrive and take it back. " How is that an issue with the game? Its players who decide to to move enmass from objective to objective! its even bad strategy! leaving a small defence force is enough to defend a keep, the game even rewards you for defending, in the case of the castle, it rewards you massively! what more can it do? Lock the castle once you take it so as to ensure everyone will definitely ignore it because its safe now no matter what? that would be going the opposite direction you’re asking for imho!
Worst yet taken objective isnt really meaningful in WvW, holding them is! The game really did everything right to prevent what you’re saying but alas some players dont understand what WvW is about and just are looking for the action or something!

Wrong players only utilize the mechanics in which they are provided. In this case the only mechanic in Wv3 is to be highly mobile preferably with a huge force. People often overlook this common WV3 mechanic if a hold point in wv3 is not occupied it decays so AN put in place this zerg mentality.

Galen Grey.4709:

The PvE issues you mention are also coming from players themselves! something that really puzzles me is the appearantly large number of players that claim to love horizontal progression but turns out they all flock to vertical progression the moment it was made available! Horizontal progression isnt about power, its about having tons of content to play! Gw2 certainly has that but like you yourself said some people will never stray from content that rewards the most! thats vertical progression mentality I need to get more reward to get better and better! Gw2 implement both game play styles and to do that made sure all content is doable no matter what armor tier you have! Wearing rare armor you can get in a day allows you to play all of gw2 content but I guess some people just cant live without having the best possible armor and the best rewards! that means they will always flock to one place until that is nerfed cause no matter what anyone does there will always be that one place with the best rewards! always!

Wrong again game mechanics nudge people in to areas of the game which is most profitable and in this case most profitable for AN.

Galen Grey.4709:

Disagree with the classes comments as well. Classes are truely diverse, not just in terms of skill but also in the way you have to play them!

Wrong again, theres no diversity in the way you play and its by design. You have x build for dungeon, y build for pve, z build for pvp. To prove my point look at the way stats are designed and implemented on gear you have 8 different stat allocations on gear and 3 are all but worthless.