Hey there,
I wanted to share some of my personal experience with GW2. What I mostly want to tell is how a few changes made me enjoy the game more (or better said, once again). If you are one of the frustrated people out there, or just interested in my story, feel free to read it. English is not my first language, so apologies in advance for the errors. The post is long and has no TL;DR for a reason.
I started playing GW2 in December 2012 and being a new game for me, it excited me a lot. My first character was a charr warrior, who was raised to 80 in a week. I enjoyed the map exploration and farming events in Orr for gear afterwards.
Having never done any dungeon before, I had initial difficulties there before I started to run them regularly. I didn’t like (s/t)PVP and it was a shock at the beginning that my PC was not suited for WvWvW combat, but I’ve got over it eventually. Since PVE was the only thing which remained for me (what I never regretted) I started to “specialize” in it and found what I looked for in dungeons.
I literally soaked up all the information about dungeon/combat tactics and character build/gameplay I could find, I wanted to learn/find the most efficient ones, always with the goal of improving my personal gameplay. Sadly, my experience at that time was limited to only a few dungeons I needed tokens from.
A leap in time to April/May 2013. Meanwhile I have 4 characters on lvl 80 and played every single dungeon there, including high level fractals, with Arah being my favorite one. I have 2-3 people who I regularly run fractals with, pugging solo for the rest of the dungeons. My gameplay has improved by a lot now and watching other people I slowly start to develop an attitude some people call elitist. I’m member of a big and successful guild, something which I am proud of. A legendary weapon seems to be an answer to the question what my next goal should be, so I start farming CoF p1 without an idea what changes would await me next.
Many of my friends start to get bored of the game and eventually leave it with only me remaining as a daily active player. My guildies start to play more and more WvWvW, while I feel left behind. I feel that all of my effort was for nothing and play less every day. After some time, I only log in to get my daily laurel and asking myself why I’m doing that I quit the game.
Another leap in time – 5 months later we are in August 2013. Being somewhat bored and not having found a good game to distract me, I try to give GW2 another chance. Seeing that I was kicked from my previous guild, I rejoin it to tell them I am back after a long time just to see the people’s reactions. Only answer I get is a short “hello” from the guild leader, which leaves a bitter aftertaste. I try to get over it and start pugging for dungeons again. Since I didn’t want to play any of my previous characters back then, I made a new one and leveled it quickly to 80. After some practice I was able to get back to my initial level. Now I was back at the point where I left the game.
Asking myself what to do, I decided to help new players by sharing my ingame experience with them. It was challenging, but also fun seeing people succeed. I could feel their excitement and it reminded me of myself in the old days. I found many new friends among them, also some of them amongst the people who joined my old/new guild. It made me enjoy running dungeons again and I abandoned my plans on joining a dungeon-only guild. The most notable change for me was that I opened my friend list every time I went online. With those changes, I was happy about the new dungeon reward system but it didn’t really change anything to me (in a positive sense).
A month later I return home from 2 week long vacations only to find that I was kicked from the guild again (despite of telling the reason of my absence beforehand). Some nice people invite me to their guild and I gladly accept the offer. I could also make some of my newer friends join it. We are a small guild but have a lot of fun. I play dungeons every day again, mostly with guildies, sometimes pugging alone (which I never abandonned completely).
Seeing how much gold I am able to make in a short amount of time due to the new reward system, I decide to make some shiny weps for my new char (not legendaries though) and to buy some expensive dyes. What disappoints me is how fast I find my new expensive look to become boring to me.
At this point, I start to realize that not the result (new look) but only the road there matters for me. For that reason I decide to keep running dungeons like I did before. I create my 6th character. I have fun in the game after finally having found out what really keeps me playing it. Not even the release of ascended weapons changes that because I know now that it’s not the result that mattes. It’s the way. Thanks for reading.