Guild Wars 2

Ive been wanting to come back but how has the population been since HoT launch?

Great!

Felt like it took a big hit but the recent update has many feeling that they might be finally understanding where they went wrong.

Many probably left for good after the suspension of the Legendary Development Team but I’d still wager that they are a fairly small group of people.

In general, likely still less than pre-HoT, but right now is probably the highest it’s been in months.

Substance E.4852:

Felt like it took a big hit but the recent update has many feeling that they might be finally understanding where they went wrong.

Many probably left for good after the suspension of the Legendary Development Team but I’d still wager that they are a fairly small group of people.

In general, likely still less than pre-HoT, but right now is probably the highest it’s been in months.

Is that “many people” based on your guild/friends’ list? If it includes people who threatened leaving in the Legendary suspension announce thread… well, I take forum announcements about leaving with a grain of salt.

I agree though, about the number leaving not being all that large. I still see about the same numbers everywhere I go. Of course, I have no way of knowing whether there are the same number of mega-server shards, so who really knows?

Suffice it to say, OP, that pop levels don’t seem significantly different seem to me. If you play in off-peak hours for the region, you’ll likely run into some scarcity, but popular things still draw a crowd, especially in prime times like evenings/weekends. Also, WvW might pick up when they bring back the Alpine Borderlands.

its fairly dead.

It took a huge nosedive about a month or two after HoT and has slowly declined since. The reason? There’s nothing to do right now for the vets not overly interested in PvP, WvW, or raids.

I fully expect it to take another upswing when Living World returns, but for right now? Some areas are Tumbleweed City.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Substance E.4852:

Felt like it took a big hit but the recent update has many feeling that they might be finally understanding where they went wrong.

Many probably left for good after the suspension of the Legendary Development Team but I’d still wager that they are a fairly small group of people.

In general, likely still less than pre-HoT, but right now is probably the highest it’s been in months.

Is that “many people” based on your guild/friends’ list? If it includes people who threatened leaving in the Legendary suspension announce thread… well, I take forum announcements about leaving with a grain of salt.

Well I did say probably and to be perfectly honest, even with all the things they have added since launch, Legendary crafting is still essentially the end game activity in terms of time/effort investment.

There was no small amount of anger at the announcement and Gw2 isn’t really a game where the idea of ‘Sunk-Cost Fallacy’ keeps people logged in long after they stopped having fun like it does in games like WoW.

There are plenty of people who simply had nothing left to do in the game. Tell them the possibility of any new legendary to gun for has been indefinitely suspended and they no longer have a reason to log in outside of new content windows which is probably not going to happen until early Fall at this rate.

I still maintain that it was a relatively small group (compared to total pop) that might have left but it might still enough to notice if one frequents circles of hardcore pve’ers.

The good with Guild Wars 2 is that it follows the Modern MMO style where you don’t depend on other players at all, so even if you were the only one playing you can still finish the story and get your good gear

We can’t really tell if pop is up or down since HoT but what we can tell is that there are still plenty of players so population is good. HoT maps tends to cause “bunching up” but there are still lots of players.

TheBlackLeech.9360:

its fairly dead.

This.

After HOT was to insanely hard for most people and didn’t like the 3D map, WvW is dead atm and the players that did pay for HOT felt betrayed when the game they paid for is now being given away to new players for free.

All in all the base game is pretty decent ( alot of F2P’ers running around)

HOT is a ghost town most times and you need to do whats coined as getting a “taxi” where groups of people make a group to bring others into their instance just to try and fill a map in HOT let alone play.

And if your not sure about HOT do what all the free to play players are doing. Just wait until the next expansion so don’t have to pay for HOT either and it’s free.

Anyone saying HoT is dead is fooling themselves. What they do is go into a dead map, not look for looking for group to busier maps and they conclude it’s dead. You can pretty easily do every meta on every map at any time if you time it right, because like world bosses it’s all on a schedule.

If you enter a HoT map when that stuff isn’t going on, those maps are big enough and more importantly complex enough to not see many people while going around.

Until you announce a hero point of popular event in map chat and suddenly people show up from nowhere.

HoT isn’t dead, people just don’t know how to go about playing it.

I don’t really understand it when people ask on the forums about how the game is now and should I return etc. Just log in and see for yourself. It costs you nothing but a little time if you already have the game, especially since you said you’ve been wanting to return. Just try it and see

EU Guy.1803:

Ive been wanting to come back but how has the population been since HoT launch?

No one knows. People complained of empty maps as early as the first week after launch; people complain of too many people (for certain events) as recently as today.

If you want to know what it’s like, download the client and check it out — there’s no subscription, so it only costs you a little time.

CarolGam.2649:

I don’t really understand it when people ask on the forums about how the game is now and should I return etc. Just log in and see for yourself. It costs you nothing but a little time if you already have the game, especially since you said you’ve been wanting to return. Just try it and see

Sometime, in my less charitable moments, I find myself wondering whether posts like the OP’s are genuine questions or just someone finding yet another way to have a pot-shot at the game. Or just trolling, of course…

From returning after a two year break its incredibly dead, yes people are still here but the population is about 1/3 it was, maybe less.

CarolGam.2649:

I don’t really understand it when people ask on the forums about how the game is now and should I return etc. Just log in and see for yourself. It costs you nothing but a little time if you already have the game, especially since you said you’ve been wanting to return. Just try it and see

Because it takes 12 hours to download the game again, many uninstalled a while ago.. 12 hour download or ask on a forum…

Yes but opinions differ, as the replies in this thread prove, sometimes the only way is to find out for yourself.

Yes it’s fascinating. Some people says it’s dead while I myself find myself around loads of people in every HOT map everyday..

Famine.3164:

Yes it’s fascinating. Some people says it’s dead while I myself find myself around loads of people in every HOT map everyday..

I believe its Time Zone based, Server Based etc.. I know they say mega servers now but i feel either the games lost a huge amount of customers or something is wrong with the mega servers..

Just my opinion.

Depends on the server.

On Vabbi – a low pop server since release – there has been a marked increase. This has chiefly been due to that doubling up of servers on WvW. Now you have to get on early – UK time – to get into EB or even a BL, something completely unheard of on Vabbi.

Qs for sPvP feel shorter.

PvE is as always controlled via mega-server so it’s impossible for to get any sense of population. On ‘events’ people always turn up – perhaps more than usual, pre-April fix patch.

HoT -VB in my case – still suffers for emptiness. Although I suspect this is down to the appalling UI map system – curser the same colour as the background being a particular annoyance – and the difficulty of travelling (even without 100s of mobs to pass thru). Anet still have a serious problem here in that their UI Map system just doesn’t bloody work with HoT maps.

I also don’t see how difficult it is to add a range of user selectable cursors – colour and size (flashing?) – to the game giving how deflective the default is at times. There is also the problem that has been mentioned repeatedly regarding how the hero points indicate completion or not. These problems are not fixable! Seriously?

Anet can’t program a flashing ‘current-position-marker’ on a 2D UI map display?

Population seems fine to me.

Population seems more or less the same as ever to me. There’s dungeon, raid and fractal groups going on round the clock. Multiple instances of the more popular map metas. WvW is the most active it’s been in months.

The population looks the same to me. With 4 new maps there is going to be some thinning out of the player base. That can’t be avoided and it’s going to be a real problem in this game in the future as more maps are added.

Other games concentrate their max levels in the newest expansion zone. In this game, with the whole game playable every new map spreads the population out by that much, which is probably why it took so long for them to add new maps. You should expect each expansion with added new maps to be followed by posts that the maps are empty as the player base spreads out more and more.

Population is about the same as before. People who say less though are correct that there is less people per map because we now have 4 new maps spreading people out.

Dante.1508:

From returning after a two year break its incredibly dead, yes people are still here but the population is about 1/3 it was, maybe less.

CarolGam.2649:

I don’t really understand it when people ask on the forums about how the game is now and should I return etc. Just log in and see for yourself. It costs you nothing but a little time if you already have the game, especially since you said you’ve been wanting to return. Just try it and see

Because it takes 12 hours to download the game again, many uninstalled a while ago.. 12 hour download or ask on a forum…

You not only have no evidence of this, but the one third comment is almost definitely not true. First of all, when you left, megaservers didn’t exist at all, so you’re comparing an opinion about the game with one server and then another. You have no idea of the overall population.

As an example I was on TC when servers were actual servers and it was probably the second business server in the US server park. It was busy…in some zones. Some zones weren’t.

The advent of the megaserver spread out the population in some cases. Servers that had no one were now paired up with servers that had some traffic and those servers saw an increase in population that I never did.

So before you could only know the population of one server which isn’t at all indicative of the game.

I’d love to know what your calculations are based on.

I mean just the idea that that core game is free to play has brought more players into the game, and Anet now has the money to offer large rewards for PvP that they never have before. That doesn’t strike me asa game that’s lost 2/3s of it’s population.

The important question is whether there’s enough people to do your preferred game mode, and the OP never said which part of the game (s)he likes to play.

The April update revamped the LFG tool, making it massively easier to find people for the content you want to do. I’m having an incredibly easy time finding viable HoT maps now, compared to a month ago when it was always a hassle. (Improved rewards certainly didn’t hurt, either.)

Redenaz.8631:

The important question is whether there’s enough people to do your preferred game mode, and the OP never said which part of the game (s)he likes to play.

The April update revamped the LFG tool, making it massively easier to find people for the content you want to do. I’m having an incredibly easy time finding viable HoT maps now, compared to a month ago when it was always a hassle. (Improved rewards certainly didn’t hurt, either.)

This! (15 cuddly Quaggans in a row)

Redenaz.8631:

The important question is whether there’s enough people to do your preferred game mode, and the OP never said which part of the game (s)he likes to play.

The April update revamped the LFG tool, making it massively easier to find people for the content you want to do. I’m having an incredibly easy time finding viable HoT maps now, compared to a month ago when it was always a hassle. (Improved rewards certainly didn’t hurt, either.)

With that in mind it would make this thread more constructive haha.

I’ll add for WvW, the april update is running an “open beta” of sorts and has allied low pop servers with higher pop servers. In addition there are a lot of improvements to loot, including reward tracks similar to sPvP reward tracks, and loot drops with every tick that becomes more frequent as you earn more participation. So far WvW has had every map queued on reset nights (Friday) on my server in T3 and seems to be more active throughout the week so far. So WvW is a lot healthier now population wise.

Everytime I do a key run the starting area has multiple new chars. Some of them I can tell are from old accounts, but they can’t all be old accounts. No matter what time I make a new char there’s several new chars at the spawn site and several chars at the final boss, and since I run straight from the spawn site to the boss it’s usually not the same chars. Most of the time I don’t even get to the boss before it dies and I’m sent off to Queensdale. And this has been going on for months, since they made the game f2p. So I would say there’s a steady stream of new players.

For those of us that watch market trends the spring update has breathed life into the population count from what I can see, there’s a long ways to go before any new content will come so it will be at its peak now and decline until the next major update.

Dante.1508:

From returning after a two year break its incredibly dead, yes people are still here but the population is about 1/3 it was, maybe less.

You must be playing a different game than I; it’s very active no matter what times I login.

I’m so glad all these people have real numbers backing up their claims of it being dead.

Presumably you are from EU. I think many of the response isn’t from EU.

It’s really hard to tell about population because megaserver kind of bring people together.

Typical Hot Play session.

This map is empty would you like to move to another empty map? – This map is empty would you like to move to another empty map? – This map is empty would you like to move to another empty map? – This map is empty would you like to move to another empty map? – This map is empty would you like to move to another empty map? – Ad infinitum

Population is probably fine, they just need to get around to fixing mega servers.

Dante.1508:

From returning after a two year break its incredibly dead, yes people are still here but the population is about 1/3 it was, maybe less.

I strongly doubt you have absolutely anything to back that up.

Dante.1508:

Because it takes 12 hours to download the game again, many uninstalled a while ago.. 12 hour download or ask on a forum…

Speak for yourself. I can redownload it in under an hour. Not everyone has Walmart internet…

Overall, the population seems pretty solid. Groups usually fill quickly and there are plenty of people around, although the megaservers help with that. It seemed like the spring quarterly update helped bring people back to the game, so I’m looking forward to what will happen with the next quarterly update

Since the patch the population is much better again in the expac and the vanilla game. This is from my experiences when playing on EU. Before the patch (must say before Sab) the population had imploded.