Guild Wars 2

• The news goes out and Chef Anet is opening a new restaurant. It’s like the old restaurant only it looks better and has a big 2 beside it’s name.

(I promise this will make sense)

• We learn that this new restaurant won’t have all of the same meals, some of our old “usuals” will be replaced. Ok, this is reasonable. New horizons and all. Still many of us wonder what will become of the old Assassin Burger. Will it be replaced? It was hard to find on the menu anyway and kept changing it’s location.
• Thief sandwich? Ok. It’s like a burger, fills the same role, has similar fillings. The hype hits.
• Some lucky kittens get to try the sandwich first. And oh, is it brilliant. It kicks hunger in the teeth and is such a joy to eat that one minute it is there and the next…gone. Sandwich lovers everywhere are optimistic and trust in Chef Anet runs high.
• But things change, ideas change. Some time after launch of the restaurant, Anet receives complaints about Thief Sandwich, specifically during it’s food competitions. It’s just there and gone, so tasty that the people eating it just won’t stop. The Soup loyalists and pasta die-hards suggest that the sandwich is broken. It must be fixed.
• In response Chef Anet rips out the tomato and lettuce. Ok, we can deal right? That’s not even the main part of the sandwich.
• But the complaints don’t cease and the Chef gets heavy handed, having their own doubts about the meal. Out comes the meat. The kitten kittening meat! (This dramatisation is in no way a reflection on it’s vegetarian author) So we sandwich lovers take a step back and look at our meal. Some of us even get up and walk away from the table or order something else. But not us survivors, no, we persevere. We take our bread and cheese and we grill that kitten! We make grilled cheese, we make the best of a bad situation. And grilled cheese works, against all reason it works. We find our niche. I mean grilled cheese is a staple. No one does cheddar like grilled cheese.
• And then a new wing of the restaurant is announced. We have high hopes but we know everything there is going to be expensive and hidden behind a wall. A wall we have to pay to get around. And holy? All the salad! What is Chef Anet thinking? Didn’t we have enough salad as is? Ok, I can ignore that. I can even ignore all the potted plants and greenery they are adding to the wing. The customisable bar where groups of friends can hang out looks neat. I also hear our meal is going to have some special sides added to it maybe? Maybe some new elite bread? Maybe a long range straw for our cups? I mean seriously, the short utility straw we currently have won’t even reach the bottom.
• And there goes our cheese. What?? Why?! Why Chef Anet? That…. that’s all we had to make us work. Who will order this meal now?
• Oh they… they just gave the new elite Daredevil’s Club Sandwich our cheese.. only they aged it some.
• And a toothpick. They jabbed a stick in it.
• The new wing launches, and it launches with a few sandwich lovers less to be sure. But some of us hopefuls, we pay to get into the special wing. The menu is a jungle of options and it does some to hide the fact that they only added 4 slightly smaller tables to the wing. I can overlook that, though, where is my new sandwich? Oh right pulls the toothpick out useless thing.
• Everywhere people are flocking to the Revenant Sub; hey it has a toothpick too. And the DragonHunter Burger Delux can be found at almost every table. Our table is a bit small, those of us that remain. But we try our bests to find our way around this new meal (Maybe we shouldn’t have tossed the toothpick after-all).
• But ultimately it all just seems so….hollow. The Mesmerising Desert disappears just as easily as our sandwich does. And it tastes so good that it’s like time slows. The burger and the sub both hit hunger harder. And I mean, we have this improved cheese just jumping all over the place in terms of flavour….but where is the rest?

A few facts to point out. When Anet wants to get rid of a game feature, they de-incentivise it, (Dungeons) they basically make you go, “Why bother?” Anet prides it’s self on being “different” And “thief” is about as true and tried a fantasy trope as the holy trinity. Anet has absolutely no problem with retconning things such as how old lore has been changed by current lore canon. And WHEN they retcon, they just give you something they feel is better. Revenant has a melee staff, Mesmer can stealth, and now everyone seems to have improved mobility.
We are the fading. We are the retconned.
This is why Anet won’t address thief flaws and core class issues. They just want us to fade away. Sure we will still be there, on the menu. But now we are just two soggy slices of bread beneath barely readable type.

Here Lies Thief.

But I’m not giving up. I think there is something viable in all this mess, and I will not quietly stealth into the night. I will not dine on some meal I can barely stomach. I will take this toothpick and jab into my enemies eye defiantly. I will keep hotjoining with different builds and gear until that old mantra, “Holy crap, there is a thief on my kitten!” will be heard again.

This thread is meant to address a misconception that is currently wreaking havoc in every form of PvP in this game. What I am going to talk about probably THE source of most of the toxicity that exists in the PvP and WvW game modes and I have hopes that putting this problem to light will help the players become a little more wary of complaints.

So without further delay, I present to you the source:

It is pride. The inability to accept that you, as a player, have faults and are unwilling to admit that there are personal factors you can improve upon (like experience).

How the problem of pride relates to the misconception is this…

PvP is a game mode where you are pitted against another player using the game as a medium. Since the opposing side is controlled by a living player, the game becomes competitive. Both players striving to come out on top.

In a competitive game like GW2 PvP and WvW, you are guaranteed to run into a player who capitalizes on the required mentality for PvP. These players are usually hard to kill because they actually strive to win. If for any reason said player gets killed, they either find a way to beat it with everything they have at their disposal or they play whatever killed them and continue on winning.

Said player is the kind of PvPer that every PvP mode needs.

Now this is where pride comes in and how it causes this misconception. When a player gets beaten but is absorbed with pride, that player will deny most if not all fault within themselves and place blame on outside sources. Now this isn’t a big deal by itself. However, this problem becomes more severe the more often this behavior is enabled.

And it is not hard to enable it.

A player whose experienced the same kind of grief as another player who previously posted said complaint on the forums will see the thread as a form of confirmation, thus reinforcing their beliefs. Any incoherent, rage-induced complaining then is reverberated throughout the forums and the fallacy eventually becomes a widely believed delusion even to the players who know for a fact that it is false.

Developers can also enable this behavior by listening and acting upon it. By basing balancing decisions off of the complaints of loud minorities, you confirm a problem that never existed. Their belief that the problem lies within external sources instead of both external and internal sources is now reinforced.

Both forms of enabling (combined) leads to chaotic balancing. But more importantly, it lets players comfortably assume that Arenanet WILL nerf something if they complain hard and loud enough.

This SHOULD NOT happen. Nobody should allow this kind of behavior to go on especially when the players themselves have more than enough resources and options to work with their issues in combat. It breeds poor (actually kittenty) sportsmanship, honor, etc. among the community. Everyone pays the price and everyone is to blame.

Hi i bought this game a few days ago and i’ve played it for a couple of hours and i have problem when enemies get me down. I’m level 6 and when i was level 2 i died instantly but now something is wrong. Somehow i killed a mob and still i was downed until I died completly. Is there a way to stay alive in this game? Sometimes im able to dodge but when i get downed its a matter of seconds until i die. It was better when you get killed istantly so you are able to teleport away but now i dont know what to do. Anyone can help me please? This is my first mmorpg i need to learn and at the moment this game seems a little hard for me. Thank you