What do you expect them to say?
The reality is the player base has plummeted and they’re desperately hoping folks that wandered off to play the parade of great games that came out over the last 45 days or so will come back (hint: a lot won’t). As long as they’re clinging to that hope they certainly can’t say things might not have gone how they like and they can’t really make good calls about how to reshape the game because they can’t admit publicly or privately that some of the blame is on themselves and not just a market filled with shiny new toys. Because that would take an honest look in the mirror and those are hard.
If you’re a broad and regular reader of these forums you’ll notice posting has also plummeted. The year of hype has become the 4 maps of reality and some really questionable balancing decisions. Roy has moved on from sheltering the Warrior from a righteous beating with the nerf bat to his new golden child, the OP Revenant of OPness. The economic rebalancing served some well but it also made a lot of people decide ‘screw it I’m out.’ Not with big showy I’m leaving posts but with the far deadlier silence. And really ANet is pretty much clueless about what to do about it because they don’t have exit surveys or really any surveys to ask people how they’re relating to the game.
Me personally, I don’t find the new rewards appealing so there’s not a lot to struggle for. The bladed armor is hideous, the leyline armor is meh, the Legendary armor is STUPIDLY ornate — because apparently the ANet character artists simply have zero appreciation for clean lines. It’s like someone took nice armor and then vomited spikes and squiggles all over it until you can’t see it anymore. The new stat combos are almost interesting, but their also gated behind an order of magnitude more fiddly nonsense than the established sets. Because These days the do want you to grind not just for cosmetics (a deal I’m totally ok with) but for mechanical advantage too (a social contract I can get in any of a dozen other MMOs, most of which made that arrangement clear up front).
I’d like to care about masteries, but the terrible piece of design that is the CoH exploit-we-call-acceptable pretty much just spits on anyone who plays the game as intended rather than sitting mashing 1 at a broken spawn point. Its pretty much an accelerated version of Liadri was awesome till someone found an exploit that ruined the sense of accomplishment. Only this took hours instead of months to break.
I log in. I do my dailies. I get my laurels and my AP. And I hope that maybe next year they’ll put out something I want to exert myself for. Cosmetic or mechanical.
I wonder what your basis for comparison is…”
- Jareth, King of Goblins.