Guild Wars 2

hi , im playing mmorpg games for more than 13 years now and literly tried almost all popular and good mmo games , about hot i never saw any game … i mean any game have that kind of expansion pack , im not going to talk about the way they expand the game and that we didnt lose all our hard work instead they interduced mastry and stuff like this im going to talk alittle bit about new maps in hot .

as many of u may noticed or mybe was having fun too much that u didnt notice that maps in hot arent like any other mmo the depth the detail this isnt a joke this isnt something any other mmo do.
just go to new areas and see layers see how deep maps are ,and compare those to other mmos, im not going to namethose games but look at most succeful game,s expansion packs those games are like a joke to me their maps are 2D its literly like they used a game editor … and first added some grasses and then some default model of trees and buildings and … its like even a person like me can make those maps by having models in like 1 day top ,
just a flat land with some up and down and then add various models in game ,u literly see same kind of tree hundreds of time there and all these for other stuff like building and stuff like this too .

but look at hot the areas are all like drawn by hand and there wasnt anything like first making a model and then coppy paste it many times . so many difrent places im not even going to talk about many layers in game ,

i can say a single area in hot can literly be splited to 5 diffrent zones or more in other games, i can say if we have 4 new area in HOT ,in other games with this much work they would give u 20 new zones ,im realy not exagrating i want anet to know we see what they did we see how much work they did we see instead of quintity they cared about quility , after all these years these new maps and tbh many core game maps make me feel like this world is alive .
in other games u play the game and then u watch the artwork from the artbook and u r like wooooow this zone should supose to be like this but in gw 2 specialy hot the gameitself is the art work its the pure art it make me think about how creative and how professional those people who designed and created these are ,its so complex and stning and beautiful and idk what else to say

tbh i kinda cant go back to those 2D maps other games offering anymore, that just make me sick how those other famous mmo games still make such low quility maps.
those just looklike a joke and so cheap and well amature work to me .

and some complain about how hard mobs are tbh personaly think its not true they r what they should be some of us play as berseker cloths wearers and complain why mobs 2 attack us game gave us sooo many diffrent sets to choose for and now that we can change stats on ascended mybe its the time if u have trouble with mobs go and add some defence, tbh i remember first tiem enetering SW and i was kinda scared how mobs are strong then i realized how to dodge and those scariest monsters ! cant even hit me once now ,

i saw many negative posts in forum , well its totaly normal in all these years kinda never saw forum of any game where people come and say opposite things , all people do is kinda destruction and take 1 very tiny and small thing and exagrate it like if a game do 99% of things right and 1% wrong people keep puting finger on it and say the whole game is bad or …

so that was my opinion about the game and sadly i could barely cover the map creation and …. but i can say the same for other aspect of the new expansion,
Thanks for reading and sry my english isnt realy good

particularly like geography and exploration, so I played a lot RTS. in this regard the Anet does a masterful job on their maps. .It is much better than even some offline games, which while not having to deal with connection problems tha maps of theses games are large empty spaces only. Even the simplest like Dragon Stand has a certain aura of “mystery” and adventure while walk through him. GW2 reminds me of the good old days of Super Metroid 2.

about the difficulty, I feel very at first mainly because my main is a warrior Zerker glass cannon. I switched to a defensive build for some time, but after months of testing, I realized that instead of being defensive, would risk being even more aggressive and it worked. When I have free time, I will make a guide or video, for glass-canom style play in pve hot. Currently my warrior does not even use the defense trait line, is full-Zerker and i solo hot a lot. I use Discipline+Arms+Berserker traits and a good old greatsword, i soloed some HP with this, like the 3 golems in TD.

thats what im talking about mybe people who think hot is kinda overpowered and kinda soooo hard they should not play glass canon until they learn how to play it , im not even alowing myself to call them not pro players but well its hard when we go from core tyria( not saying sw and dry top ) to a challenging contnent. u literly can autoattack afk mobs in core tyria but new contnent like southsun cove and sw and dry top and also hot u cant do it , plz all of u guys remember ur first day and week in sw and southsunn cove do u rememeber how those karka could kinda 1 hit u or same for mordem teragriff

I don’t remember seeing many of threads with numerous players criticising the work of the art team or the sound design. They got the job done, no doubt about that, but if that would be the deciding factor whether a game is good or not, Destiny would have been game of the year 2014 instead of being one of the biggest disappointments in years and Star Wars: Battlefront would have been a flying success instead of being outperformed by every other AAA shooter on the PC platform despite having one of the most popular licenses of our pop culture.
Of course you can say that people complain about the 1% wrong, but well, let’s look at it, shall we?

• The story is a mess, even for the rather low GW2 standards.
• The content is artificially stretched out by gating and a huge number of collections.
• Numerous mini games have been introduced without proper quality management, leading to an unacceptable range of quality from “good for live server” to “kill it with fire”.
• Taxi Wars 2 has become a popular term for communities trying to organise meta events for their players on the new maps and getting kicked out of Dragon’s Stand in the middle of the fight is an issue that hasn’t been fixed for months, either.
• WvW guilds and small guilds have been screwed over by losing their progress and having to deal with a massive PvE grind to get it back.
• WvW is on life-support and the developers haven’t even tried to stop the bleeding or even talk to their alienated WvW players. They kicked a lot of very dedicated long-term players in the teeth this way and it’s not like a WvW player was spoiled with ANet’s attention in the first place.
• PvP suffers from the elite spezialisation powercreep and other terrible balancing issues and their answer was “balance patches every three months to shake up the meta”. Balancing by hitting the system with a sledge hammer in 2016 isn’t looking all that professional, especially for developers trying to establish their game in the e-sports scene.

If that’s just 1%, well… then I never saw how huge this expansion really is. I just wonder where all this content is hidden, because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen everything but raids. In other words: Yes, it’s not all doom and gloom, but pretending that this expansion is a paragon for the genre is like the proverbial whistling in the dark.
ANet has done better in the past and I won’t stop nagging until they live up to their old standards… or until I leave the franchise for good, that is.

Alicornus.7095:

I don’t remember seeing many of threads with numerous players criticising the work of the art team or the sound design. They got the job done, no doubt about that, but if that would be the deciding factor whether a game is good or not, Destiny would have been game of the year 2014 instead of being one of the biggest disappointments in years and Star Wars: Battlefront would have been a flying success instead of being outperformed by every other AAA shooter on the PC platform despite having one of the most popular licenses of our pop culture.
Of course you can say that people complain about the 1% wrong, but well, let’s look at it, shall we?

• The story is a mess, even for the rather low GW2 standards.
• The content is artificially stretched out by gating and a huge number of collections.
• Numerous mini games have been introduced without proper quality management, leading to an unacceptable range of quality from “good for live server” to “kill it with fire”.
• Taxi Wars 2 has become a popular term for communities trying to organise meta events for their players on the new maps and getting kicked out of Dragon’s Stand in the middle of the fight is an issue that hasn’t been fixed for months, either.
• WvW guilds and small guilds have been screwed over by losing their progress and having to deal with a massive PvE grind to get it back.
• WvW is on life-support and the developers haven’t even tried to stop the bleeding or even talk to their alienated WvW players. They kicked a lot of very dedicated long-term players in the teeth this way and it’s not like a WvW player was spoiled with ANet’s attention in the first place.
• PvP suffers from the elite spezialisation powercreep and other terrible balancing issues and their answer was “balance patches every three months to shake up the meta”. Balancing by hitting the system with a sledge hammer in 2016 isn’t looking all that professional, especially for developers trying to establish their game in the e-sports scene.

If that’s just 1%, well… then I never saw how huge this expansion really is. I just wonder where all this content is hidden, because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen everything but raids. In other words: Yes, it’s not all doom and gloom, but pretending that this expansion is a paragon for the genre is like the proverbial whistling in the dark.
ANet has done better in the past and I won’t stop nagging until they live up to their old standards… or until I leave the franchise for good, that is.

QFT. I have to agree with what you said. I don’t dislike HoT. But I to think it did more harm to the game than good.

Alicornus.7095:

I don’t remember seeing many of threads with numerous players criticising the work of the art team or the sound design. They got the job done, no doubt about that, but if that would be the deciding factor whether a game is good or not, Destiny would have been game of the year 2014 instead of being one of the biggest disappointments in years and Star Wars: Battlefront would have been a flying success instead of being outperformed by every other AAA shooter on the PC platform despite having one of the most popular licenses of our pop culture.
Of course you can say that people complain about the 1% wrong, but well, let’s look at it, shall we?

• The story is a mess, even for the rather low GW2 standards.
• The content is artificially stretched out by gating and a huge number of collections.
• Numerous mini games have been introduced without proper quality management, leading to an unacceptable range of quality from “good for live server” to “kill it with fire”.
• Taxi Wars 2 has become a popular term for communities trying to organise meta events for their players on the new maps and getting kicked out of Dragon’s Stand in the middle of the fight is an issue that hasn’t been fixed for months, either.
• WvW guilds and small guilds have been screwed over by losing their progress and having to deal with a massive PvE grind to get it back.
• WvW is on life-support and the developers haven’t even tried to stop the bleeding or even talk to their alienated WvW players. They kicked a lot of very dedicated long-term players in the teeth this way and it’s not like a WvW player was spoiled with ANet’s attention in the first place.
• PvP suffers from the elite spezialisation powercreep and other terrible balancing issues and their answer was “balance patches every three months to shake up the meta”. Balancing by hitting the system with a sledge hammer in 2016 isn’t looking all that professional, especially for developers trying to establish their game in the e-sports scene.

If that’s just 1%, well… then I never saw how huge this expansion really is. I just wonder where all this content is hidden, because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen everything but raids. In other words: Yes, it’s not all doom and gloom, but pretending that this expansion is a paragon for the genre is like the proverbial whistling in the dark.

Solid points.

Alicornus.7095:

I don’t remember seeing many of threads with numerous players criticising the work of the art team or the sound design. They got the job done, no doubt about that, but if that would be the deciding factor whether a game is good or not, Destiny would have been game of the year 2014 instead of being one of the biggest disappointments in years and Star Wars: Battlefront would have been a flying success instead of being outperformed by every other AAA shooter on the PC platform despite having one of the most popular licenses of our pop culture.
Of course you can say that people complain about the 1% wrong, but well, let’s look at it, shall we?

• The story is a mess, even for the rather low GW2 standards.
• The content is artificially stretched out by gating and a huge number of collections.
• Numerous mini games have been introduced without proper quality management, leading to an unacceptable range of quality from “good for live server” to “kill it with fire”.
• Taxi Wars 2 has become a popular term for communities trying to organise meta events for their players on the new maps and getting kicked out of Dragon’s Stand in the middle of the fight is an issue that hasn’t been fixed for months, either.
• WvW guilds and small guilds have been screwed over by losing their progress and having to deal with a massive PvE grind to get it back.
• WvW is on life-support and the developers haven’t even tried to stop the bleeding or even talk to their alienated WvW players. They kicked a lot of very dedicated long-term players in the teeth this way and it’s not like a WvW player was spoiled with ANet’s attention in the first place.
• PvP suffers from the elite spezialisation powercreep and other terrible balancing issues and their answer was “balance patches every three months to shake up the meta”. Balancing by hitting the system with a sledge hammer in 2016 isn’t looking all that professional, especially for developers trying to establish their game in the e-sports scene.

If that’s just 1%, well… then I never saw how huge this expansion really is. I just wonder where all this content is hidden, because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen everything but raids. In other words: Yes, it’s not all doom and gloom, but pretending that this expansion is a paragon for the genre is like the proverbial whistling in the dark.
ANet has done better in the past and I won’t stop nagging until they live up to their old standards… or until I leave the franchise for good, that is.

Pretending like these problems are only inherent of HoT is also whistling in the dark. In order:

• The main issue with the story is that it wasn’t long enough. I won’t deny that that is an issue, but for the story parts we got, a lot of it was actually good IMO. I also happened to get a bit lucky and have the first character I played the story through go through Living Story Season 2 and Heart of Thorns in one long go, which made the whole thing much more enjoyable. Even if that wasn’t intended, at least try it once.
• So…leveling? Masteries were created so a big level cap increase was not a side effect of the expansion. If leveling is not a problem for you to continue through the game, then masteries should not be either. It’s the same concept executed differently. As for collections, complaining about being forced to play the game rather than grind gold to pay as quickly as possible for your legendaries and specialization weapons is a much better alternative IMO. I intend to play them as intended by gathering the materials for the precursors and going through the collections. If you would rather play the game by putting your credit card in and getting as much gold as possible to speedrun your loot without earning it, you only have yourself to blame for your disappointment.
• From what I have seen, most adventures are in the passable and good section, with very few (Shooting Gallery comes to mind) being universally hated.
• I won’t argue with the Dragon’s Stand issue. On the other hand, it’s not like zerging through the difficult content wasn’t already common place. Before HoT, people taxied the world bosses. Now they taxi the meta events.
• Never been in a guild, so I won’t argue.
• WvW has been dying since launch. It has barely ever been supported, and for the last year and a half it has been heavily declining. Don’t peg this one on HoT, peg this on Guild Wars 2 as a whole.
• Balancing the game constantly in drastic ways can work if Anet does it right. While I’m not in high hopes that they will, successfully doing this can actually be one of the best moves they have done. It’s worked with other genres, and I have no reason to doubt that creating a changing meta will better the game as a whole by making things less stale. If you would rather sit through 2016 in stagnation, PvP is not for you.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

Pretending like these problems are only inherent of HoT is also whistling in the dark.

I didn’t do that.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

The main issue with the story is that it wasn’t long enough. I won’t deny that that is an issue, but for the story parts we got, a lot of it was actually good IMO. I also happened to get a bit lucky and have the first character I played the story through go through Living Story Season 2 and Heart of Thorns in one long go, which made the whole thing much more enjoyable. Even if that wasn’t intended, at least try it once.

Issues with the story without going into too much detail here:

• The plot starts with a plot convenient device: The full-scale airship attack at a jungle and the subsequent total loss of the fleet. It serves to start the story with a bang, but doesn’t make much sense at all and could have been achieved in a much more clever fashion.
• The setup of the jungle and the new pact allies is done poorly.
• The Rata Novus episode is entirely pointless for the plot.
• The character development is handled poorly with Braham and Rytlock not getting any kind of development despite being prepared for it, Caithe’s story being underused and not really resolved and several characters not being used at all.
• The story ends with a big deus ex machina without any setup whatsoever.

The length of the story is only one part of a major design problem that might be attributed to HoT being developed without the necessary amount of time.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

So…leveling? Masteries were created so a big level cap increase was not a side effect of the expansion. If leveling is not a problem for you to continue through the game, then masteries should not be either. It’s the same concept executed differently. As for collections, complaining about being forced to play the game rather than grind gold to pay as quickly as possible for your legendaries and specialization weapons is a much better alternative IMO. I intend to play them as intended by gathering the materials for the precursors and going through the collections. If you would rather play the game by putting your credit card in and getting as much gold as possible to speedrun your loot without earning it, you only have yourself to blame for your disappointment.

Nothing of that relates to those systems trying to bloat a rather small amount of content.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

From what I have seen, most adventures are in the passable and good section, with very few (Shooting Gallery comes to mind) being universally hated.

It’s apparent that the adventures were not tested in respect of ping issues, which is important for an international MMO. The requirements to achieve the medals are imbalanced and not throughoutly playtested and haven’t been corrected for months despite the data the developer could gather since launch.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

I won’t argue with the Dragon’s Stand issue. On the other hand, it’s not like zerging through the difficult content wasn’t already common place. Before HoT, people taxied the world bosses. Now they taxi the meta events.

That’s not the crux of the matter.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

WvW has been dying since launch. It has barely ever been supported, and for the last year and a half it has been heavily declining. Don’t peg this one on HoT, peg this on Guild Wars 2 as a whole.

Every games dies beginning the day it launches, so that’s a fallacy. While the WvW player base was on a decline, partially due to the lack of support, the HoT launch resulted in a collapse of the player base for every single server for a number of reasons elaborated by many players in interviews and the respective forums.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

Balancing the game constantly in drastic ways can work if Anet does it right. While I’m not in high hopes that they will, successfully doing this can actually be one of the best moves they have done. It’s worked with other genres, and I have no reason to doubt that creating a changing meta will better the game as a whole by making things less stale. If you would rather sit through 2016 in stagnation, PvP is not for you.

With the rise of e-sports we have seen a lot of professionalisation when it comes to balancing multiplayer games, so it’s not unreasonable to expect a professional approach from a developer trying to make a mark in e-sports and to call them out if they don’t. Shaking up metas is a way to evolve a game mode, it hasn’t proven to be a successful way to balance a game for professional competitive play which is what ANet pushes for.

Alicornus.7095:

Issues with the story without going into too much detail here:

• The plot starts with a plot convenient device: The full-scale airship attack at a jungle and the subsequent total loss of the fleet. It serves to start the story with a bang, but doesn’t make much sense at all and could have been achieved in a much more clever fashion.
• The setup of the jungle and the new pact allies is done poorly.
• The Rata Novus episode is entirely pointless for the plot.
• The character development is handled poorly with Braham and Rytlock not getting any kind of development despite being prepared for it, Caithe’s story being underused and not really resolved and several characters not being used at all.
• The story ends with a big deus ex machina without any setup whatsoever.

The length of the story is only one part of a major design problem that might be attributed to HoT being developed without the necessary amount of time.

The beginning of Heart of Thorns was already revealed and set up since Living World. Complaining about “poor setup” for races when the game exists with Soviet mole rats and Eskimo polar bears is pointless, while the maps (what I assume by setup of the jungle) are for the most part sensible. Rata Novus exists for the concept of every dragon having a weakness; if the characters don’t know that even though the audience does, it still has to be in there. Character development is rare in GW2 anyways, so that is not something to peg on HoT. Finally, I find myself much preferring this ending to the core ending. Mordremoth was actually fun and engaging, and the final fight made sense when the dragon is the entire jungle itself. Zhaitan, conversely, was horribly uninteresting.

What are hearts other to “bloat” map completion? What is leveling other to “bloat” the small story of the core game? The argument still stands; HoT created alternatives to leveling as a form of timegate, yet some portion of the playerbase has taken offence to having to work towards their goal rather than buy it.

Alicornus.7095:

It’s apparent that the adventures were not tested in respect of ping issues, which is important for an international MMO. The requirements to achieve the medals are imbalanced and not throughoutly playtested and haven’t been corrected for months despite the data the developer could gather since launch.

What would you propose to be done about this, then? There’s very little I can see Anet doing about other people’s Internet.

Alicornus.7095:

That’s not the crux of the matter.

Then what is, making people form together into large groups? Oh god, the horror, MULTIPLAYER online gaming!

Alicornus.7095:

Every games dies beginning the day it launches, so that’s a fallacy. While the WvW player base was on a decline, partially due to the lack of support, the HoT launch resulted in a collapse of the player base for every single server for a number of reasons elaborated by many players in interviews and the respective forums.

WvW was dead on arrival. The developers are currently working on trying to fix it. But WvW was not some sudden attack by HoT that instantly killed it. It was on life support before the xpac was even released.

Alicornus.7095:

With the rise of e-sports we have seen a lot of professionalisation when it comes to balancing multiplayer games, so it’s not unreasonable to expect a professional approach from a developer trying to make a mark in e-sports and to call them out if they don’t. Shaking up metas is a way to evolve a game mode, it hasn’t proven to be a successful way to balance a game for professional competitive play which is what ANet pushes for.

What is DotA? What is Magic: the Gathering? These both are games that thrive on the idea of shaking up the meta. If Anet can do the balance patches correctly to make every class viable but have a different playstyle within times, then they have a lifetime supporter. Will they do it correctly? Probably not. But if they can, they will make things interesting. ANYTHING is more interesting than the last couple years of PvP gaming on GW2.

Alicornus.7095:

I don’t remember seeing many of threads with numerous players criticising the work of the art team or the sound design. They got the job done, no doubt about that, but if that would be the deciding factor whether a game is good or not, Destiny would have been game of the year 2014 instead of being one of the biggest disappointments in years and Star Wars: Battlefront would have been a flying success instead of being outperformed by every other AAA shooter on the PC platform despite having one of the most popular licenses of our pop culture.
Of course you can say that people complain about the 1% wrong, but well, let’s look at it, shall we?

• The story is a mess, even for the rather low GW2 standards.
• The content is artificially stretched out by gating and a huge number of collections.
• Numerous mini games have been introduced without proper quality management, leading to an unacceptable range of quality from “good for live server” to “kill it with fire”.
• Taxi Wars 2 has become a popular term for communities trying to organise meta events for their players on the new maps and getting kicked out of Dragon’s Stand in the middle of the fight is an issue that hasn’t been fixed for months, either.
• WvW guilds and small guilds have been screwed over by losing their progress and having to deal with a massive PvE grind to get it back.
• WvW is on life-support and the developers haven’t even tried to stop the bleeding or even talk to their alienated WvW players. They kicked a lot of very dedicated long-term players in the teeth this way and it’s not like a WvW player was spoiled with ANet’s attention in the first place.
• PvP suffers from the elite spezialisation powercreep and other terrible balancing issues and their answer was “balance patches every three months to shake up the meta”. Balancing by hitting the system with a sledge hammer in 2016 isn’t looking all that professional, especially for developers trying to establish their game in the e-sports scene.

If that’s just 1%, well… then I never saw how huge this expansion really is. I just wonder where all this content is hidden, because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen everything but raids. In other words: Yes, it’s not all doom and gloom, but pretending that this expansion is a paragon for the genre is like the proverbial whistling in the dark.
ANet has done better in the past and I won’t stop nagging until they live up to their old standards… or until I leave the franchise for good, that is.

agree 100%.

Anyone should go into WvW and look at how the new BL map looks in the full map view, it’s just a design intern just slapped the maps over the old maps. ANd that’s just the tip of the iceberg on how ANet has treated the WvW game mode.

This expansion is NOT a good example of a how a good MMORPG expansion should be.

Thanks for the support so far, but readers beware, this post is going to take a while.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

The beginning of Heart of Thorns was already revealed and set up since Living World.

It’s still part of the plot and its very beginning, so it is relevant.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

Complaining about “poor setup” for races when the game exists with Soviet mole rats and Eskimo polar bears is pointless,

Guild Wars 2 is a fantasy game with a well developed and rather complex setting, therefore failing at the setup is not pointless but a failure when it comes to storytelling.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

Rata Novus exists for the concept of every dragon having a weakness; if the characters don’t know that even though the audience does, it still has to be in there.

“Getting shot to death by airships with powerful anti-aircraft cannons” counts as “having a weakness” for a dragon now? Seriously, look at what you’re defending. The episode is absolutely pointless, it doesn’t give any new information while it could and should have provided the setup for the actual ending of the plot.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

Character development is rare in GW2 anyways, so that is not something to peg on HoT.

I’ll give you that, but that doesn’t make it any better, especially if you prepare characters for such a development just to fail to deliver in the end. Which is again, bad storytelling.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

Finally, I find myself much preferring this ending to the core ending. Mordremoth was actually fun and engaging, and the final fight made sense when the dragon is the entire jungle itself. Zhaitan, conversely, was horribly uninteresting.

Putting aside the deus ex machina it was more fun, I agree. The ending of the personal story was a very long and rather boring story dungeon with a bossfight that was not even half as epic as it was on the drawing board while you had to do a whole lot more against Mordremoth. I don’t actually have a problem with the ending itself, but Trahearne growing super powers and the heroes running into the fire just to come up with a plan right before they face the end boss is just off. It came from nowhere and that’s bad practice.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

What are hearts other to “bloat” map completion?

While not all heart quests have unique and especially interesting activities and gameplay elements, there are quite a few to have this. They are content.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

What is leveling other to “bloat” the small story of the core game? The argument still stands; HoT created alternatives to leveling as a form of timegate, yet some portion of the playerbase has taken offence to having to work towards their goal rather than buy it.

Leveling is actually the closest to the mastery system the core game has, and if a leveling system from 1-80 is necessary while I cannot remember missing leveling my character after the tutorial area in GW1, is debatable. However, you can level a character while playing the game without being forced to repeat content which is not true for the mastery system which requires quite a lot of repetition, especially for those players who don’t invest a huge amount of time to play the game.
I would agree with you if this leveling would be on par with the leveling of a character in the core game, but that’s obviously not the case because of the XP grind. It would be if everything you had to do would be gathering the mastery points, which is actually fun by times.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

What would you propose to be done about this, then? There’s very little I can see Anet doing about other people’s Internet.

That’s why you consider what makes it to the live server and what sounds good in theory and won’t work in practice…

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

Then what is, making people form together into large groups? Oh god, the horror, MULTIPLAYER online gaming!

Your cynicism is lost on me, especially since all you do is taking an ill-informed personal shot at me. #discussionculture
What HoT actually accomplishes is a better scaling for large meta events, it’s not always perfect and needs some adjustments here and there, but it’s one of the better working systems of the expansion, so that’s not the point. The problems with Taxi Wars 2 are as follows:

• The latest iteration of the megaserver system makes it hard and sometimes even impossible to find or “create” a new map instance if you want to organise a large community event. That was regarded as a major letdown by the big Guild Wars communities especially in the early days of HoT when the meta events had a tendency to fail on maps without good organisation. Most meta events can be done with relative ease now, but the technical side of the problem hasn’t been touched, yet. Even though HoT requires coordination for large scale meta events, it makes it unreasonably hard for communities to actually get organised on the maps, not even counting those who cannot participate at all because of full maps, often resulting in a loss of a considerable amount of game time without being able to get anything done and without the desired reward of being able to participate.
• The map “decay” further solidifies this problem because maps are closing even if the message goes away or doesn’t even appear for those arriving on such a map after larger groups have been brought in.
• The HoT maps have a map participation system but the data is tied to a specific instance of the map, therefore you’ll lose your progress when you use a taxi, even though you’re often forced to for the main event because your map loses players prior to the main event instead of gaining them.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

WvW was dead on arrival.The developers are currently working on trying to fix it. But WvW was not some sudden attack by HoT that instantly killed it. It was on life support before the xpac was even released.

The game mode had a flawed concept from the get go, that’s true, and the failure to evolve it is one of the biggest letdowns of GW2. Nevertheless, despite its flaws it was a well received game mode with a numerous and quite dedicated player base, calling it “dead on arrival” is bonkers. The HoT meltdown is well documented and has been analyzed and discussed to death and no flat out denial will change this. Everyone has a right to his own opinion, but not to his own facts and that’s the end of that.

EvilSeaOtter.3789:

What is DotA? What is Magic: the Gathering? These both are games that thrive on the idea of shaking up the meta. If Anet can do the balance patches correctly to make every class viable but have a different playstyle within times, then they have a lifetime supporter. Will they do it correctly? Probably not. But if they can, they will make things interesting. ANYTHING is more interesting than the last couple years of PvP gaming on GW2.

You may educate yourself about the differences between balancing of multiplayer online games and patches to evolve said games, you even quoted the part where I gave a hint that there might be more to balancing than just shaking up things. That’s all there is left to say for me on that part.

Alright, that was it for today. I apologize for having to pluck the post to pieces, but it would have been even harder to follow than it already is without the citations.