Guild Wars 2

The infrastructure for all of Guild Wars 2 was built around Lion’s Arch. Note that the only Asura gates in any ’home’ city that go anywhere except to regional destinations go to Lion’s Arch and that Lion’s Arch is the only location where gates to all home cities are located in one place. Lion’s Arch was designed as the transportation hub for the entire game. It allowed any player to transport from any city to Lion’s Arch and from there to any other city and then to a reasonably priced way point in the area. Now, the only way to get from, for example, Divinity’s Reach to the Field’s of Ruin is to either run there (which would take almost an hour without using way points) or spend the money to used the already overpriced way points. Nice way of creating a new drain on the already depressed GW2 economy. Of course, there will probably be a nice pass to a central Asura gate portal similar to the Captain’s pass to Havoc’s Air Airship (only with access to multiple Asura gates instead of an exit) for sale soon in the Gem store.

Arenanet designed GW2 with a reasonable transportation system and when it became clogged because they created their own bottleneck, rather than creating a distributed transportation system that would make it convenient to keep characters at their home city (i.e., provide Asura gates to all the other home cities in each home city) they opted to destroy their infrastructure rather than spend the money to reduce the need to upgrade their physical server and bandwidth to accommodate the traffic pattern that their own design created.

Who benefits from the destruction of Lion’s Arch? Not the players. If players end-up leaving in droves due to the frustration from being forced into an expensive and/or lengthy transportation problem, Arenanet has no one to blame but themselves. I will probably be looking for another game unless they provide an alternative method of transportation that doesn’t suck either huge amounts or time or huge amounts of in-game cash (which is hard enough to come by already). I just dont have the time to spend most of my playtime traveling or spending a significant portion of my session’s income on travel. One would think Arenanet has been studying the oil companies for tips on how to make money.