While many people are complaining about the mastery system that was implemented, I think the biggest problem here is the way that the guild hall upgrades are structured.
Having to first create a Tavern, then a workshop, then a mine, upgrade the mine in order to increase the amount of time-gated Atherium in order to build a workshop, then again grind for a market is simply ridiculous for guilds that simply want the guild arena. The materials required for these upgrades are expensive – which i don’t have any problems with, its the ones that are soulbound drops or time-gated materials such as charged quartz and silverwaste shovels (seriously who wants to grind for 100+ shovels in a zone that has been around for the better part of a year? at least make the mats accountbound drops that drop in the maguuma jungle).
Also requiring items such as 200 runes of holding, and the shovels I mentioned earlier, in order to upgrade your mine and aetherium cap makes it infinitely more difficult for smaller guilds (20-30 competitive GvG focused players) to upgrade their guild hall without dropping massive amounts of time and gold in a game-mode they don’t particularly enjoy playing. Guilds with upwards of 50 members can achieve the guild hall upgrades much quicker because with more players comes more resources.
Why should smaller Guilds have to grind so hard in order to obtain the only thing they’ve asked for since launch? Effectively an instanced version of the obsidian sanctum where larger scale deathmatch based fights can happen. There’s no rational reasoning for the arenas to function any differently than the Custom PvP arenas other than to force players to play the content they don’t particularly enjoy in order to play the game-mode they prefer. Add in the cost of the specializations and new ascended stats and any competitive player that prefers less emphasis on gear-selection than player skill will immediately be turned off to the prospect of gvg’ing and likely turn to other games.
It’s taken two years for a glorified obsidian sanctum to be implemented and yet again the developers have completely kittenized a simple alternative with an overly complex and expensive system that is going to alienate more players than they already have by not listening to the community.
The expansion looks nice, you can glide around like Archeage and the guild hall decorating system is a rip-off of EQ next. Very original and not at all what players wanted.
With the cost of playing the new content and weaponsets/specs I’m sure Gem sales have skyrocketed on top of the 50 dollar pricetag to an expansion that is large in scale solely due to time-gating and gear progression. I’m sure other companies would kill to have the combat-system that you managed to revolutionize the MMO genre with and the fact that you’ve managed to make the game progressively worse is an impressive feat.
I’m honestly very impressed that a game could be better at launch than it is 2 years later – you all deserve some karma for failing the event that is game design.