Why I have not played in 2 months

GW2 for the last 3-4 yrs has played a huge part of my gaming world. It possibly sits in my top 10 personal favorite games of all time. I spent the first year playing pve and getting a feel for the 2-3 classes I chose. HoT was when I started to feel like I was truly on an adventure of sorts. As time went on friends introduced me casually to fractals and various modes, which i did for a time. Then after some casual fun in wvw, I found myself joining some nice social guilds. Toward the later years I wanted to challenge myself. Some choose raids or top pvp fights (conquest) to do this, but I got into gvg/wvw level challenges. I'm glad I did, though I had to learn a lot. It felt rewarding as I struggled to learn how to coordinate and fight larger groups while being outnumbered. It is quite amazing how the mode holds up with minimal changes. But why am I talking about all this.

Well somewhere there is always inevitably a dropoff with waning enthusiasm for a game. In this case of gw2, I feel there didn't need to be, however. So what was it? For me it was the replayability and richness of content that the living season fails to deliver. It is captivating to find out what happens, do some collections, get some skins, but then it fizzles. It is so much effort and manpower for content that just doesn't have any staying power. Look at a mode like wvw which has remained relatively unchanged for 5 yrs or more, yet a selection of the community can play it over and over for years. I don't feel LWS provides that experience, but it could. You basically have a ton of dead static open world maps that could be put to use. Better rewards, incentives for exploration, and fun generated encounters would all be much more worth your time. Imagine you and your 5 friends are out on one of the new maps and a challenging boss or mob surprises you. You quickly realize this is a rare encounter and that loot/rewards are good for actually taking down this beast. You all fail after 15 minutes of fighting, but now you got a hunger for a new challenge.

I don't know how halving your staff will work for gw2, but if I were to come back, I'd love to see a game with some actual replayability and maps that are truly alive; a reason to explore and have conquest. It could be that I've just met my threshold however. Gw2 does provide a lot if you seek it out, and has/had one of the best guild communities around.

I understand and feel the same way with a lot of what you mentioned. I think this company realizes that for the gamer and the company future changes need to be made. I know that laying off people isn’t easy. But now this company is in a better position not to stagnate and move forward with expansions and future products. I think the nc soft merge and hiring previous world of Warcraft devs was the best thing they had to do. People are probably thinking on how they operate with less people, but a good example would be the amount of devs used to make fallout and fallout76. The first fallout before the 76 version is better and used a lot less people in the development.

Half of the problem is that PoF changed how the dev team approaches the game.

Because people complained so much about HoT's design, they went with something completely different for PoF and LS4--expansive, but boring, maps, with alot more casual design. They are little more than prettier, more mechanically polished versions of the Central Tyria maps.

Except not even that because they have even less diverse environments, being mostly desert..and more desert.

This is in contrast to the high replayability of Heart of Thorns, especially the meta events which still outclass anything PoF or LS4 has introduced, even Istan's meta is pathetic in comparison to something like Tangled Depths meta, just being a rushed and mindless zerg lootfest.

I've gone back to HoT maps thousands of times and PoF maps maybe a hundred. I go to Central Tyria more than Crystal Desert.

Hopefully in LS5 or the next expo (if there is one), we'll return to more replayable content.

Thats the nature of free udpates in games. They are never enough and hardly compaire to the quantity/quality of paid content that u can get elsewhere.