Guild Wars 2

I miss the old days, after release, before christmas 2012. Where the map chat was full of conversations, people having fun, discussing things. “Things will get worse when the playerbase from the game that shalt not be named will get their hands on this game”, they said. I didn’t want to believe it.

One year later, what has happened? Anet’s promise of no farming, no grinding and no gear-treadmilling has been long since forgotten. Because the influx of players that get into a game, create their first character and immediately go “so, what’s the best class? build? how do I level fastest? how can i get the best gear asap?” seem to make up such a huge amount of the player base that they must be catered to. I understand that, the staff needs to be paid. And even though I probably dumped about 200€ or more in the past year in the cash shop (mostly for fashion and harvesting tools and character slots and bank slots – btw we need more fashion/skins), I guess I’m not the target demographic and my contribution is too little.

These days the map chat only reads “where’s the train at!”, “train at X” or just “zerg at X” and “OMG some idiots are ruining the train!”. Conversations? No. Fun? No. It’s about efficiency. It’s about farming. It’s about making the most gold/h. And the game gets designed around that.

From my guildie I heard that last year’s Halloween was amazing. I missed it because I moved and didn’t have internet for the time being. I was looking forward to it all year. What I got was a grindfest and the statement “It’s certainly nothing like last year”. Yay.

Worst of all, the people that do this mindnumbingly boring stuff that is running in a circle all day long everyday even get rewarded and thus feel entitled to what they’re doing. They yell at you for playing the game it’s intended. You call out the event so others can do it, but all you get is hateful messages how you shouldn’t dare messing with THE ORDER!!11

ANet has created a beautiful world, full or lore, NPCs with funny or interesting dialogue and things to discover, fun things to do. It’s just that they do everything they can to keep people away from it and give them braindead farming because that’s what people want.

Yesterday I was playing with a guildie in the Fields of Ruin, just doing an ogre wars event. A random guy came along and asked “This is for Foulbear Kraal, right?”, to which I said “Yes, but the world boss is bugged atm”. His response: “Lol, why do the event then?”
Obviously, if there is no bonus chest to be had, there’s no point in playing the game. If you can make more gold running in circles all day in Queensdale or Frostgorge, there’s no other point in playing the game except yelling at the people that play it that way since release.

I don’t know if the Devs share my frustration, they made this world after all. But I don’t like the way GW2 is turning into a grindfest. At least make it so that the stupid grinding does not interrupt regular gameplay / can be interrupted by people foolishly playing the game ‘selfishly’, aka not the most efficient.

On topic:
You did the right thing, OP. Noone can force you how to play the game, especially when YOU were the one playing it as it was intended. Don’t listen to all the goldfarmers/progamers/zergrunners, they’re just mad you keep them from gaining more virtual pointless gold in a short amount of time.