MMO companies seem to never realize how commited is the player community and how fast they can achieve even the hardest of challenges. After a lot of players started to advertize their new Legendary weapons, in a relatively short time after the game launch, they kind of panicked and hastly introduced the FoTM to keep the achievers entertained (achievers were the first to reach end-game and to get the Legendary skin). They were afraid about people leaving the game because of no challenges.
Now they should be even more worried about people leaving because there is no reward for effort. Many, many players, such as myself, are reward driven much more so than goal driven, which was a big draw for me in GW2. I don’t have time to grind and didn’t have to to feel as though I accomplished something. After Nov 15th, everything is about grind. I get off on finishing a tough event/fight and reaping the rewards…well now there is essentially no reward. As a casual player, while I do enjoy dungeons and long chain events, I don’t always have time for such things. Mind you with the rewards as they are, there seems little point in doing such things since regular mobs usually drop better loot than veterans/champions/bosses.
Unfortunately much of the open world seems to be dying, as people funnel in to specific areas such as FotM, dungeons and Orr. Why? It they seem the only places where one can make any decent coin or get good drops. Orr, while it is part of the open world, it is a different story, many are there to farm T5-T6 materials needed for making legendary weapons. I pity those people who aspire to make a legendary. Under these new loot scheme getting all the required material by farming alone will take at least 10-20 times longer (And probably longer than that) than pre-Nov 15th.
Back to open world adventuring…even in Orr, where people do tend to congregate, although I understand there is less congregation since the loot changes, it’s hard to find a group who is willing to help with menial things like skill points…it’s all about about events and farming. I find myself often trying to hit-n-run skill points using pets/minions to distract mobs hopefully long enough to get the point. Unfortunately, this is not possible in all cases.
The areas I find most affected by population problems are the 40-60 level areas, especially now. Many simply leave the game before ever reaching level 40 and that number will only increase with the increased difficulty in leveling, heavy focus on the gem store, lack of rewards and the sheer frustration that causes.
The entire crafting, loot system, gem store and trading post is broken and corrupt. Artificially manipulating the marketplace like this would be considered fraud in the real world. Crafting is essentially dead as a result because T5-T6 mats are now so scarce and expensive that crafting is a waste of time. If they want a pure micro-payment-type economy common in some of the free MMOs…$2 for this piece of armor, $8 for this weapon, or even just straight gold for money…which seems the direction they’re pushing, then just do it and tell everyone. Then in this case, IMO ALL listings should be returned to the respective sellers, the TP should be shut down for player trading so that players can ONLY sell to in-game vendors, which in turn increases TP stock and prices are controlled from skyrocketing. GW2 should also be free to play in a pure micro-payment system. At $60 to buy, I didn’t sign up for a money sink. At least, then people would know where they stand.
