Is GW2 ruined? Maybe. It certainly was. However, Anet has done a lot to clean up the mess. HOT as it launched was a disaster. Most of that disaster has been corrected though, as much as possible anyway considering that most of it was built into the maps. PVP issues excluded, that is still a colossal mess. Anet clearly knows they screwed up. It remains to be seen if they know why.
>HOT began with a brick wall. You hit Verdant Brink, and were instantly locked behind a progression grind because masteries are needed to even navigate the maps. Everyone’s first experience of the expansion was thus completely terrible, full of frustration and “WTF I need to grind for two days to get that Hero Point because of a freaking BOUNCY MUSHROOM?!!!” This has been addressed by reducing the grind to a fraction of what it was, reducing the pain. It can’t be eliminated though, since it’s built into the maps themselves, but at least we can be sure Anet knows it was a mistake.
>HOT maps require mastery progression, but don’t account for that very progress. Imagine if the zones went AB > VB > TD > DS. You’d start with a basic map with some progression helping out (AB), to a map where masteries aren’t required but really are needed to get the most out of it (VB), to a map that’s really only possible at all with masteries (TD), to DS which is really just an epic boss encounter anyway. The maps would progress with your character, and you gain more and more use of your masteries as you move forward. Instead, they threw you right at the wall. Whether they learned this mistake or not is unknown, since they have released no new maps.
>HOT increased the combat difficulty, but again as a sudden wall. The new creatures use a variety of short-telegraph (and some zero-telegraph) punishment mechanics, that you have to learn, anticipate, and then counter. But instead of being eased into the new mechanics that creatures used, you’re left to figure it out when you die suddenly. I actually REALLY like the new combat, but admit that it was frustrating to adjust. My wife, who’s much more casual then I am, still refuses to solo HOT content because her first experience with it was death and frustration. I am certain that Anet lost players over this.
>HOT maps are exclusively meta-event maps. There are no old-school explorable type maps. Furthermore, loot was tied directly to meta-progression, not to personal activity. This means you had to commit to doing the entire 2+ hour event chain to get decent rewards. Casual players who like to log in, do some stuff, go make a sandwich, come back 20 mins later, do more stuff, etc, got completely shafted. Naturally, they left. More customers lost. This has been addressed by breaking rewards into their sub-events, not the overall meta. As a side note, I’m worried that this will affect them in the long-term when people move on to new expac maps, and there’s not enough people left to finish the metas.
>PVP was completely unhinged by elite specs. The sudden, massive power creep not only changed the gameplay meta overnight (which was expected from an expac anyway), but also changed the speed and pace of PVP combat and made it almost a completely different game. It also instantly excluded all non-expansion players. This means that people who were taking a “wait and see” approach to buying the expac saw a classic Buy To Win scenario and fled the game. This has not been fixed and PVP remains unbalanced and terrible.
>WVW had the additional component of needing to unlock the elites, meaning that WVW players now had a grind wall of their own, and were forced into regular PVE to climb it. Naturally, many of them didn’t want to do that and simply left.
>Guild halls were also a bust. They took features that people already had (missions, XP bonuses, etc) and took them away. Then they stuck them in the expansion. They also stuck them behind a massive grind designed for large groups of people, which left small guilds shut out. This was seen as obvious, underhanded way to force people into buying and was heavily protested. Not to mention the small guild players that got shafted. More customers gone. It has not been fixed.
On the upside, Anet seems to have realized most of this and has been slowly eliminating or reducing the problems. Masteries get much more XP now, Elites take fewer points to unlock, meta-event progression has been broken up so you don’t have to play for hours at a time, (DS excluded, that’s kind of locked into the map design), and so on. Power creep and PVP have not been addressed at all, sadly. But it’s not hopeless – the next expac may actually be good if Anet has actually learned these lessons (also, they have a new Creative Lead). I advocate a “wait and see” approach and certainly won’t be pre-ordering the next one, but I’m cautiously optimistic. The power creep worries me though – if the next expansion has the same amount of creep, I’m gone and won’t look back.
