Guild Wars 2

“There are >500 skills in this game, 480 traits, and 2 designers working on this.”
Wow what? C’mon Anet, this is core to the game! Also one of the key gripes of your customer base.

I’ll add a reply here to also express my discontent with the Ascended gear changes.

To start off, my full-time job leaves me with only a max of 3 hours playtime per weekday, and 6-10 hours per day on weekends. I’m also a longtime GW1 fan, with hundreds of hours spent in the various PvP aspects of that game, precisely because I could still compete with people that have more time to play.

Secondly, I had put aside a minimum budget of $50 per month to spend on the GW2 cash shop. I wanted to to support the game company that I trust and whose product I value. Over the past 3 months, my spending has actually been over $150 each month. I also pre-ordered a deluxe version.

Currently I have two level 80s in full exotics, and 6 other characters at various levels of progression (all over lvl 30). The plan was to level them all the 80, and ‘finish’ them by obtaining a good set of exotics for the build i like playing best for each profession. Being forced to grind the same dungeon for each of them to get the required gear is not an attractive prospect at all.

Finally, I’m heavily WvW focused. I only obtain full exotics, via dungeon runs (specific stats) or from Trading post in order to compete on a level playing field in WvW. I don’t have time to farm or study market trends in order to play the market. I also don’t want to do these things, as I don’t enjoy them. Being able to use real money to avoid farming/trading was another reason that I bought the game as advertised.

Now, in a forum post (unplanned in my opinion) two days before launching the functionality, Anet announces the very gear grind that has me not playing any other MMO.

I bought and invested in this game believing Mike O’Brian:
“Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.”

After reading this announcement yesterday, it was the first night that I did not log in because I did not want to play Guild Wars 2.

I’m no longer going to support the Cash shop as planned, wasting money on a gear treadmill was never my intention.

I love this game, and I’ll stick around and see how it plays out. I sincerely hope Anet can find a way to stay true to their beliefs.

HabibLoew.2590:

Hi all,

First and foremost: Thank you for the positive feedback! We work hard to make WvW fun for you all and it’s very gratifying to hear that you’re enjoying it.

Now I need to make a bit of a clarification about culling being fixed. I think you’re referring to this post in the PvP forum: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Please-fix-this-sooner-rather-than-later-Vid-attached/first#post622762

We have a fix for culling in Structured PvP but that fix does not yet extend to WvW or PvE. The issue is that Structured PvP uses small maps with small player counts so we have fewer challenges to overcome with regards to resources like cpu and bandwidth. We are doing the work to extend the culling fix out to WvW but that change will not be in the next patch.

Ah, ok, thanks for the clarification . Ah well, with regards to WvW culling, I’ll go with what Darwin didn’t actually say: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” Or even, re-adapt to it not changing xD and just keep levelling my thief … heh, if you can’t beat’em … jokes I love killing me some thieves with my ele.

So just thought I’d put up a bit of positivity amidst the many threads of valid, constructive and sometimes emotional criticism found in this section. I’m sure you guys/gals at Anet have thick skins, but it can also be tough to only hear critique on your labour of love day-in and day-out . More forum criticism than praise is of course perfectly normal. People who are enjoying the game, like me, are too busy playing and typically don’t spend time posting our great experiences here, while frustrations get aired frequently.

So let me be clear, I love this game. In particular, I LOVE WvW, warts and all. I’m confident that Anet will keep improving all aspects of it, within reasonable time-frames. I’m also not concerned about the declining number of people playing. This is perfectly reasonable and to be expected.

Anet, you’ve already shown that you respond to our feedback e.g. by adjusting SM’s keeplord position and points, 7 day transfers, removing orbs etc. Some, myself included, might not always agree with exactly how you respond, but the point is that you are responding. Thank you for that.

As you’ve hinted, there are already plans in place on changing/improving things for WvW. You’re also working on it already, and some of it is about to go-live i.e. the comment on culling being fixed in the next patch (THANKS). Being in the IT-industry myself I know that designing/developing/testing/releasing these changes is a mammoth undertaking and you have so little time! So thank you for all the time and effort you are putting in every day and also just for being awesome. Adjusting from an iterative/creative environment to supporting such a massive user-base must be a big challenge/change for you guys, so keep at it, your doing great

Looking forward to seeing what you do with:
- Culling. Will we see enemy armies when we should?
- Turtles. Working as intended? AoE buff/healing caps perhaps??
- Orbs. Can the flying hackers be stopped? Tough one I’m sure. But also, what advantage should an orb give?
- Outmanned buff. Will it help eventually help those with their backs against the wall?
- Thieves. Will WvW become Thiefwars? Are counters to invisibility required or will the playerbase solve it themselves?
- Keep/Castle. Should they be harder to take and cheaper to upgrade?
- Rewards. More things to spend badges on? More/consistent drops for kills?
- Nightcapping :/ If only global servers were possible. kitten you physical reality! Should there be some adjustment to potential points based on number of opponents on the map? Does that make it too easy to grief? Should NPCs scale to assist? Many good ideas to be found in these here threads.
- Transfers and guesting. Guesting plse, and long WvW lockouts for transfers …

Cheers.