I can tell you why this happens.
MMO players have different expectations, because they are all looking for this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse
The Metaverse is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the internet. The word metaverse is a portmanteau of the prefix “meta” (meaning “beyond”) and “universe” and is typically used to describe the concept of a future iteration of the internet, made up of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces linked into a perceived virtual universe.
The term was coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, where humans, as avatars, interact with each other and software agents, in a three-dimensional space that uses the metaphor of the real world. Stephenson coined the term to describe a virtual reality-based successor to the Internet. Concepts similar to the Metaverse have appeared under a variety of names in the cyberpunk genre of fiction as far back as 1981 in the novella True Names.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how much you payed for it – what matters, is whether people get burned out on it, whether the time they spent there (whether it’s 1500, or 15 hours) was fun, and whether or not there is a horizon of content that is always receding from the player (meaning: no matter how much time a person spends living in your world, they can never see everything, or experience all the content, because new content is being created faster than any player can experience it).
We are NOT quite to the point where any company can deliver this experience, but we are rapidly approaching it.
What I found annoying, is that GW2 promised at least some aspects of this. I expected that Anet wanted to create a Metaverse inside Tyria – of course I knew that they would fall short, but what I didn’t expect was by how much they fell short.
Much of the content was boring grind. Leveling to 60 was fun at first – then quickly grew stale.
Combat still clings to too many traditional MMO conventions – it’s actually not “actiony” enough.
The world itself is designed like a theme park ride – invisible walls separating zones, the zones themselves are these huge rectangles on the map that make no sense from a geographical POV.
It’s much less a “living world” than a Tyrian flavored theme park.
Despite this, I think that GW2 did several things really, really well, at least relative to MMO’s in general, which I think are very terrible right now.
What I’ve realized is that what everyone wants just isn’t feasible for another 6 years or so – we don’t possess the technology to really make a convincing MMO world that is more than a gimmick.
What happened is that as adventure games glimpsed the possibility of the Metaverse in the past – from games like Ultima – their fans got a taste of what’s to come. Since then, we’ve been demanding what we really want – and what will be available soon, but not today: the Metaverse. Developers have been promising this to make some money, and in all honesty many of them really enjoy the journey towards this goal – the only problem lies in our expectations that “this game” is the ONE. The metaverse. This problem is exacerbated by developer hype pre-launch.
GW2 promised a lot – and while I feel it is hands down one of the best MMO’s on the market, it still fails to become what I want out of a fully immersive, captivating virtual world, and it also falls short of what Anet promised it would be.
That’s ok.
I’ve spent just under 1000 hours playing GW2, and I had some fun. Ultimately, I probably shouldn’t have spent extra money in the shop, but I spent around $70 which is ok – I thin Anet does deserve some reward for what they’ve done, but I realize it’s probably time to quit.
Unless they can turn around and actually make good on the things they promised in the Manifesto, I don’t see much reason to continue playing – and especially not continue paying.
Another metaverse is waiting out there for me – somewhere.
