Guild Wars 2

Just do it. This game throws experience at you in many ways anyway. Free exp everywhere and experience writs and experience tomes. I would worry about the age for your character (birthday gifts), map completion and crafting on that character and consider whether it’s worth deleting that time and gold investment.

Based on the Q4 sales, somewhere between 200-300k copies of HoT have been sold. Assuming half of these players have quit by now or just log in for dailies, there’s 100-150k active players with HoT. Since 80% of players I see everywhere have HoT, then there’s 20% that don’t have HoT. Now, Let’s be generous and assume there’s 150k HoT players and 150k non-HoT players. Let’s be generous again and everyone plays 3 hours per day on average. that’s 300k/8. That’s 37.500 concurrent players on average. By comparison, 470k concurrent players was the peak and that was near the launch.

I always thought titles were really cringeworthy and this game would be much better off without them. It just contributes to design clutter and if everyone is special, nobody is special.

I totally agree.

Aarean.5398:

femalehumanmeta.8351:

The only relevant information Anet has released about it’s playerbase is here.

According to that blog post, at the peak of the games popularity there were 460k concurrent players.

The player population has obviously decreased since then (ie. megaservers). If I were to guess, GW2 might be as popular as TF2 is right now, and that game has around 50k peak concurrent users most days according to steam stats.

The reason this statement recently has value is because regardless how the number 3.1 million in monthly unique account logins is interpreted, its growing at a very steady rate which is exactly what anet is after. If people want an update on this games playerbase then this release 4 months ago that i just ran into a week ago is very relevant and i would want to hear about it.

Where does it say it is growing at a steady state? You know that the playerbase was highest during launch and had a little peak again after it went f2p together with the HoT launch? After the release of HoT, people would quit one by one again, as would a large portion of the f2p players. And don’t forget all the people that just log in once per day just to collect the daily reward… because this game rewards you for not playing.

Manasa Devi.7958:

It’s getting absolutely ridiculous.

It took Guild Wars 1 many more years before the horribly character appearance options completely destroyed its world’s aesthetic coherence. But then again, they didn’t have a cash shop fueling the fire.

You know a game is in decline, when the developers decide to forsake the coherency of their product just to milk as much money as possible out of its remaining life. That’s when obnoxious and ridiculous cash shop items start appearing.

I already stopped bothering.

jheryn.8390:

Questions:

1. Why hold on to fancy useless loot to begin with? Sell it or destroy it.

2. I see so many players claiming that ANet is “rapidly losing its player base” but no one ever provides evidence other than "me and my friends are quitting. Where is the real proof that the player base is leaving? If the Q4 2015 reports put out by NCSoft are any indication, GW2 is doing just fine.

1. The point is that you have to deal with it continuously to the point that it feels like a chore and it’s downright annoying. What’s the point of destroying stuff if you get spammed with it every other 5 minutes anyway? Might as well leave them in your inventory and let them stack. It’ll cause inventory crisis either way.

For a casual friendly game, this isn’t exactly casual friendly. Returning players try out a round of silverwaste and get welcomed with keys, essences, keys, sand, shovels, more keys, 10 different types of loot bags and a new currency etc. to the point that they don’t even want to begin bothering with this game anymore. I’ve seen this first hand. The way this game throws loot at you is just exhausting. We don’t want to play inventory simulator or click wars, thank you.

2. Do you really need evidence to see what is happening? According to ncsofts Q4 reports, I’m estimating their gemstore earnings at 25.000, since all ncsoft games seem to have an ~20%ish increase in revenue in Q4 (It’s probably higher, because there were more players during HoT launch, so there were more people to spend money on the cash shop) Which means that the HoT sales made about 12billion korean won. Which is about 10 million american dollars. Assuming everyone bought the basic package of HoT at $50, this means that they’ve only sold about 200.000 copies of HoT in Q4.

Please correct me if I made any mistakes.

Considering how the majority of the in game players have HoT and guilds reporting that nobody’s logging in anymore, I don’t even dare to guess how many concurrent players there are at the moment.

Well, I could make a guess: if half of the HoT buyers quit and 90% of the players you see have HoT, there would be a total of ~111.000 active players. Assuming everyone plays 3 hours per day, every day spread evenly globally, this would mean there are 111.000/8 = ~14.000 concurrent players at the moment. For a game that is supposedly up there with FFXIV and WoW, that doesn’t exactly sound succesful.

Don’t pin me on this though. This is a VERY rough estimate based on a lot of assumptions.

But hey, if all the remaining players buy all the cash shop wings that gets thrown at them (which apparently is already happening, considering the amount of players running around with wings in game), A-net may still squeeze a good amount of revenue out of the game before it dies.

Just a little bit of advice: only buy it if you really want to buy it and not because it is artificially limited in availability. That’s just a trick to make you buy things that you wouldn’t buy otherwise.

Ayrilana.1396:

And what reason is there to do high level fractals? Grind for ascended armor just so you can grind some more for fractal skins? Or grind for the rare chance of the tonic? If someone were willing to grind in high level fractals then why would they have an issue with having to grind to get the gear to do so?

There isn’t, unless you want those skins or beat the last level I guess. Or if you want to maximize your effort/reward ratio by playing Checklist Wars (read: doing dailies), which is seriously a chore. And it’s probably grindy and repetitive.

Cyninja.2954:

This sounds a lot more like you not enjoying the game than you having to grind something. Which is fine, it’s just important to notice the difference.

I remember when we were promised a new groundbreaking mmo 3 years ago. Now, a lot of us are still waiting.

Cyninja.2954:

I think you missunderstood pdavis. The ascended gear was not why he played those evenings or those nights and weeks. It was a nice bonus on top of enjoying the game.

That is the difference between gamers that game for loot and gamers that game because they enjoy the game. Now if you want to get into the disscussion of worthwile, engaging and fun endgame in GW2, sure. But that is a different topic now is it not?

What I mean to say is that grindiness is directly tied to (the lack of) engaging content and appropriate rewards. OP was talking about high-end content. Between the lack of engaging high-end content and atrocious rewards, making the process very grindy. The balance is completely off imo.

jheryn.8390:

There are many people who actually like the things you are complaining about. This is evidenced by all the people buying them. They don’t bother me. So your opinion of them being “not decent” is subjective.

Again, then don’t buy what is there. Many people WANT what they sell and obviously have no problem with what is offered. And they must do pretty well with them because they constantly offer the same types of things and they keep selling.

It may be subjective, but I’m not alone in this. If A-net targets a specific audience (winglovers with awkward sense of style), A-net should also know that they’re alienating themselves from another, possibly larger group and may even make gw2 unattractive for potential new players.

Two friends of mine were already put off by the wings after coming back to this game and see for yourself how the golden wings are perceived in subreddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4632j5/gemstore_update_golden_wings_glider_combo_and/

Then don’t spend money on them. And “overpriced” is subjective. If storage is what keeps you from fully enjoying the game… Well, there are no words.

4 friends of mine already got put off by the inventory crisis in this game and got overwhelmed by the sheer amount of fancynamed, but useless loot. In their defense, why would they spend even more money for bag slots in a game that fails to deliver? And that is after buying the base game. They quit the game long before I did and I guess it’s time for me to quit as well now.

But at least A-net should know why it’s losing its playerbase rapidly. And I addressed only a small part of the problem.

pdavis.8031:

What one thing people seem to be forgetting about grind and how it relates to GW2 is that it adds for replay-ability.
Imagine if everything was rewarded near instantly over the course of a single, maybe two play through’s?
Why would you need to log back on? You’d already have everything. Sure you could jump on to play some pvp, or wvw, but without anything to work toward, that won’t hold players for very long at all.

As for the ascended grind? Yeah not so much. I was able to farm and craft 2 full sets of ascended. That included lvling up the crafting professions in less than 6 months. This wasn’t spending 8+ hours a day, nor was it every day. At most I would do 2-3 hours, and 3-4 days a week, sometimes less. It’s not hard, it’s not “super grindy” I didn’t need to do the “same content over and over again” to do it either. (Although I did when I farmed for my legendary, some places give much better drops than others.)

This is exactly the problem. Everything besides ascended is already rewarded near-instantly. And assuming, you spent 2 hours per day, 3 days per week and 5 months (I took the lower amount of the spectrum), this is already a total of at least 120 hours of your life spent on what? ascended gear with 5% stat increase. Does that feel rewarding to you? Not to me.

But yeah, it’s necessary if you want to do high level fractals… which require even more grind.

Aldath.1275:

And this is EXACTLY what I mean. Yes, most of people playign this (including me) are tired of the usual MMO grind, and it’s the only thing we know about endgame.

GW2 has alternate ways of doing stuff? Well, it isn’t advertizing them well enough, because everyone is still grinding and inflating the game economy as they try to achieve the gear that, according to others, can be “easily” obtained thru other ways.

“Easily”, since it’s a low drop rate for gear whose stats you can’t chose, which actually turns the trip into ANOTHER kind of grind.

Should you work to get it? Yes, but I mean, A-Net has been looking to make things more fun for us, such as with collections, why not reinvent the way we’re supposed to do this?

I guess A-net noticed that everyone maxed out their characters levels + gear within a week, but instead of releasing meaningful content, they introduced a pointless ascended gear grind. Living world doesn’t count. Those were merely frivolic side-festivities with time-gated achievements, which usually were more tedious than fun.

Cyninja.2954:

Both of you have clearly not been long with the game which is very obvious from these posts.

Instead of getting into the usual details and tearing up your post with all the mistakes you’ve made (yeah, let’s talk about inflation when prices have been steadily declining ever since the dungeon nerf and initial post HoT spike…) I’ll give you some hints:

- imagine your character were done. I mean done as in you need no more items. If it helps, get yourself deced out in full exotics.

- now think of which things in GW2 are fun to you. Guild missions, fractals, wvw, spvp, map completion, LS2, etc.

- play the things you enjoy, stay away from the ones you don’t

- then 6 months from now after having played mostly stuff you’ve enjoyed, check your ingame back account.

- buy ascended armor or not, since you’ll most likely not need it for anything you’ve had fun the last 6 months doing

Here is an extra tip: do the Bioluminescence achievement.

The problem is, since character progression and meaningful rewards are practically eliminated, WvW being zergfests, PvE combat lacking depth and uninteresting PvP, all that’s left that’s worth doing is challenging content. Which the game is sorely lacking. The most engaging and challenging content imo at the moment are jumping puzzles and fractals before they get repetitive and grindy.

Map completion feels more like a chore than an adventure, due to the large amount of tedious heart quests. Most achievements are either a huge time sink, gold sink, or just feel like a chore. And why would I want to do collections if they are just huge, tedious gold sinks, with only ugly skins as rewards?

Something is seriously wrong with an mmo if jumping puzzles are the most fun thing to do, how aggravating they sometimes can be.

jheryn.8390:

Piejoe.7268:

I am getting the impression that A-net is in desperate need of money. Spamming the gemstore with obnoxiously over the top cosmetics and spamming your inventory with fluffed up, but useless loot forcing you to buy all the inventory and bank upgrades.
Why else would A-net resort to this other than pure greed?

Your statement above is wacko. Why is it either desperation or greed for any company to make money?

ANet isn’t an altruistic non-profit organization for the health and well being of computer gamers everywhere.

Because this shows that they have no intention of preserving the longevity of this game. They use wings and other over the top cosmetics as quick cashgrabs, but in the long run this hurts the game. Do you want to play a game where everyone and his pet runs around in obnoxious wings and leaves behind particle effects everywhere? I can play MapleStory or any random generic F2P mmo if I want to be surrounded by obnoxious stuff. If they made decent stuff for the gemstore, it would be less polarizing, causing less people to leave the game and I might actually even be interested in buying some cosmetics.

I know Anet created inconvenience to sell convenience, limiting space and increasing the different types of loot and keys, and I’m heavily against abusing annoyance to make money, so I refuse to spend money on these ‘convenience’ upgrades, especially if they’re overpriced. So this leads to a massive gold grind just to buy storage upgrades and such before I can start fully enjoying the game, leaving me burned out already.

I did not buy the base game and the expansion just to run into soft paywalls.
I want to spend money on something that I WANT to spend money on, not because out of necessity because of artificial paywalls. By comparison, I DO spend money on skins in League of Legends because some of them are just so brilliantly done, but here I haven’t seen a single item in the gemstore that I want.

At this point I prefer p2p models much more thanks to A-net and I am about to switch to FFXIV. It’s just that A-net’s design flaws and business model that bring me more annoyance than joy.

I am getting the impression that A-net is in desperate need of money. Spamming the gemstore with obnoxiously over the top cosmetics and spamming your inventory with fluffed up, but useless loot forcing you to buy all the inventory and bank upgrades.
Why else would A-net resort to this other than pure greed?

Both are ruining my gaming experience. The first is causing screen pollution and the second is causing inventory crisis every 2 minutes, annoying the crap out of everybody.

I’m still looking for a no-nonsense haircut that doesn’t look like it’s from a 20 year old game. All the hairstyles have just so much obnoxious fluff, that I wouldn’t spend a cent on any of them.

To be honest, I don’t understand why A-net chose this MAJOR design flaw. There is something seriously wrong with the ‘grinding curve’. Leveling to 80 and acquiring exotic gear is trivially fast and easy and from there on you have to grind hundreds of hours for ugly skins or a minor 5% stat increase.

It doesn’t help that the loot tables are so random, that it’s practically impossible to hunt for items that you want, so the whole game turns into a massive gold grind. And on top of that, the most boring content gives the best rewards… This makes the whole game feel like a chore

Worst of all, this game promotes afk-tagging, because this gives you the best rewards for the least amount of effort.

All in all, no matter what you do, the time spent in this game feels unrewarded, because it’s either trivial or not worth the effort. There is nothing in between and there is no fun content to make up for it, besides fractals – at least the levels that you don’t need to grind for.

ProtoGunner.4953:

lol @ carpet tunnel syndrome. It’s carpal, but maybe just a Freudian slip

Oops, didn’t see that one, thanks! Fixed.

Overdesigned and too flashy as usual. Not wasting my gems on those.

The dagger, shortbow and torch look alright though, since they look like they could actually be useable

Also, wings are just so tacky and obnoxious ^^;

I recently started playing Guild wars 2 again and I noticed the increase in the amount of loot you get in this game, increasing the amount of clicks you have to perform to manage your inventory. The amount of doubleclicks you have to perform is ridiculous and is actually giving me carpetal tunnel syndrome or RSI and I am considering to take a break to give my hand a rest.

Suggestion: Implement an enable/toggle option or auto-build in an alternative input to doubleclicking on items.

A lot of games have the option to quickly move items from inventory to stash with something like Ctrl + mouseclick. Something like this could be implemented to:

- Opening loot bags
- Quickly move things to/from the bank or guild bank
- Selling items to npc
- Flushing items into the mystic toilet.

I noticed this game has slowly turned into ‘Click Wars 2’ and ‘Inventory Wars 2’ (I know you are trying to sell your bank tabs and bag spaces and other ‘convenience’ items, but this is getting out of hand) and the root of this problem lies mostly in the bad loot system. Too much loot makes the game a chore and sometimes less is more.

I thought this would be an easy fix to prevent injuries and make the game more attractive to play. I know there is a workaround with newer mouses or windows, but I don’t think the average person wants to bother with that all the time

/Edit: I wanted to rant so hard, but I really tried not to.

Please, no more backpack wings. It makes this game look like all these cliché free to play MMO’s. They’re hideous, obnoxious, cheap, generic, childish and they don’t fit into the lore and the game. My friends came back to this game after a long break and the wings were one of the reasons that they quit within one day.
Enough is enough.

I am glad that these wings are glider-only like all wings should be.