I am deeply, deeply disappointed in the direction that Anet has taken GW2.
In general:
- I suppose the first inkling that things were going downhill was when dye went character bound in the beginning for the sake of “character progression”, instead of staying account bound. I argued against it, because quite frankly dye shows nothing about character progression when the money to buy the dye comes from a primary character anyway. The logic was deeply flawed and suggests only one reason dyes became character bound.
- Then came ascended trinkets, with its alt unfriendly time-gated gearing dependent on laurels. There were multiple threads and posts begging Anet not to proceed with time-gating or ascended gear, but alas, they were merged into one giant thread and every constructive post became buried behind “this is our vision of the game”.
- Then came ascended weapons, and soon to come, ascended gear, behind more time gating and massive grinds to reach 500. The threads are also merged and ignored for the sake of the vision of the game.
The reasoning: it took too little time to obtain all exotic gear.
Wasn’t that one of the original selling points of the game – the ability to reach level and gear cap quickly so everyone can participate in WvW on an equal footing without much time or grind?
That brings me to WvW.
- Orbs were a bad mechanic. Yes, they were removed because they were hackable, but behind that was also the problem of the snowballing effect it gave to the winning server. Yet it was brought back, against our protests because and I loosely quote “WvW isn’t supposed to be fair.”
Is the vision for WvW one of unfairness, then, with blowout matches and the winning server flipping everything quickly because “it makes for more exciting matches”? Where alts are detrimental to server performance because they lack points in wexp?
- On the WvW forums, we begged and pleaded for leagues to be canceled, or in the alternative, gave multiple wonderful constructive suggestions for how leagues could be organized and scored for a better player experience. Instead, we get a “Q&A” session with Devon a week before leagues will go live – a session where he will most likely evade questions and nothing will be changed.
- Plopping down ruins in WvW, providing new maps in PvP, or bringing back a broken mechanic into the game is not more content. Especially when there are so many imbalances and issues that should and could be fixed first before being further imbalanced by these new and exciting features!
TLDR It seems that no matter how much helpful, constructive feedback is provided, Anet will decide to go its own route and give silly answers such as:
- “character progression”
- “not supposed to be fair”
- “makes the game more exciting”
- “our metrics say that WvW population isn’t declining” (so it must be a great mechanic?).
I honestly don’t see the point for anyone to post in the hopes that their opinion won’t be taken as a “vocal minority”, and frankly, I only posted this to vent.
P.S. I see GW2 heading towards more grind, more levels, more levels of gear, and more time-gating. If you would like to have a meaningful conversation with the community, perhaps you could address, in a blog post or in this forum, why this vision is definitely not happening, or if it is happening, provide a kitten good reason. Otherwise, I’d say to expect more angry outbursts on the forums.
If only GW2 had stayed true.