Guild Wars 2

Anet have made some questionable decisions during the years of GW2 development , beta and after launch.
1. Remove Loading screen lore, Loading screen use to have text/lore. Anet removed it later on, What is the point of removing extra flavour text? Please bring them back.
2.No duelling , It is their design choice to not add duelling into the game rather than technical difficulty. I understand where the worry comes from, duelling might encourage unfriendly players to annoy others , but they can always add a auto decline all duel option . I see duelling as a nice way of making friends, I have enough faith in our community to not abuse this feature.
3.Remove Lore book, during old betas there use to be lore books all around, they give player extra lores about creature, organization, locations and events with motion pictures. Again, why remove the extra flavour and lore?
4.The launch trailer, many of you might not know but the launch trailer of GW2 is beyond horrible. It’s one of the worst trailer ever I have seen in my entire life, there are even no actual game in it. It definitely affected GW2 initial sales. Who thought that was a good idea?
That’s all I can think of for now.

Honestly, your list doesn’t bother me much at all. None of those four things are questionable issues to me.

That said, some of the biggest things I see as failings of GW2 design decisions are:
- Removing Solo Queue
- Not allowing players to queue for PvP outside of HotM

id have to say pushing HoT while failing to deliver any content in the mean time is a very questionable and risky decision i personaly know at least 15 players who have droped out and at least 4 of those have stated they will not return

continuous and regular content updates have been the only thing keeping this game going when it so clearly lacks end game content for players who have been here from the start and now this insanely long wait with no new content is killing the game for alot of players who are simply bored stupid re running the same content over and over again

Questionable:

Why stray from original GW1 Ranger so much? And by stray I mean making pets mandatory instead of optional?

Rising Dusk.2408:

Honestly, your list doesn’t bother me much at all. None of those four things are questionable issues to me.

That said, some of the biggest things I see as failings of GW2 design decisions are:
- Removing Solo Queue
- Not allowing players to queue for PvP outside of HotM

Well, these are not particularly huge feature, these are just very questionable decisions.

I understand not separating solo and group queue, GW2 don’t have enough players in pvp, separating solo and group queue would result in extremely long queue times.

1. The change in the trait system.
11. The NPE. Level-gating things in order to make leveling seem more rewarding.
12. Putting precursor crafting into the game as a feature of the expansion.
13. Putting a muzzle on Josh Foreman.
14. Selling the infinite continue coin in the gemstore, then failing to work on that content at all for at least a year.
15. Introducing the watchwork pick at the same price point as the other infinite gathering tools.
16. Three months since the announcement of the expansion, and we still don’t have any information about what the other specializations will be, aside from Ranger-Druid/Staff, and Necro-Greatsword.
17. Selling the SAB minis on the SAB anniversary, with no intention of bringing it back right now.
18. Turning townclothes into tonics, not outfits.
19. Fractal reset.
20. Adding currencies to the game, but not to the wallet.
21. Narrowing dailies to be overly specific and complete removal of monthlies.

(I could make an equally long list of good design choices, as well, but that’s not the topic of this thread.)

For me the numbers 1, 2 and 3 are:

1. Removing the greatest fear storyline and changing the order of the level 80 story.
2. Waiting so long to revert the change mentioned in 1.
3. Not telling us why on earth the change was made in the first place.

Edit:

4. Although I enjoy the new trait system (by that I mean I enjoy having to do tasks to unlock traits), I really dislike the new trait point progression. I wish we would get 1 trait point at level 15 and every 5 levels after that. I also wish we would the trait tiers at lower levels (adept at level 15, master at 40-ish and grandmaster at 70-ish). This is more similar to how the progession was before the trait change.

“September 2014 feature pack” aka china client port to eu/na. I want my human female animations back -_- .

Almost all of the things I find questionable could be summed up in one quick phrase..

NPE

Guhracie.3419:

1. The change in the trait system.
11. The NPE. Level-gating things in order to make leveling seem more rewarding.
12. Putting precursor crafting into the game as a feature of the expansion.
13. Putting a muzzle on Josh Foreman.
14. Selling the infinite continue coin in the gemstore, then failing to work on that content at all for at least a year.
15. Introducing the watchwork pick at the same price point as the other infinite gathering tools.
16. Three months since the announcement of the expansion, and we still don’t have any information about what the other specializations will be, aside from Ranger-Druid/Staff, and Necro-Greatsword.
17. Selling the SAB minis on the SAB anniversary, with no intention of bringing it back right now.
18. Turning townclothes into tonics, not outfits.
19. Fractal reset.
20. Adding currencies to the game, but not to the wallet.
21. Narrowing dailies to be overly specific and complete removal of monthlies.

(I could make an equally long list of good design choices, as well, but that’s not the topic of this thread.)

I would switch 1 with 2 because I think that NPE change was more harmful but I’m amazed how accurately your opinion fits mine…

thefinnster.7105:

id have to say pushing HoT while failing to deliver any content in the mean time is a very questionable and risky decision i personaly know at least 15 players who have droped out and at least 4 of those have stated they will not return

Lol are you for real, they’re going to get kittenloads of revenue from the expansion, and they’re already raking in money from recent sales on the base game. How is this a questionable decision in the slightest? Because you know 15 people who decided they had something better to do with their time than stay committed to one game that you can stop playing and come back to at zero cost?

1. NPE and everything that came with this patch
2. Outfits rather then just allowing town clothes to be used in combat
3. daily revamp with this overly specific BS rather then the casual way it was before
4. the lack of love in asura and charr armors since launch
5. the re-vamp of the trait system
6. the re-vamp of the gem system
7. the new currencies that clog up inventories and banks rather then the wallet
8. the ability to even sell legendary weapons on the TP
9. having medium armor 90% made up of coats

It’s more like 98.5% of medium armor are coats and dresses

Questionable things? I will go back to pre-release times because there are things many people might not know about:

1) How they completely changed how traits were supposed to work pre-release. Learning traits by defeating profession specific challenges, Elementalists reading about forbidden lore, Warriors engaging in drunken brawls and other things like that made me LOVE the trait system of GW2. Sadly, none of that could be found anywhere at release.

Then they “tried” to return back to that initial idea with the more recent trait change but we all know how that failed too. I want the initial promised Trait system, not what we have now, not what we had at release, the ORIGINAL explained in their pre-release blog post.

2) The original Orr battlefield. I want the original idea for Orr, as a huge battlefield with multiple objectives (Temples) that players need to capture in order to progress further into Orr until they reach their final objective in Arah. Really, the pre-release Orr looked like it was going to be like the current Silverwastes, a huge open battlefield where players were fighting against the Risen. What we have now is simply lacking

3) Lore everywhere. Lore books, lore on loading screens, lore here, lore there. Why did they have to remove all lore tidbits from the game is beyond me.

Also nice title for this thread, it’s a lot less obvious than “let’s make a kitteny list of things we don’t like for the X00th time”

warbignime.4610:

Well, these are not particularly huge feature, these are just very questionable decisions.

I understand not separating solo and group queue, GW2 don’t have enough players in pvp, separating solo and group queue would result in extremely long queue times.

Your post is titled “Top Questionable Decisions Anet have made”. those are going to vary.

Mine would be
1. Changing the Trait system.
2. Not having the ele be like the GW1 ele.
3. Not bringing back SAB.
4. Not having Scythe and Throwing spears in game from launch.
5. Their very poor communication.
6. The poor treatment of Charr and Asura when it comes to armor design.

andred by your logic its perfectly fine for anet to say screw the curent player base over in favour of a new one so long as they make a kittenload of revenue as for there recent sales of the games this has more to do with the daily log in reward system than anything else and dosent necessarily mean we have an increase in playerbase
witch in itselff is a questionable decision since im personaly loging in on 7 diff acounts atm earning 156 t6 mats per acount allowing me to make a legendary a month allmost

player drop off is and always has been a serious issue with this game due to lack of end game content and perhaps you misunderstand me i am not saying HoT is a bad idea im saying pushing HoT while abandoning current content entirely is a questionable decision

1. Trait devamp.
2. NPE.
3. Ascended gear.

I loved the initial revamp to the dailies and monthlies because it gave us choices… I actually liked doing them. But with the newest revision I don’t usually bother. The choices are not usually great, and it ends up with only portions of the map being populated. Whereas having more choices meant having people wandering in more areas. Or you could accomplish them in a more natural way with daily exploration instead of having to pop around so much. The daily login rewards are… meh.

why are those “questionable” decisions ?

all those things didnt have any impact on anything at all. For example there are still some books around the world you can interact with but nobody really cares about them…

its the same if they remove vista animations, a lot of peoplejust press F and exit form the cut scene instantly.

A more noticeable decision anet has made was removing the custom gem→ gold and gold→ gem conversion and replacing them with a fixed amount.
But guess what, after a few weeks of forum outrage they added the custom conversion back

Vukorep.3081:

why are those “questionable” decisions ?

all those things didnt have any impact on anything at all. For example there are still some books around the world you can interact with but nobody really cares about them…

its the same if they remove vista animations, a lot of peoplejust press F and exit form the cut scene instantly.

A more noticeable decision anet has made was removing the custom gem-> gold and gold-> gem conversion and replacing them with a fixed amount.
But guess what, after a few weeks of forum outrage they added the custom conversion back

I never said these have huge impact, lore books in the old betas are not just regular books, they have motion pictures. Also in your theory no one care about vista, then what do you think if Anet remove Vista completely . There are no benefit at all to remove such things, many may not care, but at least the option is there and when people want to get some extra lore .

I would say their top questionable decision was moving away from the trinity. Not that I am for or against the trinity just it was a fairly large change, that has noticeably changed the main fundamentals of playing the game.

Since there is no real way to determine if it was truly successful or not, because this game is neither the impossible second coming of WoW nor a complete failure.

The most questionable (and controversial) thing- hands down- that they’ve ever done was the sudden disappearance/extinction of Ambient Snakes.

I don’t recall it ever addressed and it’s been GW2’s greatest mystery. Was it genocide? A kidnapping? A conspiracy of some sort? No one knoez. The poor darlings may never find justice or closure. ;-;

1. Account bound dyes (thankfully they changed their minds)
2. Death penalty (again, they changed back to the original plan)
3. Adding vertical progression.
4. The extreme grindiness of 400-500 crafting.
5. Pretty much all of the NPE changes.
6. Trait acquisition rework.
7. Policy of dev silence.
8. Turning town clothes into tonics and removing ability to dye.
9. Moving world bosses to a regular timer.
10. Including Fractal rewards in Mawdrey recipe.
11. Too many waypoints.
12. Not giving enough value to builds heavily speccing into support and cc.
13. Condition damage not affecting objects.
14. Putting all three PvP game modes in the same queue.
15. Making it far too easy to jump servers for WvW.
16. Rejecting the idea of adding new playable races.

I’ll never understand why they didn’t bring the build template feature over from Guild Wars 1.

Doggie.3184:

The most questionable (and controversial) thing- hands down- that they’ve ever done was the sudden disappearance/extinction of Ambient Snakes.

I don’t recall it ever addressed and it’s been GW2’s greatest mystery. Was it genocide? A kidnapping? A conspiracy of some sort? No one knoez. The poor darlings may never find justice or closure. ;-;

Lol. That was going to be my ‘questionable decision’, as well!

Oh! And thank goodness for the decision about dueling. (If OP means Open-World, of course.)

Confession – I don’t know what NPE means. Can someone fill me in?

New player Experience… that

No Player should Experience….

Oh! Thanks.

gaspara.4079:

I would say their top questionable decision was moving away from the trinity. Not that I am for or against the trinity just it was a fairly large change, that has noticeably changed the main fundamentals of playing the game.

Since there is no real way to determine if it was truly successful or not, because this game is neither the impossible second coming of WoW nor a complete failure.

You are for a trinity, just admit it. If you weren’t, then you wouldn’t even bring it up.

The lack of trinity is very successful. The problem is some players do not understand how to play without a trinity so they whine and complain about zerker gear when they don’t even fully understand the game or the fact that there is no problem.

1. Long break of SAB
2. New dailies
3. Adding jumping puzzles to an mmorpg (I love it )

Dear God… nobody has said anything about the Megaserver yet? What’s wrong with you people?

I can’t stand being packed into this world like a sardine. Give me back the lower population server that I elected for in the first place. And get it OUT of the cities!

The Gag Order. “We won’t tell you anything about what’s coming until it’s imminent, because the juvenile among you accuse us of breaking promises when we can’t produce what we discussed.”

Hamfast.8719:

Dear God… nobody has said anything about the Megaserver yet? What’s wrong with you people?

I can’t stand being packed into this world like a sardine. Give me back the lower population server that I elected for in the first place. And get it OUT of the cities!

I thought about it.

The other day I did Fire Elemental for the first time in a very long time. It was a sad sight to see all those people streaming in, knocking it out, and then moving on.

Made me think back to when FE was difficult. I remember a handful of us battling it once, barely surviving by the skin of our teeth until more players finally showed up. That just doesn’t happen with the Megaserver.

Then again, I don’t know what the population of this game actually is at this point. Without the Megaserver, we may have seen server merges over the last year, and still be all alone whenever venturing into a mid-level zone. I’m not much more fond of ghost town areas than the overcrowded ones. If I wanted to play and never see another person, there are plenty of better single player games.

So, yeah. The Megaserve gives, and the Megaserver takes away. Hard for me to say if it has been a net gain or loss.

1. new trait system
2. NPE
3. latest dailies

1. Removal of Twilight Arbor Forward Up path
2. Fractal reset
3. NPE trait aquisition

Cant believe noones mentioned the removal of TAFU. Removal of content will never make sense to me.

5. town clothing not being an outfit
4.WvW achievements (100 years to get SMC caps)
3.MMO Manifesto overhype
2.Trait overhaul implementation
1.That kittening mug!

Other than that there’s really nothing i take major issue with Anet has done an amazing job and i really enjoy their work.

I mostly do Dungeons/Fractals, PVP, triple trouble and Teq. But as some have mentioned

1. The removal of lore? why anet? Is it because us veterans from start know about it or is it because you think all these new players are call of duty/FPS just want things to blow up and don’t like to read or learn crowd? Because that’s insulting. Many people who go to MMORPG understand its about the adventure with friends not twitch shooting. A very slippery slope of pandering to the lowest common denominator.

2. Fractals Fractured update/ no leaderboards! reward drop rate lowered to oblivion! no higher levels above 50 for a chance at that stupid fractal weapon box!

3. NPE! I have all classes for PVP because i like to learn all the strength and weaknesses of my enemies but leveling outside of PVP in the PVE world is just sad. Luckily for me I have been on for a very long time and have stacks of tomes so I instantly level to 80. But why restrict new players in PVE? The trait locking is sad, as a Mesmer good luck at leveling because your dps is crap without the right traits.

To be honest no one who can make a difference reads these posts, we have hundreds of forum post on these subjects and more. But devs are busy hyping this expansion that I know from past experience will quickly disappoint.

GW2 was a questionable decision seven years ago.

1) straying from the gw2 mmo manifesto

2) taking away the “originally promised” HoM rewards (fow armor, 15k armor, minipets, pets, doa and destroyer weapons) and replacing them with the mostly lame or medicore hom current rewards…which people don’t have access to now…

3) guild halls/capes/alliances (sure gh are coming in expac and maybe the others will too one day… but why are they not in the game in the first place…)

4) No fow, uw, doa, elite content. Sure there is fractals and the new ta path and a few zerg events like teq or the 3 wurms… but its not the same. 1 path in ta doesn’t cut it … fractals are a learning curve and difficulty negated by AR and bugs. And I’m not talking the speed clear runs near the end of gw1’s life cycle after pve title skills and op consumable buffs, I mean the 4 hr doa raids in their prime.

5) Dual professions and many skills: sure its a different game and battle mechanics but that was a big part of gw charm and its uniqueness especially pvp wise. While maybe not hundreds of skills a few more wouldn’t hurt…

6) speaking of pvp… random arena, team arena, FA, JQ, alliance battles, guild wars, Heroes Ascent… etc… WvW is interesting and spvp is pretty cool but there’s a lot less options than gw1. It is called GUILD WARS for crying out loud. Where are the guild wars? I can’t imagine a mario game without mario, pokemon without pokemon, zelda without link or zelda, final fantasy without…fantasy…lol, world of warcraft without war, diablo without demons, etc. It just doesn’t make sense… at all.

7) The searing/pre: I know it happened a long time ago (I believe about 200 years?) But what if we could have played a similar experience the charr lands before the elder dragon ruined it, or the asuran explosion, or saw the birth of the sylvarri, the relocation of the norn, etc. Those who didn’t experience pre-ascalon and the searing in gw1 just have no idea…

8) Elite skill capping… more elite skills/variety. Sorry trait capping for +5% dps just isn’t the same…

9) Less lore, the human gods, the eternal alchemy, the norn spirits of the wild are barely mentioned… such a shame. Balthazaar, grenth, dwayna, menzies, kormir all have amazing back stories.

10) My greatest fear plotline screw up. Story out of order, people are dead and alive again and dead again. Bosses are out of order and don’t make sense. Meaningful stories are gone… so happy they are fixing this but why was this ever implemented in the first place without testing or serious editing… oh and the new newbie changes too… waiting forever for skills, underwater combat, stealing, pets, elixers, etc… it just doesn’t make sense… This game gets criticized for1-1-1-2-1-1-3 and then it does this… sure new HoT players and returning ones that quit will love this change (sarcasm) and quit b/c they don’t want to auto attack and level up so slowly… this game isnt’ wow with its tons of buttons… there’s barely any. Even casuals can pick it up or non gamers (like my brothers wife who was horrible at first and now an elite dungeon runner)

11) The mystic forge. Horrible RNG, just sell/salvage. No need to say more…

1. The promotion of zerg mechanics in WVW, which includes full credit for minimal contribution on kills and the rally system (which makes zerg busting almost impossible).
2. The continued performance problems and lag in large scale WVW, which has only gotten worse.
3. Removing the solo que in sPVP.
4. Failing to act faster on major exploits, which included people farming bugged karma events at the beginning of the game and then turning around and converting that karma to huge amounts of gold, people exploiting the southsun cove event to get multiple precursors, etc.
5. Fractals update actually making fractals worse. Promising a fractal weapon box and then failing to deliver.
6. Promoting this as a game where “support” was a viable way to spec your character but then failing to deliver viable support specs.
7. Failing to come up with a viable solution for the population imbalances in WVW.
8. Failing to come up with a reward system for playing WVW that is more closely comparable to playing PVE in terms of skins, gold or titles.

Lovely, another Shakespeare thread. You know, Much ado about nothing.

Absinthe.9538:

1. The promotion of zerg mechanics in WVW, which includes full credit for minimal contribution on kills and the rally system (which makes zerg busting almost impossible).
2. The continued performance problems and lag in large scale WVW, which has only gotten worse.
3. Removing the solo que in sPVP.
4. Failing to act faster on major exploits, which included people farming bugged karma events at the beginning of the game and then turning around and converting that karma to huge amounts of gold, people exploiting the southsun cove event to get multiple precursors, etc.
5. Fractals update actually making fractals worse. Promising a fractal weapon box and then failing to deliver.
6. Promoting this as a game where “support” was a viable way to spec your character but then failing to deliver viable support specs.
7. Failing to come up with a viable solution for the population imbalances in WVW.
8. Failing to come up with a reward system for playing WVW that is more closely comparable to playing PVE in terms of skins, gold or titles.

I strongly agree with most of these if not all of them… especially the 1) zerg tactics, pve too. Looking at you world bosses… and people who have been trained to be lazy and fail the easy marionette fight by not reading lol.

4) precursor exploits: 60g and under incinerators…

6) agreed.

8) agreed but spvp too.

Guhracie.3419:

1. The change in the trait system.

This. It seems to be the main reason why everyone I managed to convince to try the game has gotten bored and left. Something about “losing motivation” and not knowing what to do to get them…

Traits. That’s the #1 questionable decision, and it amazes me that it ever went live. lol.
Megaservers would be next. It destroyed server communities, as well as RP.
Oh, and the TP revamp. That was just bad.

thefinnster.7105:

id have to say pushing HoT while failing to deliver any content in the mean time is a very questionable and risky decision i personaly know at least 15 players who have droped out and at least 4 of those have stated they will not return

continuous and regular content updates have been the only thing keeping this game going when it so clearly lacks end game content for players who have been here from the start and now this insanely long wait with no new content is killing the game for alot of players who are simply bored stupid re running the same content over and over again

I have to agree. They should’ve had some content to keep people interested. But this is the norm for GW2. Lite on content. It’s been several months since the HoT announcement. It makes me wonder if they dissolved one of their teams or merged them all for HoT.

Gibson.4036:

9. Moving world bosses to a regular timer.

Not only is this more convenient than it was before, the way megaservers work requires it (since every map instance used to have its own independant boss timers, including overflows).

Gibson.4036:

10. Including Fractal rewards in Mawdrey recipe.

Is running a level 1 fractal five times (less now, if you wait for fractal dailies) really that hard?

Gibson.4036:

11. Too many waypoints.

What?

Nadgering up the personal story. That includes messing up the steps and making Arah story a solo instance.

1) The changes to the trait system. Then the year of not talking about or fixing it.

2) The communication policy. Basically every bad decision they make (traits, SAB, rearranging the personal story, hobosacks…) is made much, much worse by this. It also leads to a general atmosphere of disrespect and lack of loyalty. A friendly company that makes mistakes but talks to people about them is fine. A company that makes mistakes but treats its customers like children, not so much.

• NPE
• The new way of getting traits
• LS
• No raids/hard instanced group content with > 5 people