I mean what’s the point of this discussion, really?
I got a precursor on the 13th, read the patch notes on the 14th and quit the game on the 15th. Haven’t really missed it since then. I mean seriously, when was the last time that Guild Wars was fun?
For a while I was following the thread, but before today it has been more than a week and this will probably be my last words on Guild Wars. And the only reason that I even had Guild Wars on my mind today was that a friend of mine really wanted to convince me to play with her. And I really went out of my way to get her not to.
I mean by now ANet has betrayed all their ideals and manifests. They have proven that their company is not capable of developing a working MMO any more (wildstar).
Their latest changes seem targetted at making Guild Wars more like wow… which puts customers in the situation of having to choose between the best wow or the second best wow. I mean Guild Wars is free, but that comparison is still not going to end well.
Guild Wars had its own niche. Yes, it was smaller than wow, but it was there for a reason (and honestly: I think that Guild Wars deserved a much bigger part of the cake, just people were used to the old way of doing things and demanded that).
As for new customers… just the name “Guild Wars” drove many people from the PvE-crowd away from ever trying it (which is especially unfortunate considering that Guild vs. Guild Wars are not even a real thing in the game).
The effects of this change were known to ANet when they implemented it. It is a simple change. Remove the trader, invalidate the currency. Is there even anything left to do with badges that is worth it? The only use I could find was getting racial skins for a bit less gold (which is pretty meh for a currency).
They had different options of implementing it. Like leaving the trader and starting to hand out a new currency in WvW. So everyone who earned badges prior to the update could still spend them on the same stuff. They just made the wallet so ugly to be able to implement new currencies easily. It would be the obvious solution. If they decided for a different path it is because they wanted it to be this way.
As ANet said in the past: WvW is the fastest growing part of the game (which at this point in time means that people there leave slower). They want to push PvEers into WvW to save their customer base. Personally I think it is the wrong way to go and will just result in PvE people leaving faster (like me) and the situation in WvW remaining much the same, but it is their game. And it is their choice.
And honestly… it’s a sinking ship. Megaserver just covered up dwindling numbers on many servers. No solution they come up with will make that any prettier than it is. I just wished they would have had a bit more grace about it.
I don’t even know why I wrote this…
So goodbye Guild Wars. It was a bad change, but it is not even the reason why I am leaving – just the incentive.
It is not even that there was newer/shinier competition. There is no competition out there that seems particularly interesting to me.
It just feels like you haven’t been there for a really long time. And that’s why I want to finally break up.
899 days (logins, not play time) is a long time if you think about it.