Anet really did want to do something different and a fan base that simple couldn’t adapt to it changed the plan in my opinion. That’s why we’re stuck with stuff like ascended gear and why raids have finally made it here. Because Anet couldn’t change the genre as much as they expected they would be able to. Fair enough I suppose. They have to make the games for players.
I’m not sure if it was necessarily a community fault insomuch as it is design flaws in the system. GW2 was very much built on the backs of games that fully embraced gear grinds at the level cap and extremely finely tuned multiplayer content that requires this gear to be successful.
I mentioned it before, but it bears more elaboration. GW2 is a game that worked by stripping away the features of other games. Part of it was to deal with inequality. Part of it was for convenience. But, by taking away so much, the end result was a game that had a world that was aesthetically pleasing but functionally bland. In this essence, the failings of GW2 themselves serve as an interesting case study. Some of the issues were fixed, but think about this from the perspective of GW2’s launch.
#1: The loot and quest system. A lot of games have almost exclusively enemy specific drops, and these drops have a unique value for what they would be used for. Usually some kind of crafting or resource, or even the equipment types themselves. This drives players toward explorations, because each obscure monster in obscure corners of the world is a new capitalistic venture.
GW2 largely abandoned this feature, wanting all content to be equally rewarding. Some crafting components were “gatherable” at launch, via fighting a certain kind of enemy at a certain level, but the way the loot system handled everything made this slow and impractical. So, most enemies have a set of generic global drops and junk items that serve no purpose. The end result was that, there was little reason to care about enemy types or locations. If I find an obscure creature in a cave somewhere, you weren’t interesting in seeing what it “dropped”, because it dropped the same bland stuff. At launch, champion events roamed the map unhindered, because there was absolutely no reason to fight a champion mob.
The entire bestiary of GW2 existed so you could look at it. The heart quests and events themselves were also a bust. Heart quests were basically busywork with paltry rewards and vendors that sold items nobody would use. The dynamic events rewarded a paltry amount of coin and a useless currency that is karma. After having experienced them once, unless you hit a “grind spot” where you could mass slaughter enemies spawned by scaled up events, there wasn’t any reason to do dynamic events.
This also meant that there was no reason to visit lower level zones, even if you scaled down.
#2: Leveling and stats. Now, in games prior, your level carried over to everything. It was how strong you were, in PVE and PVP, bolstering both your physical presence and the techniques available to you. It was how much work you had put into your toon, and because the level was everything, it was a strong sense of growth and progression.
GW2, wanting to get rid of imbalances, made it so PVP and WvW auto scaled, fumble became mandatory as enemy level increased slowly, and made it so with the exception of Health and Armor, all players had identical stats no matter what class they started with. The end result was that leveling wasn’t a goal or even interesting. It was a content throttle. An obstacle for you to overcome in order to… be in GW2.
#3: Gear tiers and types. Now, previous MMOs had gear that was special, in that they did special or unique things, or had unique buffs or stats on them. The tiers themselves were important, as they bolstered your stats and gave you special advantages. You wanted to work toward new gear. Sometimes, it even changed what you could do or how your class performed.
GW2, wanting to remove imbalance and make everything fair, removed all special properties from gear (including its drop locations), and just made the tier and gear prefix important. This made all of the drops in the game bland: though weapons looked different, everything was functionally identical, so the new aesthetics of weapons entertained you for but a moment. You achieved the “peak” fairly quickly via exotic gear, but because everything was balanced around exotic gear, it is as if the entire gear system was a content throttle. Everything your class could do was decided and restricted very early on. Even legendary weapons were there just to look nice and boast about how much money you blew.
#4: Auto healing. Most MMOs were about the journey, in the sense that your health regenerated slowly and you used consumables regularly for healing. Many games had a “rest” command or something similar, where you could accelerate health growth.
GW2, wanting to be convenient and be about the duels and PVP, removed that for convenience. However, a lot of game’s economies and build systems were built around fighting that inconvenience. Now that you always auto-healed after a fight, we encountered something new in MMOs: the Berserker Meta. In a normal game, going full glass cannon is dangerous precisely because it magnified the wear and tear that you received as you wandered the world. But now, there was no reason not to go full cannon and obliterate enemies, healing away all damage afterward with wolverine like regeneration. Though this is a change I don’t mind too much personally, the fact is that a lot of people do, since it changed hard roles of combat into softer roles, and made body counts more important than anything else. This also lead to the WvW Zerg meta.
#5: Travel. A lot of games have a quicktravel or teleportation system of some kind, but a lot of the journey from one place to another was done by hopping onto a mount or a vehicle or a train of some kind, and traversing the dangerous but gorgeous terrain the world had built into it.
GW2, wanting to remove the wait and make things convenient, removed this system. This mean that traveling was something you did once and then you would just waypoint your way around to get to places. There was no exclusivity to locations other than their level throttle, and the entire “world” of GW2 effectively disappeared after you saw it once.
Keep in mind, these flaws compounded on each other, and quite heavily so. Any one of these would be a single flaw of a game, but when you put it together, you suddenly understand why it is that a large portion of the MMO community ended up not liking GW2 and requesting that it be changed. We had
A) A world that was basically a waypoint map
B) That was restricted by archaic systems that don’t fit into the game and would just throttle your performance
C) That lead to places that offered no unique capitalistic of functional ventures to gain
D) With a homogenized combat system that made everything feel very “samey” and a gear prefix system that reinforced this functionally
E) And the same old “fetch seven bear kitten” busywork disguised as hearts and “dynamic” events.
And this was all made by cutting things away from previous MMOs. It didn’t replace these with new features or built upon a new system. So of course there was a community falling out and a cry for something to “do” in the game. This wasn’t because there was fault in the community. GW2 was bland on the operational level.
