Guild Wars 2

I understand that the title of this topic is rather vague, but I feel like I should just let it all out. It has to come to my attention that Guild Wars 2, in terms of community, has changed. This is entirely my opinion. I do not mean any offense to anyone and it is not meant to be taken as a solid resolution regarding the overall game. It really just me ranting.

When I first joined this game back at late August of 2015, I deemed that the Guild Wars 2 community was one of the best when it came to MMORPGs. I felt welcomed. The people were nice, creative and helpful. I truly enjoyed it. I even liked the PvP, which will is well-known for its sourness, but I didn’t see it as bad as before. Eventually I got myself into the Roleplaying community as well on the European servers. It was quite lovely and rather big if I might say.

But after a whole year of playing this game, I started to notice on a few things… I noticed that the people weren’t being as nice and helpful as they once were. I saw people leaving.. and I ended up feeling rather lonely. I couldn’t find a guild where I could fit in. All my online friends grew different tastes and decided to approach me and the overall roleplaying community died; it sank itself into a vast pit of drama that I managed to avoid thankfully. I also started to notice a rather unnatural amount of “normies”. Normies are those type of players who overdo themselves with legendaries, overused or skimpy looks that reveal a poor choice of dyes, some with scarfs, rather silly names and an abundance of annoying wings— I was no longer seeing that originality that I once experienced. Also the number of bad encounters in raids, dungeons and even events got gradually worse.

Also, throughout that year I decided to get creative. I do not know how to draw and my writing isn’t magnificent, but I do possess some good editing skills. And seeing that some videos about this game were well-known and appreciated I decided to do a few by myself, which are not bad at all. I attempted to share them with the community, but it kind of.. backfired? It was completely overlooked and even hated and I attempted to share it on most related-sites that I knew.

And back to what I mentioned earlier, about me being lonely. I was still into the game, but I took the foolish decision of wanting to try to craft a legendary. It was going well at first but it didn’t take long until I found myself in a grind-like routine and that contributed to me losing interest in the game. I have experienced most of it could offer and I no longer see a reason to stick around. I may pop here and now when new episodes come to the surface.. but besides that… there really is nothing. And I find this rather.. saddening, considering just how much I had enjoyed this game. More than any MMO I’ve had in the past. I just don’t know what went wrong really.

I’m also going to assume that this thread is going to be ignored or maybe even deleted? Who knows, really. I just needed to get this off my “chest”.

Edit: I forgot to mention something. I technically gave up in early December, but I have logged in here and there to check on things.. but is it just me or is the population decreasing? I have found myself in an empty Divinity’s Reach quite often and I’m part of one of the biggest European servers, which should place me on a populated shard, right?

What you are experiencing is something afflicting not just guild wars but the gaming community as a whole.

people who play MMO’s right now want all the very best new features that work together seamlessly and allows them to do practically anything they wanted in an exciting and dynamic world. – in short, people are looking for the new WoW and they won’t settle for an inch less. The problem is that games actually being able to match WoW are few and far between. Moreover the ‘free-to-play DLC’ Cash Cow became such a profitable venture that nearly every online MMO has it in one form or another, with many gating all of their best items services and other desirables behind these cash gates. With the economy being the way that it is the majority of players actually go to these games to spend as little as possible, yet most inevitably fall prey to this sooner or later. This leaves MMO Players rather bitter, leading them away from the MMO playground and back into consoles.
On top of this, GW2 players have recently been getting sick and tired of repeated sales tactics that do nothing for people who don’t want to pay any more than they have to for the game – mainly the gem store and all the items therein. the bait and switch of HoT and overhype it generated didn’t help much either, as did living story. things are starting to improve but this has left a lot of players so full of salt for this game and Anet that the dead sea is jealous, so it will be a long time before this game can come close to how it was when it first launched – if Anet doesn’t screw up again.

It’s also that the gaming community has had so much experience in game play styles and that game developers are practically repeating themselves at this point that gamers are setting the bar of ‘great’ higher and higher with more details of what they want in a game just to get that ‘new’ and ‘innovative’ feel again – in short, they are trying to tell developers what they’re looking for and developers at this point are just out to make cash.
This has led to the rise of indie game developers taking the scene and leading more and more players away from major developers, as indie gamers often ‘experiment’ with new ideas and innovations – with several being huge successes, such as Undertale and FNAF. (Despite how games like these are usually plagued by a majority of toxic overzealous die-hard fans that pretty much ruin it for everyone else – normal fans included.)

TL;DR – Everyone’s just become very salty for different reasons, it’s not you.

All games get salty once the honeymoon is over and flaws show up. You can either skip from game to game looking for that “new game smell” where the game is wonderful, the people are wonderful and the sky is never cloudy. Or you can realize that nothing is perfect, people will be people and you have to make do with what is before you. Whichever makes you the happiest is what you should choose.

Indeed not only MMOs but also other online games! such as Overwatch; a game I love to the core and yet, ever since the christmas update, everything and everyone seems to be on edge… aggressive, annoying, salty, whatever word you wish you use, it will be negative. It seems to be quite a common crisis with these online games. People are honestly surprised when we play and usually say “its so rare to meet players that are not toxic nowadays” true, and saddening I must say.

There are always salty people. There were tons during public BETA tests, at launch, during Living Story 1, and so on. One of the hardest things to learn is when it’s time to move on from perhaps a guild of 3 years which is no longer as fun as it used to be, or to try a different game for a few weeks, etc.

I try to play with people who are still enjoying the game and less often with people who are grumpy about it. That makes it more fun for me and for them. (I’ll still chat with old friends/associates.)

Community: A lot of the people that were around at the start of the game aren’t around any more. Whether the active players are better or worse in interactions with others than the departed players is likely a matter of just who one is interacting with. Of a certainty, there’s less interaction in game than there used to be — at least on map chat. Guilds likely range from still friendly and active to dead.

Drama: Different people are going to have different expectations of an MMO. Often, those expectations come into conflict. Since people are essentially anonymous online, the social constraints that discourage kitten-hattery are absent. We can often see the same things happening in social media.

Players Whose Tastes We Don’t Share: While you or I might not appreciate the kitsch that others choose to display, it’s their game, too.

Video-Sharing: Kudos on having the courage to put yourself out there by posting some videos. I’m sorry it didn’t work out the way you might have liked.

MMO Longevity: There are a lot of different types of entertainment that pale over time. How many movie sequels get panned? How many game sequels fail? Even the best TV series end eventually once they lose momentum. MMO longevity is further hindered by MMO consumers who expect to play many hours a day and expect the game to constantly provide new things to do. You’ve played for more than a year. If you’re now not having fun, then that may be this game’s life span for you.

Population: With mega-server shards you never know whether the shard is empty, just seems empty because no one is chatting, or whether you just gt dumped in a brand new shard because the existing shard reached the number at which the algorithm triggers a new map. There are certainly less threads and less posts in general on these boards, but I’ve seen deader forums. I certainly see players everywhere I go in game, but I’d expect to because of how mega-servers work. I always see a fair number of people in the WvW maps, but ANet has linked servers, so I’d expect to. One thing we can say with certainty is that revenue was down in Q2 and Q3 2016. What we don’t know is whether that means people are no longer playing — or just no longer paying. No one knows, really, except maybe ANet.

This game is like a romantic relationship, you just need to take a break every now and then to truly enjoy/appreciate it.

I’ve been on several hiatuses, first one voluntary, second one was involuntarily, but every time I come back to it, I realise how much I miss playing the game.

I think people expect problems to be fixed as soon as they appear, and everyone has an opinion on how to fix things. When they sit and sit for ages, and people hash and rehash the same old things over and over, then toxicity emerges. What people don’t realize is that (some) problems are actually really complicated and require tons of care and manpower. Another possible reason is that at the end of the day companies are run by businessmen, not gamers. The last reason I’ll add is that people in charge can make mistakes, and some mistakes are not easily undone.

Video games are a very tricky business. You might see growth for the first year of its birth, and then suddenly it’ll die. Its an art that few get right, and if one doesn’t get it right the first time, its impossible to change the brush strokes mid way. One must start over.

Grind because of a cash-shop focus. According to some players I was the only one who raised this issue. Looking at this thread (at least the first reactions) I guess not.

People ending up in grind, getting bored by it and so leaving the game is what I have been warning Anet before all along.

To OP: What you have experienced did happen to many people during the first 3 years of GW2. Then when the expansion was released (around the time you joined) many people who left came back and ‘the old times’ made a comeback. However the things that made them leave the first time where not completely solved with the expansion so they did leave again within the first half year of HoT.

I do not know if the community that you are left with is then by definition more salty or contains of more ‘normies’. But when there are less people it will obviously also be harder to find people that enjoy what you enjoy. In fact, you left because what you enjoy became less enjoyable, so it make sense that people who enjoy the same things have the same problems and so left as well.

One part to blame for this is maybe that this game since HoT have been designed for larger groups which make it hard to keep things in balance. When maps in HoT have less people things get harder to do which in turn make people go less often to those maps.

Right after HoT went live (after BETA testing phase) there where very heated discussions here on this forum about how difficult some Hero Challengers had become. Those in the first wave finish with grind-them-all, get-them-all had their share of legendaries/new specializations etc. and moved on which make most things more difficult as it is meant to be done in groups and not solo.

When there is people around and you get downed or killed this is not a big problem as long as you can get rezzed when there is enough friendly people around, but with less people on each maps it gets harder to finish what ever event or challenges you want to do, especially when you haven’t open up all WP yet. Right now it just feels like an extreme uphill to finish my Ele/Tempest for map completion in HoTs maps. I have two other toons which have almost every WP and HP/MP, but this one just feels not that fun to run or glide from the only WP that is still open when not being set in combat during an event running at the same spot.

I have been with HoT all stages of beta testing and right now I just feel that they might have over done it will all those small creatures (Pocket Raptor) where ever you go. If you are not careful you will get killed very fast and then you have to take your time to find your way back where you where left off before you was killed. This is not very fun in my book and with less player it also means that you will get more of those concentrated on you when you pass by as a group would have more AoE to just wipe them out of the way or give out boons that more or less would reduce their impact on fast HP will go done to lethal levels. In short it scaling of damage depending on smaller population (then when HoT had larger groups 24/7 more or less) that make HoT an chore to play and not fun in the long run.

Very fast after the first wave with large population moved away from HoT, those maps started also to show that message where you get one hour warning before it will close (or get Volunteer’s Blessing to get to new one) on regular basis. When I go there it doesn’t take much time before and I will get another message telling me that this map also will soon close again. Jumping from map to map without starting anything that you can’t finish within 60 min isn’t a very fun way to explore or finish HP/MP or events.