It’s good to throw a positive thread up on occasion, especially if a new or returning player is looking on these forums.
Why I stay with GW2 [not in any order of priority]:
- Incredibly little game down time and rollbacks
- Beautiful graphics
- Nice lore/story lines
- Love the various festivals
- Do not have to compete with other players to get loot
- Choice of game modes: pve, pvp [and choices within this], wvw, dungeons, fractals
- Several character slots come with game to enjoy more than one race/profession
- Skins are just that, for looks only, and do not impact functionality. Really nice that I can get one skin and transmute for use on multiple characters as applicable.
- Once level 80, differences in exotic vs. ascended gear will not eliminate you from most game modes. Yes players may ask for certain builds/armor in a group composition for dungeons/fractals/pvp league, but not required by game itself.
- No sub
- For $50, got years of play. Was my choice to buy gems and HoT to support the game, and move forward with it, but not required.
- NEVER as in NEVER, got an e-mail back from CS summarily dismissing any issue I had. May have taken a few e-mails or did not happen same day, but got adequate explanation as to why something could or could not be done, but decisions were always explained, even if not the answer I ‘wanted’.
- Updates, mostly, done outside peak playing hours.
- Amazed at the tolerance by forum moderators with some posts.
- Appreciate Gaile Gray’s patience whether it be with handling forum questions or dealing with players when she is in game. I could never have her level of diplomacy. I won’t even post on these forums with my active player forum name, so people cannot find me in game, just for the sake of disagreeing with me.
- LFG tool, whether it can be improved or not is subjective, but just glad it is there. Has made playing this game all the more enjoyable.
- Being able to type /wiki XXXX from within the game to seek out information I may be looking for.
- Ability to ‘taxi’ to others in the game via group mode/LFG
- World bosses occur at set times, with pre-events that are very doable, unlikely to fail, and allow bosses to spawn. [Is not that way in all games…]
- Many ‘account bound’ rewards, that I can swap between characters instead of having to grind for an item for multiple characters.
- Pvp is normalized and you can jump right in. I learned to play the game better overall, by going into non-ranked pvp…great teaching tool.
- The game stores the various builds for pvp, pve, and wvw, which eliminates keeping ponderous manual lists of how my characters are built.
- Devs actually do have a sense of humor, if you’re paying attention. Started laughing when I saw that boxes for Inquest Golem Mark II had collapsed from weight of people standing on them during the boss fight.
- If you like puzzles, personal stories, and achievements [which I do] these alone can keep you busy for months.
In keeping with the positive temperament of this thread, I have slacked off WVW for awhile, but I have hopes that Anet will make adjustments.
I am in awe when I see posts when someone says they could not get assistance from CS. I only had one complaint not resolved to my satisfaction, recently, and wanted a valuable item replaced. A few weeks later, I had a junk item seem to disappear, and saw how it happened… may be a graphic glitch. I did not contact CS again, explaining what happened. So in the end, it was my choice to let it go, not theirs.
Anet does a good job overall keeping its customer base happy. If GW2 was pvp only, or wvw only, or pve only, and all resources went into one type of game mode, there would still be dissatisfied players. It is the nature of the beast.
I have been playing online games for over twenty years. GW2 is one of the few games I stayed with this long.