Guild Wars 2

I don’t think there’d be many (any?) people who played GW1 who don’t feel that a number of design mistakes were made in GW2.

My list:

• Downed state in PVP zones. Adds nothing to the game but detracts a lot. It’s annoying, disrupts the flow of combat, introduces imbalance and farcical rally situations.
• Fixed weapon skills. Far too restrictive for me, pigeonholes weapons into roles & can causes whole weapons to be ruined because of just 1 bad skill.
• No resource system. Has caused GW2 combat to be all about spamming skills/dodges.
• Removal of skill capturing (signet of capture). One of the best & debatably most game-defining features of the first game, I cannot fathom the logic of why it was elided from GW2.
• Addition of ascended gear after release. Massive PR blunder. Pushed the game into a grind corner it has yet to escape from.

garethh.3518:

You were supposed to be amazing GW2… what the kitten went wrong?!!??

lots of design fails, basically, eg:

• no resource system (rewards spamming, simplified combat)
• shallow build system (fixed weapon skills, huge trait & skill imbalances, strongly linked systems, general lack of choice)
• single, uninteresting pvp mode
• downed state (not fun, numerous problems/imbalances)
• AOE cap of 5 (rewards zerging)
• slloooooowwww balancing (which turned out to be whack-a-mole anyway)
• excessive particle effects (game looks like a mess to casual observers)
• huge level of divergence from previous game
• unwillingness to incorporate feedback, generally contemptuous attitude to players

This. The current ui is a horrible UX. One of the worst aspects is that some of the most important elements (buffs, conditions) are tiny and located in the noisiest area of the UI. The game has way too many particle effects to be relied upon for info so it all comes down to reading tiny icons.

It’s also ridiculous you can’t turn off the quest tracker.

Horrible ui.

I play a warrior and even I think it’s ridiculous that the heaviest, highest HP class is also the most mobile.

Why do you guys continue to make the majority of your balance decisions around sPVP performance when hardly anyone plays it? By any measure, sPVP has been a failed experiment, why does the rest of the game have to suffer through class balance decisions that are clearly 100% targeted at sPVP?

• The core combat mechanics are bad/overly simplified.
• Auto-attacking is sufficient to easily get through 99% of the content.
• Skills are very generic. No choice in skills.
• Most traits are ineffectual and barely change anything.
• The AI is terrible.

If this game required a subscription, it would have died faster than AOC/WAR/SW:TOR.

4/10, too obvious.

I agree. I’d make the case it’s even worse than that, not only can you not realy play the class you want in a specific chapter of the game (general PVE, instanced PVE, WVW, sPVP) due to meta-game imbalances, but even within the “good” classes for a specific chapter there are “must-have” specs.

Clearly, the various game modes value different aspects of skills more than others, e.g. mobility is high on the list in PVP modes, but next to worthless in PVE game modes, and this makes things hard to balance. However, it’s also clear that many of these meta-imbalances are due to bad game design choices.

For example, hundred blades – a very high DPS move on a low CD that roots the caster in place. Great (best?) skill in PVE, crappy in PVP. Removing the self-root aspect of the skill and rebalancing the CD and damage component appropriately seems like a no-brainer. You can always add a new warrior trait that reverts the skill to its current state, and the implied requirement for immobilisation in the current skill could be retained through bonus damage to immobilised targets.

Another no-brainer – Ele staff. 19/20 skills on the thing are AOE, which pidgeonholes the whole use of the weapon into performing well at niche aspects of the game (zerg WVW, PVP support bunker), and making it crappy at everything else.

Conditions. A critical factor in higher end PVP but virtually irrelevant in PVE due to caps and being overshadowed by 4x zerk warrior 100 blades + timewarp.

I’d argue the game needs a lots more onConditionRemoved- and onConditionGained-type abilities here, as well as more abilities with additional effects/damage based on the presence or absence of certain conditions. There is a too much of a gulf between condition-based and power-based damage, and more conditional effects (pun!) would be a good way to bridge that gap.

There are other examples.

These issues have been around since before the release of the game, and volumes have been written about them, however the game designers continue to play the laissez-faire card when it’s been obvious for more than half a year that these issues exist. I’ve come to the conclusion they simply aren’t very good designers. Claims of being ultra-passionate and listening to the community etc are not borne out by 8 months of continued inaction.

As i’ve been saying for weeks now, Elemental Attunement is a class-defining trait. A caster-only version of it should be baseline, then you can have a 20pt trait for the AOE version.

OGDeadHead.8326:

Just allow us to blast them all, when several fields are in the same location.

This. Able to blast up to 3 fields (of different types) at once, but with a diminishing returns system:

if #fields > 1, each field effect duration is decreased by 20%, cumulative, so:

• most recent field – 80% usual duration
• 2nd most recent – 64%
• 3rd – 51%

and/or…

Fields can interact, to form new fields, eg:

• fire + water field = steam field (cures conditions and grants regen)
• ethereal + dark field = void field (convert boons -> conditions)
• ethereal + light field = celestial field (convert conditions -> boons)
  etc

Obviously wouldn’t need to be exhaustive.

Please stop with the apologist angle.

They very well knew they were kittening over their playerbase when they included the core game for free to new players and excluded char slots/benefits to existing players.

They also very well knew that selling as many units of the core game as possible through discounts while saying it would be required to play the expac, and then including the core game for free with the expansion and editing the FAQ would rort players AKA “bait and switch”.

Whether the relatively small amount of content is worth $50 is a separate issue and well worth discussing, but the deceitful tactics and dismissive attitude towards existing players is pretty much unequivocal.

that is, they are willingly trashing the community for a few extra $$$. They totally do deserve this. As you can see from the lack of concern, the management don’t even care.

Eles might be fine if you restrict the discussion to a specific build (30 air GC) in the least-played & therefore least-significant part of the game (sPVP). In every other way, Ele is pretty kitten underwhelming:

• conjures still a joke
• glyphs still a joke
• signets still considerably weaker than cantrips
• high arcane, high water still required (noone roams/zergs/GVGs as 30 air GC)
• focus still sucks
• D/D has basically disappeared

Please consider the majority when dropping wtf-bombs like “Ele is OK” as this is sure to further the (noticeably already high) level of resentment of players towards yourselves.

The AH now features a rather large and obnoxiously-located “GET MORE GOLD” button, which is of course, intended to lure people into buying more gems.

I don’t really have a problem with microtransactions in general however I do have a problem with a giant “PAY TO WIN” button eating up a large chunk of the most valuable screen real estate in the auction UI.

Moneygrabbing should not trump good UX design.

Regardless of how boring they may or may not be, I think the main issue with Ele traits is how horribly balanced they are. >50% of them are total rubbish.

There’s also still the issue of requiring 20+ arcane and 15+ water in every (WVW) spec worth a kitten .

morrolan.9608:

Hanako.1827:

The only way you’re going to make people leave arcane and water is if you…….

Increase base health to medium level.

No the only thing that will free Eles from being shackled to water/arcane is to make compelling traits in the other lines. The new fire and earth traits are pedestrian at best, the Earth 30 trait has 1 use only, and that’s 1v1ing condi classes in a duel arena.

Not to mention, glyphs are crappy, signets are crappy, conjures are crappy, the 30 arcane trait is crappy… everything that is halfway decent is in water/arcane/cantrips. The design and/or implementation of everything else is total kitten.

The game has lost a large number of players since launch but numbers appear to have stabilised in recent weeks. I wouldn’t expect a large influx of new players anytime soon, whether player numbers go back to declining or grow will be determined by whether Anet starts giving players what they’re asking for. They sure haven’t so far.

Not providing a character slot in an expansion that adds a new class, is kittening the playerbase, whichever way you spin it.

Not even counting the other 3 issues:
- expansion is very light on content for $50/bad value
- old players effectively subsidising new players/old players getting kittened over
- blatant bait and switch on discounting base game recently to suck in players with FAQ clearly stating base game required to play, then give the base game away for free, then editing the FAQ.

kittening your customers over is never a good move. The Anet/GW2 brand has just taken another serious hit, and for what? you could have given existing customers a free character slot or 2 (or some other minor upgrade) and the backlash would have been greatly reduced.

But you’ve shown your hand now (greedy, manipulative, disrespectful), and that perception is going to be hard to claw back.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

this is working as intended.
warriors are meant to be fast.
what is the problem?

do you remember that warriors have no direct access to:
- stealth
- illusions
- death shroud
- pets
- minions
- protection, aegis

warriors are balanced and not overpowered, it has been more than a year since launch, please accept that already.

Invulnerability > all of those.

Surely it should be obvious that the class with the highest base armour and highest base HP should not also have the highest landspeed.

Compare this to Ele for example: lowest base armour, lowest base HP, 3rd worst landspeed, nerfed all the way down from best. Hardly equitable.

ps: I play a warrior and even I think the landspeed advantage is silly.

Grim West.3194:

What a sad statement about HoT.

WvW is officially dead, ANET killed it.

Pretty much this. The new BL map was/is a disaster for wvw, which is a horrible shame cause it’s obvious a lot of time went into it.

It’s still rescuable though, just carve the current dessert BL map into 3 separate maps and make those the new BLs.

Current BL map is too big, too empty, and the oasis PVE event with its stupidly overpowered laser should go back to PVE where it belongs. Bring back the old alpine map until the rework is done.

Also, I would consider promoting EOTM to the status of a regular WVW map, with points that count etc. The reasons to make EOTM a “staging WVW map” no longer exist.

I realise noone is being truly forced to spec their Ele into water/arcane, but 2.5 years of playing Ele (and various Ele builds) a whole lot have taught me that

To me (and I note, many/most Eles), Elemental Attunement (EAtt) is an integral part of the Ele class, IMO to such an extent that it is as class-defining as the attunement mechanic itself. I’ve tried not playing with EAtt, but to me at least, the class just plain feels wrong without it. I’d rather lose access to the 5 attunement skills of an element or 2 rather than lose access to EAtt.

Consequently, 1 of my speclines in HOT will always be arcane, which is the same as it is now I guess, so why complain? Well, a bunch of other “compulsory” traits were just made baseline because the skill/class was crappy without it, and it seems plain to me that EAtt is the textbook definition of this category of traits.

So yes, I would strongly argue it should also be baseline to Ele, even if it meant nerfing the AOE aspect (ie: make a solo version of it the baseline, with a trait to restore the AOE aspect) and/or the duration of the buffs it gives, and/or some other aspect of Ele to bring it into balance.

So the new content requires grinding to unlock? I’m sensing a pattern here…

yanipheonu.5798:

IT’LL NEVER END.

It’ll never end until Anet stops trying to ripoff its existing customers, no.

I think the skill system in gw1 was hands-down better.

I swung a sword, I swung a sword again.

Actually, scratch that, I just pressed auto-attack and beat 99% of PVE content.

Patch achieved the direct opposite of its stated goal, I now need 20+ water/20+ arcane instead of 15 water/20 arcane.

kittening kitten ed off.

I think HOT turned out ok, the biggest negative was that it was overpriced for what it was. The character slot fiasco was a PR disaster brought about by being too greedy, and that blunder will probably end up costing Anet many times more than the miniscule extra $ they would have made through char slot purchases and has likely tarnished the Anet & GW2 brand for a long time to come.

I still question the wisdom & sincerity of any game company that thinks not including a character slot for all in an expac that introduces a new class is a good idea for the brand.

The best thing about the expac was gliding, by a decent margin, and if i were them i’d be rolling that out everywhere else in the world.

The other thing is that the elite specs in many cases are have made the old weapons and traits obsolete, essentially making them mandatory. Rev for instance is pretty hard to play without Herald because it’s the main source of sustain for the class.

Mobs and maps being harder was a definite improvement, though i don’t care for the strongly orchestrated, themepark design of the HOT maps. Designing for more of a player-driven, emergent gameplay experience makes for much better long-term replayability, something GW2 is fairly lacking in IMHO.

all fair points IMHO.

I think WVW has been seriously mismanaged from the start. In my view (and the view of many many others playing WVW), WVW is the single best and most differentiated aspect of this game in that GW2 WVW basically has no other real competitors in the gaming industry.

GW2 PVE is quite bland, and GW2 PVP in my view is among the worst of all the MMOs I’ve played. Given that I would normally classify myself as a competitive PVPer, this is saying a lot.

I say mismanaged, but one could equally well argue that WVW has been _un_managed, in that Anet has done very little to capitalise on its initial success, or to address the known issues with the game mode.

Case in point the grassroots GVG scene that was really popular 18 months ago, that Anet went out of their way to kill off/ignore. This was at a time when participation in sPVP (Player vs Point) was basically non-existent. I used to work in a major game company, I can tell you with certainty that other game companies would kill to have a grassroots competitive scene spring up in one of their games and they would have fostered the kitten out of it.

It’s really sad. I still don’t think Anet “gets it” when it comes to WVW – how much of a good position they are in, industry-wise to capitalise/monetise this game mode (WVW/sGVG) as a competitive mode. It’s surprising, because all of the indicators of the potential for success were there: DAOC being a surprise success, far outselling its most ambitious sales forecasts, the initial popularity of Warhammer, which attempted to replicate DAOC’s RVR but fell short, the level of support for CU’s kickstarter, and then the popularity of GW2’s WVW, which Anet has noted on the public record was a surprise.

Players are pretty kitten disillusioned now, and many would-be WVW players have moved onto other games or game modes because of the lack of attention.

For me, the reasons I WVW are the same as when I first started: the quality of fights are still higher, more varied, and more interesting than in Player vs Point.

Firstly, vetting future changes like this IMO is much better than just dropping a set of already-determined changes on patch day.

Bsgapollo.5364:

• Water V – Cleansing Wave: It’s one of the very few condition removals an elementalist has. And for it to be effective he still has to put a lot of points into arcana for it to be good. Even after the buff to the elemental cooldown it would mean you can only remove 1 condition every 13 seconds. Which is not extremly great for a master tier trait.

• Arcane V – Elemental Attunement and Arcane VI – Renewing Stamina: Yes 1 should be moved to a master tier but not both, each one of those traits are almost an essence to have on an elementalist. My suggestion would be to put Arcane VI into the master trait, that way elementalists still have the choice to pick between a slightly less effective endurance regen traits such as Arcane VII ( vigorous scepter ) if they would only put 10 points into arcana.

• Earth VII: I would honestly put this into the adept trait tier. Elementalist has very little ways to deal condition damage, for it to work they have to stack into toughness for it to be effective, meaning they would lack a lot into vitality and other departments. There are a lot of better traits to take into earth and personally I would never take that trait, not even if it was in the adept trait line.

The above is IMO pretty spot on.

Arcane V/VI
Reducing arcane dependence vis a vis attunement CD is very needed, but you can’t move both Arcane V and VI to master tier because most (PVP-oriented) Eles will then once again be forced to spec 20 Arcane because they are such important PVP traits. Once you have 20 Arcane, you might as well spec 30 for EA and we’re back where we started. Move one but not the other.

Fire III – Ember’s Might
“The effect of this trait has been changed to Burns you apply last longer. 25%”
Not a great change IMO because Ele can already maintain close to 100% burning uptime solely with signet of fire with +duration%. What kills condi Ele is lack of frequency of application, not condi length per se, therefore a better change IMO would be:
“Reduces the CD of all skills that apply burning by 25%”

Earth XI – Diamond Skin
This trait has been redesigned. Conditions cannot be applied to you when your health is above the threshold. 90%
IMO not great, Eles spend too much time below 90% for this to be worth considering. IMO rethink entirely. eg:
Attuning to earth grants a buff that reflects the next condition. Recharges earth attunement when afflicted by a damaging condition when not in earth attunement. 6sec CD.

Empathic Bond (EB) and Sirvival of the Fittest (SotF) are rangers’ only strong condi removal. Why are they both in the same line? This effectively makes the survival line mandatory in every spec.

The other thing is it means Poison Master will never be used in PVP/WVW.

The only other options for condi removal are: brown bear (never going to happen, i’d sooner quit GW2 than run a god-kitten brown bear), the signet (of renewal) is not reliable, and healing spring isn’t up often enough.

The 2 condi traits need to be separated or a third condi-removing trait option needs to be added.

P Fun Daddy.1208:

All of the “reduce recharge on x element skills by 20%”. Every other class that takes these gets another large bonus, like range increases, bonus stats etc., but elementalists only get the reduced cooldown, which doesn’t particularly help anyway when you have a minimum ten seconds before you can switch back to an attunement and many cooldowns are less than that.

Yeah, have always thought the *Alacrity traits should also be reducing their respective Element’s attunement CD, ie:

X Alacrity: “reduces recharge of x element skills by 20% and reduces x attunement CD by 2sec”. Stacks with arcane CD reduction.

I recently came back to the game and after having played some other games it was painfully obvious how tedious it is in GW2 to manage bags and inventory.

There are numerous items in the game that appear to serve no other purpose than to consume space in one’s bank/inventory in order to drive bank/bag slot upgrades.

Moreover it seems that for every 60 minutes of playtime in WVW, I am spending up to 10 minutes of that hour doing little more than salvaging/selling blues/greens/yellows, as well as the almost ludicrous amount of excess crafting materials.

Why set the limit of crafting materials so low? Whether the limit is 250 or 1 million it consumes the exact same amount of space on the server, so this arbitrarily low limit is clearly all about adding tedium in order to make a few extra bucks.

It’s something I never enjoyed when I was regularly playing but after having taken a break from the game it’s obvious how much of my playtime is required to perform this tedious and unavoidable inventory management busy-work.

@Anet: please consider unravelling this tedium and make the game more about fun again. Please.

No. Expansion is overpriced for what it is, and recent events have made it clear that Anet simply have little to no respect at all for their customer base.

• the bait-and-switch around selling discounted accounts saying they were required for expansion and then editing the FAQ afterwards to say a bae account wouldn’t be required.
• not automatically including a character slot in an expansion that is adding a new class
• near universal scathing criticism of Tempest and then not making a single substantive change
• randomly changing WVW reset time
• dismissive attitude towards gamebreaking bugs, eg: Ele Ride The Lightning, still broken after 3 years.
• dismissive and generally condascending attitude in comms

I hope the expac flops so they learn to take their customers more seriously.

Some people here talking about efficiency and 10 hours+ of farming COF for gold… that’s effectively working for 1 dollar / hour – the opposite of efficient. It would be more efficient to work your RL job for 1 hour, buy the gold, and then play the game for fun. Grinding the game for gold is idiotic.

Chris Barrett.3280:

1. WvW’s reset time will be changed to be 24 hours later in NA and EU. It will now occur on Saturdays instead of Fridays.

Why do this? It makes no sense. ending on fridays was something you guys got right, it means we are all free to go hard at it all weekend.

Please revert.

Can we have a pvp game mode that doesn’t have downed state/rallying?

DevilLordLaser.8619:

I can’t bring myself to play a Warrior without Warrior’s Sprint. I just can’t do it – the class feels clunky and sluggish without that extra mobility, to the point where 10/2 Discipline became completely essential on both my Warriors, usually running up to 20/4. I don’t really see that changing in Heart of Thorns either – slow Warriors are bad Warriors.

Does that mean that Warrior’s Sprint should be baseline for the class?

I think if some aspect of the game is not fun, tedious, or is really weak without its accompanying trait, such that virtually every player takes it, then yes, it’s only commonsense that this should be part of the class. Because it’s not really a choice.

I’d argue that EAtt is one of the most frequently taken traits in the whole game, because the class doesn’t play well and just feels plain wrong without it (fire-camping PVE specs excluded, obviously), yet it’s now a GM trait (which everyone will still take).

Contrast this with the mesmer trait Illusionary Persona (IP), which has been made baseline, even though it was nowhere near as popular as EAtt, and mesmer plays just fine without it.

Rangers are fine, the problem is the pet.

IMO Ele.

Weapons other than D/D are v pidgeonholed or are plain sub-par.

Utilities other than cantrips are bad. Conjures and glyphs are particularly bad.

Ele basically requires 20-30 arcane just to feel playable.

Base survivability is really bad so 15-30 water is virtually mandatory as well.

Test.8734:

Lucky.4263:

What makes HoT worth $50?

Nothing.

Keep in mind ArenaNet has seeing declining profits, and that they invested a lot in the China release, which was a failure. They’re now releasing an overpriced expansion in order to make up for the money they have lost, but this is clearly a move to help them, not for the benefit of their players.

This.

I’d argue the base game has been a failure for me personally as well – in 3 years i’ve seen close to zero updates in WVW, which is the only part of the game IMO worth playing. All the Living Story content has been absolute crap as far as i’m concerned.

Class updates & changes have been glacially slow and ineffective – case in point, my Ele has had the same core spec for 3 years due to the barest minimum of effort devoted to balancing.

I’ve been willing to tolerate this insofar as I realise many other players find LS content worthwhile but this recent departure of Anet into outright deception and blatantly ripping us off to the tune of $50 for a lightweight expansion where we’re expect to pay another $10 just to play the new class has gone over the top.

Anet has joined the shadiest of shady companies with their recent cheap tactics, price gouging of existing players to fund new players, and seemingly deliberate double-charging for the core game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_and_switch

I wouldn’t have bought the game if I knew it was going to be just another gear treadmill MMO.

Class action lawsuit anyone?

any class on an AC > all classes.

IMO the classes are pretty well-balanced in WVW.

Some think thieves are bad at zerging but it really isn’t true – great AOE, spammable blasts, spammable AOE poison & weakness, good utility.

I think the Dec 10 patch changes nothing, all of the good traits are still in arcane & water and nothing worthwhile has been added to the other trees.

The 30 earth trait will be quite OP in a 1v1 vs a high condi dmg spec but in every other situation it will be 100% useless, as 10% HP on an Ele is nothing.

Moving Ele attunement and cleansing water traits up a tier without any kind of improvement of other lines only served to make water and arcane more mandatory, not less.

More than anything this patch just highlights what lazy unimaginative designers there are behind this game that the best they can come up with 12 months post-release is shuffling a few traits around.

I think DAOC had a lot of unconventional elements to it that are still best in genre even today. One of them being RVR of course, but other things, like DF, positional/reactionary melee styles, class variety, and hard interrupts still stand out to me as brilliant pieces of game design.

The things I miss most about DAOC RVR / dislike about GW2’s WVW:

• Darkness Falls. That place was just epic. Great for PVE/levelling, great for PVP, great fun cleaning it out when ownership changed hands, great feel.
• Zerginess. GW2 promotes zerging too much through mechanics like ultra fast rezzing & rally mechanics, 5-target AOE cap, towers/keeps being too easy to take. WVW would be much better served if the basic player group unit was in the group range.
• Map layout. DAOC had it just right, both the WVW maps feel like a game level instead of part of an actual world. Basically, the WVW maps have been over-engineered.
• AOE. I really hate the 5-target cap, it essentially rewards stupid play, and it makes siege weapons too good relative to players. I’d like to see it raised to 8 at least, if only for WVW.

Why oh why is it yet another close range option? dagger is already close range and sceptre is effectively close range as well.

support? we already do that on both S/? and D/?, we don’t need more.

and 2.75-5second channel, WTF are they smoking? Who is going to seriously channel for 2.75-5sec in WVW/PVP? Being locked out of attunements for 20sec?

I can’t see myself using any of the new stuff except just the warhorn. maybe.

easily the main one:

• stagnation because of neglect

breaking it down:

• no meaningful class changes, it’s GWEN or GTFO.
• stagnant build meta, most people still using same build as last year.
• failure to address the zerg > * problem.
• killing matchup threads, almost as much fun as the actual game.
• lack of support for GVG format.
• reward giveaways in sPVP.
• frustration of dev resources being wasted on bloodlust camp changes that noone really wanted.
• rampant EOTM karma-training.
• pop imbalances because of incentivised server transfers to maximise $$$.
• GW2 pop declining.

on the positive side, Archeage is looking awesome.

Vayne.8563:

Anet is improving the game based on data they have that we don’t. Why would we have that data.

Anet needs to communicate why they do thinks better. I think that’s very important. I see this as by far their biggest weakness.

As the saying goes: if you make a game any idiot can play, only idiots will end up playing it.

Ironcloud.3892:

Vertical progression =/= gear treadmill.
Adding one more tier of gear =/= gear treadmill.

Stop acting as if Anet announced that they were going to add a new tier (Of which is required to be viable in PvE and WvW), every other month.

Real problem is how you can only get these Ascended items from fractals… Luckily Anet have addressed this as an issue.

Adding a statistically superior set of gear that requires several hundred hours of repetitive gameplay in order to get is the very definition of a gear grind. Take the fanboi glasses off.

AndrewMcLeod.3857:

The Agony mechanic wasn’t introduced at the start of the dungeon so that everybody can experience the content. While one of the goals of the Fractals of the Mists dungeon was to provide some difficult content for players looking for a challenge, we also wanted the dungeon to be available for everybody to experience. While getting far into the dungeon requires agony resistance from ascended gear, the content was designed to provide challenging content, and to allow players to choose what difficulty they wanted to play at.

As for ascended gear, to reiterate what Chris has said (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/A-message-from-our-Studio-Design-Director-Chris-Whiteside), it’s not intended as a treadmill, but rather as a tier of rewards that can help bridge the gap between Exotics (a few hours of effort to acquire a piece) and Legendaries (hundreds of hours of effort to acquire one). They’re currently only available in the Fractals of the Mist Dungeon, but we’re going to be adding new ways to acquire them, both inside of WvW as well as elsewhere in PvE.

There was no statistical gap between exotic and legendary — you invented one. Resistance to the Agony mechanic could have easily been introduced as a rune set, sigil or some other new kind of power-stat-free enchantment and still required the same amount of time investment as current Ascended gear.

The Ascended tier and Infusion mechanic was clearly and explicitly created as a gear treadmill, and continuing to feed players BS is only going to infuriate people more.

sPVP isn’t unpopular because it’s hard, it’s unpopular because it sucks.