Playing GW2 since release :Feedback

I am not an expert in the video game industry or anything, just a seasoned gw2 player willing to give his view on the game and what it's become.I created my first character in 2012. To this day I'm at 5k+ hours played.

Core game was very much empty once you get lvl 80, until Anet gave us fractals and season 1.On one hand we got this Trading Post which is the same pain to use as in 2012, on the other hand we had numerous QoL upgrades over the years, from wardrobe to sigil/runes swap on legy gear more recently.HoT was a huge breath of fresh air to me, so much new content : raid, elite specs, masteries, well designed meta events and so on...Yet it was one of the first times Anet FAILED to deliver one thing they announced : the 2nd gen legendary weapons. Now don't mistake me, the legy weapons delivered with HoT ARE quality design and nice collections to do. But then why are the others legendaries of the same generation such a grindy-grind ? With no collections like the first batch we got with HoT ? That seems to me (not an expert) like pure lazyness (2019 still waiting on the last legendary of this collection that was announced for 2015).Living stories (season 3 and 4) are great, even though I think it's abit shameful that every single new content patch came with so many bugs, server crashes and/or delay.Mount design in PoF is great and unique. Again, PoF was a breath of fresh air.

Now let's get to the bad part : PvP, WvW and communicationPvP : It got better over the years, can't deny that. Yet it still is in a pretty dire state right now. Balancing a MMO is a tough, almost impossible task, especialy when you keep adding specialization or revamping runes. The game is called GUILD WARS. Guild Wars 1 PvP was glorious, so many game modes to choose from, yet all we can do here in GW2 is conquest 5v5. The only way to participate as a guild is as 5 man team in Automated Tournaments (system heavily exploited by botters and multi-accounters) which happen every 4 hours...

WvW : I'm not sure where Anet is going with WvW, Alliance system was announced quite a while ago, and we still have very little clue about it, which leads us to my last point,

Communication : is very bad. I know it's easy to say as a player, but I'm just looking how other companies do it, and you are doing it wrong in every possible way. As a dedicated player, I have no idea when is the next content update coming, nor the next balance patch, nor the next expansion, or even if there's gonna be one ever. Now, if a seasoned player can't have easy access to those info, how do you want newer players to be excited about what's coming next ?

If anyone from Anet reads this, cheers, keep the good work up.

Id add up pve to some extend in this. If you arent exclusively playing for ow/lw then the rest of pve doesnt get updated enough to warrant sticking around imo.

@Geij.3691 said:The game is called GUILD WARS. Guild Wars

They have said that the name was only for the franchise and would be nothing like the original GW. If you've been on since release, then this shouldn'thave been a surprise to you.

Communication is complicated when you have a large audience, because the company is damned if they deliver, and damned if they don't.

There's way too much outrage in these forums whenever ANet can't deliver something they offer, so that has lead them to be a lot more secretive about updates, until they are imminent.

However, I'd say they have gotten better as of late. Release cadence for LS is pretty known, and I believe they have a balance patch every mid PvP season or two (I read about somewhere else but didn't care enough to learn it).

When a company doesn't wants to release an incomplete product, they can't really announce release dates until it's nearly done, and even then unexpected bugs do happen. Wanna bet that the reason ANet's LS releases bring some serious bugs is because they don't have the resources to discover said bugs before the release deadline hits (so to speak)?

I suppose having beta players to test upcoming stuff could help, but ANet has their reasons to not do so (perhaps because they'd need to handle NDAs).

One point I can agree on is how bad balance has gotten. It's not even that balance itself is the issue, but the powercreep that has gotten into the game, not just damagewise, but even graphics wise: it's as if the artists were given complete freedom while forgetting that there are players playing the game, it isn't just to sit back and stare.

Fortunately, it seems ANet is aware and also desires to change the state of the game, the making of the systems team is a way to have a more encompassing look on changes and how they may affect the distinct game modes. There were some heavy changes that had the forums in an uproar already, so perhaps the next big balance patch will actually change the status quo, hopefully for the better.

Regarding gen2 legends, ANet actually wanted to drop them altogether after Chuka. There was a huge (and quite warranted) backlash, so they said they would keep releasing them but not as collections because that takes a lot of work, so they would just release them as craftable stuff, and so we got the junk that is today. And delivered 3 months apart, weapon by weapon (except for once when they delivered 2 at the same time). And i'm not buying the "it takes time to design them" bs. It really does not take that much time.

My personal opinion is that they had a great idea with the collections and stories, but then they got overwhelmed by it, or just flat out decided to stop doing it because it's not worth the time, and just wanted an out. After all, they had already cashed in on the announcement of gen2 legends as a selling point for HoT, and this announcement came several months after HoT was released. Scummy behavior. It is a pity because some of them were really good, chuka especially was amazing.

What really pissed me off was the nerve they had to bait and switch people by announcing a thing, then saying it's no longer coming after you payed for it. Over the years ANet did a number of things to make me trust them less, but this was one of the worst.

I won't even get into the fiasco they made out of wvw. It was one of their best concepts and it was an amazing endgame, or could have been. But they ignored it for years, silenced many wvw discussions on the forum, and when they finally decided to give it a try, they did it in such a dramatically bad fashion that they killed it. They literally gave a glass of mercury to a man dying of thirst. Alliances might have saved some of it, but when you announce something and 1.5 years later have nothing to show for it... People quit. They stop caring. They move on and only a few come back, if any. WvW is now a ghost town, when once all maps were queued and there were always tons of people to play with or against.

TBH, looking back across the years, for me the story of GW2 is one of bitterness. What it was, what it could have been - but is not, and will never be.

My problem with gw2 is that you cant put in too many hours into it or else it will get stale quick.

@Magnus Godrik.5841 said:My problem with gw2 is that you cant put in too many hours into it or else it will get stale quick.

Well, you mean that YOU can't. I've played thousands of hours and yet there's still a ton of content I haven't even begun to explore. I play every day and don't find it stale at all.

People just concentrate on one part of the game WvW this ,Raids that , Fractals something. In WvW people want change but don't want change, but it does need work. Kinda stale when its just flipping castles.Raids are not obsolete after a new tier comes out, something like Freezy in side story event in between the wings would probably help. Fractals not sure kinda the same with raids. And the next guy who says dungeons and says fractals and raids are not the same deserves a slap, but a teleport to dungeon entrance from the Aerodome and some raid currency thing of jig(exchange dungeon currency for raid currency or something) would make the people run them sometimes.SPVP needs more modes and you can notice sometimes that people just want to kill each other and not rotate around circles. It is still fun for a few games a day, but it gets repetitive. Balance is an issue but its for the whole game and its most felt in the pvp modes and some things have to be raked in without breaking the rest of the game.I hope i managed to summarize even though badly most issues.So all in all people complain about certain modes and pigeonhole themselves in some part of the game , i know i do too, and miss the forest for the trees. The game is most enjoyable when you do variety of things and when some burnout sets in a break is not a bad thing , its not like the game will leave you behind like most other mmos.