Hey,
The only incentive was skins and if you didn’t like the skin, well you didn’t have any reason to care about it.
You are playing the wrong game. And maybe with the wrong guild.
In my guild there are about 230 people, of which about 30-40 are pretty active, so business as usual.
We maxed out everything yesterday. World first. One of the world firsts at least.
Nobody ever demanded anything from any of us. Boss-man would update us on what was needed and each contributed however much they wanted. Then a couple of other guildies went crazy and decorated the place and now it looks awesome, I mean, we have a Chinese Garden kind of thing going (we call it “Beer Garden”), we have arcs, our guild initials on the walls, it’s awesome! We also had a jumping puzzle that led to a part of the map that wasn’t even finished by Anet, I spent maybe an hour just exploring that.
As for the raids – what exactly did you want? To shower you with money? You have legendary armor, you have skins and exclusive minnies to show off. If you want a gear treadmill, I suggest you play some other game. Because that’s not what GW2 is about.
The GH was not a resounding success, but it was NOT a failure.
I’m sorry, but I can’t help but feel your guild is not the common experience. We had people who donated and “went crazy”. However, that was maybe 1-5% of our guild population. Most of the population (despite being active and playing content) simply didn’t donate. Majority of them simply didn’t care because the rewards didn’t serve a purpose.
As for raids, yes I did. That is exactly what I expected. You have supposedly the hardest content in the game that not only requires 10 players, but is on a weekly cooldown. I expect some pretty good rewards.
Rewards have been an issue in this game since release. With the horizontal set up there’s little incentive to continue playing expansion content. So you have situations like we have now where HoT PvE zones have population issues where maybe one instance of each map completes the meta each rotation.
Guild Halls should’ve been areas where guilds were incentivized to play together. For example, they should have made decorations mainly bought with resonating crystals. These decoration merchants would come from all parts of the game and be hidden/locked behind certain events. Maybe you have to get to the end of a mini dungeon or jumping puzzle for a few. Maybe you have to complete a event chain in a zone. Open world content like that. To get resonating crystals, the main method would be from certain events. Completing events with guildies in your group or squad give you a medium to high chance of rewarding crystals. Completing dungeons and fractals with 3 or more guildies rewards you with crystals (with dungeons rewarding more then fractals). Taking WvW camps or doing guild team sPvP. All of these guild focused activities reward crystals that would be mainly used in decoration and upgrades.
There are a lot of areas where HoT didn’t deliver. You can see we’ve been bleeding players pretty fast. I mean just look at social medias. Reddit was getting 1200-1500 peak visitors and now its back down to pre expansion release levels. You don’t want your game returning to “normal” populations a mere 5 months after release. Especially for a f2p game.
First, no, rewards have never been an issue. Like I said, you seem to be playing the wrong game. 90% of the core GW2 players don’t want what you describe. We don’t want gear treadmill, we want new skins. I’m sorry, but what you say is a non-issue for most of us. Remember what happened when they added ascended items? Read my lips – nobody wants gear treadmill.
Second, that’s an issue your guild has. We wanted to have a cool place to meet up and we got that. The core of my guild is very tight, we help each other constantly, have a second guild so that people who can’t do GMs on Monday do them on Sunday (with a lot of people who have already done them helping out just because) and are always on TS. If your guildies are doing this just for the personal rewards, well, I already said it – you are in the wrong guild. And in the wrong game.
Third, I’ve been playing MMOs for 13 years. I’ve played maybe about a dozen, maybe more. So I can confidently say this – never in the history of the entire genre has there ever been an upward trend after the release of an expansion (maybe EvE? probably not though, and those aren’t paid). Reddit users going back down to pre-HoT levels when there is no big news around is not only expected, it’s perfectly fine. Your argumentation is ludicrous and based entirely on the idea that just because you don’t like something, nobody does and therefore the game is doing badly. Even though you have ZERO data to support this. Not to mention GW2 was DESIGNED to be the MMO you play, leave, then return, play again and leave. That’s the point of B2P for Christ’s sake. So please, don’t make kitten up about whether the game is doing well or not, because you have absolutely no idea. Neither does anyone on these forums, no matter how insightful they might fancy themselves
It’s pretty easy to tell that populations are dropping. You said it yourself that there has never been an upward trend. I’m not saying that the game is dead or dying, but I think for an expansion we’re losing players too fast. That’s great you’ve been playing MMOs for 13 years. You can’t really say too much about Gw2 using that though. Gw2 is too different. There haven’t been a ton of hugely popular horizontal MMOs in the past 13 years, maybe if you consider Gw1.
I’ve played since release and every time there has been a content addition to the game or even content changes, rewards is one of the focal points of the discussion. I mean just recently dungeons were declared “dead” because the rewards aren’t good enough. I constantly see people complaining how dungeons are pointless to do because the rewards aren’t there anymore. With Vinewrath people complained about the chest farm being too good. People have complained in the past that certain dungeon paths aren’t worth it (TA). Some are too easy to do. These complaints have always been there. I didn’t mention anything about a vertical climb, don’t put words in my mouth. I said that there is an issue rewards and there has always been complaints dealing with rewards.
I have yet to see anyone in full leystone armor. I have rarely seen anyone in full bladed (that has the chest). Maybe 1 or 2. Mistward is the most popular armor set that I’ve seen people wearing. I haven’t seen anyone with the animated machine weapons. The expensive special skins on the TP from RNG drops are more common since you can buy them from the TP. I think I’ve seen maybe 5-6 people with weapons from raids. I just hardly seen any of the HoT skins while playing.
The new stats are hugely underused. Out of all the new stats, vipers/sinister are the only stats that are in the meta right now. The rest are old stats, like the eternal king zerker.
My point is that my anecdotal evidence suggest that nobody really likes the skin. Not enough for them to be as common as say T3 or other similar ones. Looking on meta build websites you’ll see that the new stats are serverly underused. So with these two in minds (i know anecdotal evidence isn’t 100%, but considering we can’t see the data on how many people have a certain skin unlocked or used, we can’t really draw conclusions from anything else. Plus we’re already using anecdotal evidence to defend the guild design), the two major forms of rewards and incentives aren’t being used. Nobody wants to go through the trouble of getting stats because they’re not “good” or in the meta. Finally, as I said earlier, if you don’t want the skin you don’t care.
Right now only 8/29 people online between all of my guilds are in a HoT zone. Last night during peak hours it was 15/74 people online were in one of the 4 HoT zones. Even if we count fractal of the mist (which I pm’d a few and they weren’t above level 50), it’s not a huge increase in numbers.
We know they did decently well with sales. They increased profits from Q3 to Q4 (Q4 was expansion released) by about 85%.
My point is that when you release an expansion for a game, many people are expecting to spend a lot of time in the expansion. If people are so quick to return to vanilla, why purchase future expansions? I mean I’m watching what all my friends and all the guilds are doing. They’re doing all vanilla content. World Boss trains, under level 50 fractals, etc. Many of them did the expansion content to get certain skins if they wanted, but got what they wanted in a month and went back to vanilla. Why? Because vanilla offers better rewards or almost equal rewards for less work.
Why do you think they nerfed dungeons? It wasn’t a coincidence that they nerfed them prior to the release of HoT. Imagine if the audience still perceived dungeons are worth doing for gold. We would probably have even less in HoT content.
But that isn’t the point of this discussion. I’m just saying that the implementation of the Guild Halls and Scribing was serverly flawed. It only was fit for a small percentage of the audience and by just looking at different guilds donation tabs and guild bank donations, you can see that relative to the size of the guild there is a small percentage of players in each guild doing a majority of the work.
