A lot of patches over the years have flat-out made WvW worse. Blobs and poor play get reinforced with these changes and smaller teams suffer.
- The Ferocity nerf: Small groups used to be able to punish blobs with high-damage bombs. The loss in damage by the Ferocity nerf meant blobs could survive and counter-dps with their greater numbers. There was no good reason for this change other than to tone down the Zerker meta in PvE. However, Zerker is still the PvE meta, so this didn’t accomplish much beyond drawing out fights.
- Guard Stacks, Bloodlust, and Ascended gear: These introduced annoying stat imbalances. Power creep on these is marginal, but it exists. Roamers complained about rank grind to get “essential” Guard Stacks, and GvGers complained about the stat bonus from bloodlust (which was originally bigger than it is now and encouraged score/stat snowballing). It took a lot of complaining for OS to get an arena without bloodlust and for bloodlust to get toned down.
- EOTM: On the one hand, it’s a nice place for the k-trainers to go and a decent place to level up. But on the other hand, it was supposed to be a testbed for WvW that never seemed to pan out. It was a lot of effort that didn’t affect or really improve the core WvW experience.
- Tournaments: These did some of the most damage to WvW. Servers got stacked, communities got destroyed, and players got burned out. I like the idea of tickets and rewards (which really should exist outside of tourneys), but everything else was bad. PPT is a broken system and building a tournament on that broken system ensured a bad outcome.
- Stability nerf: This was a completely tone-deaf change and ensures that blobs can always win as long as they spam as much cc as possible. Pirate ships, ratwells, etc. are a toxic play style and don’t promote interesting engagements.
- Server transfer shenanigans: So it’s supposed to cost less to go to less populated servers, but on NA every single server is Very High/Full when that is absolutely not the case. I found it funny when, prior to the last tourney, all servers were Very High/Full, until miraculously overnight some of them lowered to “High” status (clearly to encourage transfers before the tourney). Then later they were all miraculously Very High/Full again. Overall, making all servers Very High means there’s no incentive to go to less-populated servers and the overall population becomes stale and stacks upwards. (Why go to T8 when it costs the same to go to T2?)
- Other stuff: Then of course there are the things that have been broken forever, like the PPT system, PvD winning the day, blobs being able to steamroll anything and everything, broken builds, stale meta, too much PvE in WvW (Scarlet minions clogging up Eternal Battlegrounds for weeks, being able to rally off random deer), and impossible achievements.
Do I still WvW? Occasionally. Is it more enjoyable than it was before? Definitely not.