I will start off by saying that my team and i have been playing GW2 pvp since about a week after release, i will not try and say that we are a top pvp team but i think it would be fair to say we have been a competitive pvp team under the names Team Iceberg and 50 Shades Of Pink.
Now after many many months of putting alot of time and effort into GW2 we have decided as a group to take a break and move to another game. We feel (as do many many others) that the meta right now is crap plain and simple and that this is the worst spot the game has been in since release, no one wants to play condi wars the game we signed up for is Guild Wars! No one wants to play a game where each class has only 1 viable build and where 2-3 of the spots in a 5 man team are decided by the meta and whats “op” at the moment, And on top of that the decision to wait till after Pax to release a balance patch blew my mind! All the players involved in Pax really want this game to succeed im sure you could have gone to them and said “we cant let the game fester like this for 2 months+ we will be patching before Pax” maybe even let them all on the test servers ahead of time to start figuring out what they are going to run, or you could have done like many other games and run the tournament on a previous patch? (probably not able to do this would be my guess)
Now the meta is the biggest complaint we have right now but there are 2 more somewhat minor complaints that did play a part in our decision.
1. Lack of features! The ladder is a joke (decay!?! lol) there is no difference between ranked and non ranked games because of this the ladder looses all meaning! You cant say ok lets run a few non ranked get warmed up then when we are feeling good we will run a ranked or two, because of this the “ranked” games loose all meaning as well as the ladder its self. Also the team ladder needs to be a team ladder you need to be able to play with your core team and work on a rank as a group then after go mess around with some friends and not have to worry about it affecting the rank that you are working on grinding with your team. All that could be forgiven if we had some sort of automated monthly and weekly tournaments to look forward/practice for and just to generally get excited about! Automated tournaments are (besides gvg, ha and huge team comp diversity) the best thing GW1 ever did these NEED to be implemented into the game RIGHT AWAY!!
2. Last but not least the pvp rewards. I wont go into detail here the reward system atm is crap. You only get anything new every 10 levels, everyone gets the same stuff, the chests after rank 30 become a serious case of carpal tunnel waiting to happen without actually providing anything in return other than the odd glory booster and sliver (which by now most people have 2-3 full stacks of)
Well thats all i have to say, hopefully some of these changes that are so desperately needed are made soon and on that day my entire team and i will come back running.