Guild Wars 2

Not sure how many people can relate, but I just so happen to be a WoW “paratrooper” (dropped off the one game, landed here). Literally, I cancelled my subscription this week. I bought GW2 several months ago, but being a raider and a guild officer in WoW meant I didn’t have much time to really play my GW2 toons.

So I finally moved on and started spending a lot more time in GW2 than in WoW. I loved it. I loved the dual-pistol-wielding thied who ended up being my first 80 (also this week). I loved the sheer beauty of Tyria. The rainbow mills in Queensdale and blinding white Shiverpeaks (lowbie warrior girl with a rifle). I couldn’t get over the shock of seeing instanced resource nodes and non-tagged mobs. Realizing that when you see players around, things are well and when you see a dead one between two nearby ores, the best thing to do is run up and ress them. So much of toxicity that plagues Azeroth seemed absent.

And then I started reading the forums.
Sociopathic elitism is here alright.
Pathetic “the cool BFF friends, ANet and me, spit at your whining, lol” is here alright.
And unfortunately it seems that design and marketing policies so well known to me from Blizzard are finding its way here too.

Beware folks. You don’t want the results of supporting snowflakes and ripping your old-timers off. You really don’t want that.
Selling an unfinished DLC as an xpac resulted in an absolutely stunning flop: 3M subs gained by Draenor hype were lost within a quarter Literally, every month a million people left the game in terms of net subs. ANet, how desperate are you to rival such stunning achievement? Why are you even harbouring the sociopathic snowflakes in one of the few places offering you fleshed-out feedback?

Come on, please tell me I haven’t moved to GW2 just as it is about to start the downward slide and trying to rival Blizzard’s losses.

Obviously, while I was completely hyped out for HoT and just couldn’t wait to try out Tyria’s take on death knights (my WoW main is one) etc., now I’ve decided to wait until the first sale at least. With only one lvl80, 3 more just started and one backup slot left, I can postpone quite a lot of purchases I was tempted to make. Partially to improve the quality of my tyrian life, partially to simply express my appreciation for the game – well, that can wait. Blizzard taught me that any delay or limitation in cash response to company policies is a huge mistake.

I so hoped to see those lessons useless here.

There’s a lot of people upset now, and somewhat rightly so, but I also think that some of that anger is either misdirected or misplaced.

Are veteran players really upset that for the past 2-3 years they have been able to play an excellent game for the cost of $60 and nothing else mandatory the entire time? ($540 in monthly subscriptions for WoW, plus the cost of any expansions that came out during that time period, so we’ll call it a cool $600). They may feel a jaded because a new player can pay $50 for the expansion and get access to the core game and expansion, but they don’t get to experience the Living World S1 at all (yet) and if they want to play Living World S2 they need to buy $20 worth of gems. When LWS1 does eventually release in some manner, it may cost an additional $20-$30. I don’t understand so much the veteran players of many years being so upset.

The second group of people are those who bought the game during massive sales. In January, March, and April there were -75% sales where you could get the entire game for $10. I was one of those people. I have no issue eventually paying whatever they require for the expansion, but I’ll hold out for now just in case they sweeten the deal some (unlikely).

The third group is actually negatively affected by this announcement; severely. Anybody who recently (past couple of months or so) bought the core game in anticipation of the expansion for the regular price of $40-$60 will now have to buy everything again, essentially forcing them to pay $90-$110 for the game and expansion. This is what it costs for the veteran players, but this group of people did not get to experience the game yet. I’ve heard Anet is trying to remedy this situation, but they’ve announced nothing official so far. People have been “forseeing” Anet’s downfall probably since the beginning of the game. This won’t change much.

As for not buying the expansion yet, I think it’s reasonable if you don’t at the moment. For now, we don’t even have all of the information about it, so I feel it’s kind of silly to just throw money at the screen without a full list of content. There is still a lot to do outside the expansion, so you’ll still definitely be able to enjoy things while waiting for any changes to the expansion.