I can’t be the only one who wishes they would slow down the new content releases and do a proper pass through on the existing content in the game and making sure most of it works before adding new stuff. We are all sick of running TA and having the Vevina crash bug, or mysteriously seeing Hodgins or Detha refuse to progress/finish the event line in AC costing the entire party their hard earned tokens. How about people who are unable to complete the burrow objectives because of obstruction bugs and bad party set ups with people who aren’t able to work around bugs? Or people who can’t finish Arah because the door at the end bugged? What about people who can’t even enter Arah (special mention goes to the Underworld server) because the chain to unlock the door bugged out? The countless tool tips on runes and sigils (like Rune of the Pack), hidden cool downs and misleading or plain wrong trait descriptions. Random skills unaffected by traits they should be affected by and bugged skills (like the pet res on different elevations). The escort events which constantly bug out and the skill points we rush to do once the server resets because we know, by the end of the week, many of them will be broken. The game is riddled with bugs, some of them less serious than others, some of them infuriating enough to put people off of the game, or parts of it, all together (the current issues with AC are an example). We’ve since seen WvW lose a core feature in the removal of the orbs (which I strongly support) because they were too easy to hack (on top of several other issues with bugged alters and weird orb reset bugs). I won’t even go into culling and it’s impact on WvW.
On top of all of that we had content added since launch which had major bugs. The loot and karma DR added which crippled players with bugged DR (it should never have been added to the game on the fly with such bugs) and the dungeon token DR which had the same problem. Both of those changes were pushed out too fast without proper testing and a lot of players suffered because of it. With the Halloween update we had several servers unable to enter the Mad King’s Realm because the event chain didn’t complete and bugged out (I think it’s becoming a very bad idea to have event chains as an access requirement if they are constantly going to bug) or people who couldn’t finish the clock tower because a bug prevented entry. I was personally at the one time Mad King event and I didn’t see the Mad King because he didn’t appear on my screen (someone even uploaded a video of that happening thinking it was what was supposed to happen).
Most of us expected the game to launch with lots of bugs. It’s part of the MMO genre these days and a game as massive as GW2 is bound to have its growing pains. It was never going to launch bug free, or even close to it. I would say though, that I was expecting the game to be further along than it is at this point. Many of the bugs, such as incorrect tool tips, stat gains or recipes, are seemingly simple to fix. The only reason why they wouldn’t have is because the developers have too much on their plates that they can’t get around to them yet.
I love the game. I played GW1 for seven years. I loved new content and I’m glad we are getting more content with GW2 than we did with GW1. I am increasingly growing tired of dealing with the same old bugs and issues of the launch content which aren’t be dealt with fast enough. It might be more understandable that these things take time, but when I see the same issues exist, new issues brought in with new content, and new content being made instead of old issues being fixed, I wonder if we will ever see some of these problems solved.
I love GW2 and I am very excited for new content to be added to the game, but I really wish ArenaNet would reallocate their resources to finish fixing the content we already have before they add any new stuff. Many people consider parts of it to be unplayable because of all the bugs. To many of us, fixing the old content would be giving us new content to do. At the end of the day I’d rather have a quality play experience rather than lots of bug riddled, poorly tested and glitchy content that doesn’t work a lot of the time. There is plenty of quality existing content even amid all the bugs, I’m not claiming otherwise. I understand a line has to be drawn between when the existing content is fixed enough that you would best server the community adding more content, but I personally don’t think we’ve reached that point yet.