Guild Wars 2

Please take the time to read this post ive thought an enormous amount about this, please don’t remove it either im not trying to be cynical, just realistic to the playerbase who commits to this game for specific reasons.

After all of gamescon and recent interviews, what we’ve pretty much obtained from the devs is “if you like wvw, spvp, fractals/dungeons, then too bad because we’re working too much on the living story to do any content/features for that.”

What we learned from gamescon interviews.
- No new dungeons planned for a while, too much effort, fractals easier. Fractals have only ever had 1 update which shows how little committment they had. They specifically said “there are so many parts of the game to commit to thats its hard to do this as well”.
- WvW updates comes extremely infrequently as well. And when they do, we get what happened with this feature pack. A handful of changes that take a week.
- sPvP has taken 2 years to develop to a state thats almost esport-ish. We still have like 3 new maps and 1 gamemode after 2 years. This is not even remotely close to enough development to support an esports type of scene.

All of these things were big things at launch, implemented in the game. Bigger than the LS that didn’t exist then. For some reason this has changed. Anet still has their eye set on the living story.

At least with the first living stoyr we saw a diveristy in content, which was yes a complaint which is why they separate living story from feature patch now. But there are so many things that are considered content that don’t fit in the living story or features patches. Let me give a list

Fractals
WvW maps
sPvP maps/modes
New dungeons or revamped dungeons
Guild missions(also completely abadoned)

At first I had some hope that “hey well the devs technically can find a place to fit this in during the living story, they just need to give a lore reason behidn it so it fits in the story.” Thats exactly what they did in the first season. Except this tiem around they show no interest in doing anything but open world content and living story instances. They sound like they actually can’t do more than that because its too much.

Anyway im giving up on this game because Anet really has pushed me and many other parts of the community away for only one part of the game. Interviews gave this away and if you all want to be honest with yourself, then you should do the same.

I don’t hate the living story by any means, but if its all Anet can do, then they’ve failed. If they have no other big projects in the background then they will dissappoint the community even more because what they are doing right now is not working at all.

Let me ask one question as well – what the hell is going on with you?!
A quick state of the game:
Content-wise:

• PvE – open-world content has never been more boring. There has been no valuable content here outside of Tequatl revamp. Living story – most of it are instances that you do once or twice. Permanent, but worthless replayability-wise. Dungeons – buried under the sands of oblivion.
• WvW – 5 months of work are bringing golem mastery and a new trick&trap. There is a new colour for commander icons.
• PvP – no new modes, no new maps, broken matchmaking, Skyhammer, atrocious ‘balance’.
  Summary: where is the ‘expansion-worth of content’?

Rewards-wise:

• PvE – open-world – nerfed over and over (Segnor Blix sends hello from his coffin). Living story – opening achievement boxes is fun… until you see the contents. Dungeons – grinding same paths for two years now.
• WvW – Colin said we would see a lot more precursors with the new reward system back when the rank system was introduced. Guess he meant something else. Also – playing WvW can actually make you lose money.
• PvP – reward tracks are nice, but still not close to PvE.
  Summary: 2 blues and a green. Bloodstone dust. Even 10.000 champion boxes can’t help.

Now where exactly is the problem?
Everywhere. Literally all you’re doing is wrong.
You introduce content that people do not want and reject to bring back things that players love. When asked about it, you hide behind petty excuses instead of answering openly. You neglect the feedback and keep people in the dark. The communication management ranges from poor to straight unprofessional. Your game has long ago become boring, stale and unrewarding. Things that are important to your players are apparently not important enough to you. It looks horrible from the outside. Where are all the people that made this game such a great success? Where are all the Lead Designers? Are they out same as Robert Hrouda, Martin Kerstein and Kate Welch?

People have been telling you their feelings about the state of the game everyday for the past 48 months and all you give them is ‘maybes’.

How to waste huge potential by getting fixated on doing the wrong and rejecting to do the right.

What an amazing time it has been! Let’s recap.

There was a company that made a video game. The game was promised to be everything before it was launched. On release, it was a lot, but not everything. What pushed it most to fulfilling its potential was its amazing community. What kept this community together was a promise of improvement from the company. It kept the community playing, even though it wasn’t always rationally justified.

A year passed. Things improved. [Redacted] The company kept promising that it was learning from all these experiences, that it will keep pushing the game forward and improve it. The community was even engaged in discussions about the game development.

Time kept passing. Some promises were kept, some weren’t. No one complained about it. The community just wanted to know that things were coming and months spent on completing mundane daily activities in a stale game would pass with the coming of a new fantastic content.

At some point the communication provided by the company dropped in quality and quantity. Even then, the community continued playing, but months kept passing and passing. It was close to the games second anniversary, when things changed…

Let’s recap the most recent history.
With the past two weeks the company’s handling of recent events has consecutively hit new lows.

First came the gamescom. The PvP event has seen some developers of the company being asked questions about the game in general. The company has obvious policies regarding outside communication and the answers provided during gamescom interviews were well in line with these policies. That was the first mistake. Not only has the company agreed to giving interviews on topics it couldn’t discuss, it also delegated improper people to do it.

The community didn’t like what it saw. It didn’t like for example, that content that was made available in the past that the community absolutely loved wasn’t coming back anytime soon. It also didn’t like the tone of poor responses that not only wouldn’t explain why things weren’t being worked on, but also sounded like excuses.

Something ticked, the head and founder of the company decided to grace the community with a letter that tried to explain the situation. Instead of showing willingness to improve, the rhetoric suggested a total negligence and denial, duplicating the well-known interview political talk. Something inside the company was shaken though and the community has seen a sudden wake-up of few developers. One of them for example, decided to hop into a 4-month-old topic with concerns about a recently implemented system and acknowledge the community he would look into it again. How splendid… In another topic, someone else came back and reassured the community, that he would talk to them again. Would things finally come to normal…?

Tensions dropped as the days passed, but then… another interview happened. Once again were the developers asked questions. The community learned for example, that one of the oldest and most important systems that was in dire need of changes to make the game more appealing and keep sworn fans playing wasn’t being looked into for the past year and no plans to change that were made. The community was once again reminded of things that weren’t off the table and were a subject of revision down the road, down the pipe.

Anet is working its kitten off to give us as much as possible, with LS.

You nailed it. tldr Anet does nothing.

OP, do you do anything but complain? Gah!

I’ve had the feeling off and on that somewhere someone in a position of authority at ANet views this game as some kind of ongoing sociology experiment and we’re all “lab skritt.”

1. Burst skills should’ve blown adrenaline on a whiff since day 1.

2. Hit detection on projectiles is very wonky across whole game, not just warrior lb

Side strafing to avoid ranged auto attacks effects weapons for almost every class, not just warriors. And it’s about time warriors have to think more about when to use a burst skill.