Guild Wars 2

So, I’ve been playing for two weeks now. I was loving the game, and was smack dab in the middle of the honeymoon phase. I was so wrapped up in it that I hadn’t even bothered posting on the forums yet. However, I’ve been playing these games since 1999, and this is the first time since 2003 that a single patch has killed an entire MMO for me; it has -never- happened to me during my initial rush of love like it did this time.

Full disclosure, I am very probably not the target demographic for this game. I realized that going in, because I’m not fond of dungeons and I’m not fond of pvp. Dynamic events can be fun, but mostly I like leveling, I like character progression. Much to my surprise, I loved the GW2 system of last week. I looked forward to logging in every day and making the tiniest bit of progress, having the player agency of adding a point here and a point there at the end of every day. Those were heady days!

They’re gone. My endgame has always been the journey of leveling alts (by playing the game, not grinding through it), and it was literally the only endgame that mattered to me in GW2. The new changes make it feel like progression doesn’t begin until 30, and from that point on it only happens once every six levels. The whole system feels back-loaded now, making the first half of the game feel like “something you just have to get through until the good part begins.”

Contrary to what the intended design goal was, the new system — if it made me want to log in at all — would make me want to just zerg-grind my way to the cap so I’d have traits to play with, not play through it incrementally the way I did before.

I’m sad, because I was really enjoying myself for awhile there. I don’t consider my money wasted, but the honeymoon’s definitely over now and the bell-hop’s taking my bags to the car.

Normally I wouldn’t write a post like this. I’m not really invested in the community yet, no one has any reason to care whether I stay or go, and “I quit!” messages after patches always seem ugly and self-serving. My main reason for posting today is that these changes were ostensibly put into place to make the game more enjoyable for newcomers. I’m a newcomer (so new I didn’t even realize these changes were incoming), and they chased me right out the door. It seemed worthy of note, especially since I’m exactly the sort of player who would’ve bought three or four character slots somewhere down the line.