Leger.3724

I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of reality here. Heart of Thorns was purchased because of people's experiences with the base game. By that same logic Path of Fire was purchased because of people's experiences with Heart of Thorns. You can't trash the sales numbers of expansion packs after Heart of Thorns without understanding their abysmal sales are because people bought Heart of Thorns and then quit because it was such a horrific experience. And of course community polls will rate Heart of Thorns highly - again, you can interpret a community poll as success... but if over half of the community has left the game, another 40% don't participate on the forums or wherever the vote was held and 10% who do vote they liked Heart of Thorns the most, is that a success? I doubt it.

Verdant Brink is still my least favorite map of any expansion or living story. The Heart of Thorns expansion led to me taking several years off from the game. Now it's okay-ish because of mounts but traversing Verdant Brink to work together was a challenge in and of itself. Unlocking skill points for elite specializations was another huge challenge you essentially needed a group to access basic skills content, something Guild Wars has tended to shy away from. The other problem is if the next expansion does this - the old content like Heart of Thorns becomes less populated. How many times is Dragon's Stand attempted per day? How about the Verdant Brink meta? I worry more expansions is going to spread the playerbase a bit thinner and make catching up that much more difficult. I love the PvE content in this game. To me the content I would want to see is more along the lines of Drizzlewood Coast and Dragon's End or even Dragon's Stand for that matter (Heart of Thorns). Introducing players to an expansion with a map like Verdant Brink is not good. It turns people off. It turned me off. I went back to playing League of Legends PvP exclusively where my skill mattered and it wasn't "yeah this skill point challenge has a billion HP, hits like a truck and you only have 2 dodges so you're not getting this done solo without cheesing it". It also takes you 5-10 minutes to get to the skill point in the first place to find out you can't solo it. Now with mounts, with 2 other expansions it's not so bad. But it was a terrible experience at launch. And for any new player going through the expansions in order, they're going to feel that same pain only worse as they see old players zooming around on the map on mounts + full gliding mastery.

Keep in mind that many existing players like myself got these boosts as we purchased expansions. It was nice to just pop a character to 80 and have it in full decent-ish gear (celestial) along with inventory bags that were okay too. And others might be interested in hitting 80 immediately to go WvW with decent gear or they might want to try out strikes and raids immediately after reading up and watching videos online. While it was super fun at launch exploring the world with friends and progressing through leveling... that's not for everyone. Some people want go to straight to a specific piece of content and a boost allows for that. In terms of you personally, I guess it depends on what you want to do. It's probably worth saving the boost and figuring out what you want to play first if you're brand new to Guild Wars. I wouldn't rush leveling, you'll get to 80 fast enough and you should have enough money to get a good set of starting gear.

No. The forums is a place for feedback that Arena Net needs to hear. Unfortunately for them there are people like you who try to shout down feedback. I'll spell it out really clearly: PvP in this game is essentially dead. The community compared to PvE is miniscule. When you are making a fun event for your decade anniversary - "tour the world of Guild Wars and get a cool cape skin" - maybe the achievement that takes the longest time in the journey to earn that cape should not be in the mode that players do not play. Players voted with their feet 10 years ago and continue to vote today. Why force them into a situation they clearly do not want to get that anniversary skin? And if you are going to force this on the playerbase, why not a more reasonable number of games or something not based on games at all? Why not 10 kills/assists? Obviously Arena Net can do this and they have. But decisions that force PvErs to play 10 PvP games breeds alienation and the more you alienate your playerbase the more players you lose. Arena Net should be looking to bring people into their game by making it a fun and enjoyable experience. An anniversary event should not be the place for a grind or challenging content. And you can see the intention with the other 19 achievements. All easily completable. All can be done very quickly. None actually require PvP interaction. Given the feedback they're getting in this thread maybe next time Arena Net will think about the next event they run and consider their options. Alienating your largest group of customers again and again seems like a poor business decision. This 10 year event and cape skin won't break the camels back by any means but if you keep adding content like this, don't be surprised when people vote with their feet again... except this time it won't be not playing sPvP, it will be not playing Guild Wars 2 at all. And now I think I'm done because it's pointless to deal with people who sit on the forums all day shouting down any feedback.

I would hope doing 18 achievements takes longer than doing 1 singular achievement.

10 events in WvW is not a big deal. You can get it done super fast. 10 matches in PvP? That takes much, much longer. And no one is forcing you to be here whining about the complaints of others. Some of us are simply pointing out the achievement that takes the longest to complete is also the one the vast majority of the playerbase does not want to do. Generally speaking a celebration event should be fun and not "grind at something you don't want to do". They could have added "kill 10 raid bosses" as an achievement. They didn't. Why? Because it's supposed to be a fun, accessible event and not a grind nobody wants to complete. Arena Net needs to understand offering up PvE players to PvP queues is not a solution for PvP being dead. No one is going "wow, I didn't give PvP a chance but this 10 game achievement changed my mind". If you want to sell a PvP mode, sell WvW because it has some unique selling points. Just give up on sPvP. I'm sorry to the people who enjoy it but it's not worth the time and money in developing it or balancing it. The playerbase for arena PvP combat is in MOBAs and they're not jumping ship to GW2.

Yeah a strike. One strike. Singular. A dungeon path. One dungeon path. Not "10 full games of something you have less than zero interest in". Old School Runescape did this frequently. Content updates to force people into the Wilderness to help out the small PvP playerbase of that dead region of their map. Player counts dropped. They were met with backlash. The only thing this is going to do is breed animosity.

It's too late at this point. If the goal was to bring in new players and retain them it should have been an immediate nerf to the major solo classes in WvW so that new players won't get dumped on by a thief or mesmer jumping around invisible 70%+ of the time or a mechanist with tons of frontloaded damage. These nerfs that aren't happening but would have allowed new players a chance when wandering around or attempting to link up with the zergs on the map. I understand what I'm typing here would be extremely unpopular for a dedicated minority of the playerbase but if you want to bring new players... having them getting blown up in 3-5 seconds as they attempt to join up with a zerg or figure out objectives is a horrible introduction. And then after launch focus on more serious balancing of groups/zergs. Focus on boons from Guardians. Focus on DPS of mechanist. Condition AOE of necros and the group stealth from Mesmers that allows zergs to pull off some absurd kitten.

Sure and people can have fun in games that are unhealthy and unbalanced. Just ask the big spenders in Diablo Immortal as an extreme example. Some people having fun doesn't change the fact the game has some unhealthy mechanics and some blatantly OP ones and instead of fine tuning for a better player experience Arena Net has simply taken the approach of "lets give more of it to more classes". I don't want to drag down this thread. I would simply point to an unhealthy and unfun but not necessarily OP mechanic: look at how GW2 has handled stealth and look at how any competitive MOBA game handles stealth.

Pretty much this. If you're coming to GW2, come for the PvE. The PvP is legitimately awful and the main playerbase for it seems to be the people who washed out of balanced PvP MOBA games where they couldn't succeed. Guild Wars PvP hasn't been good since like launch WvW. The last time there was balanced PvP was Guild Wars 1.

Except it is. Communities can vary in the intensity and dedication they display. Take a look at PvE content, open world. Very casual to the point where sometimes people don't form teams. This alliance idea is going to concentrate the most dedicate players in WvW Guilds on teams at the expense of everyone else. And while that might sound great if you're in one of those guilds... a lot of your fun right now depends on meeting up with those more casual zergs or groups and fighting it out. I don't know for sure how this beta will turn out if it's pushed out of beta and into "live" but I suspect it will result in casual players decreasing their playtime and even some of the smaller dedicated guilds fracturing with some members moving to other WvW guilds and others giving up or reducing time spent on WvW. And all of that is bad for the longterm health of WvW because unlike PvE there is no scaling. The bigger, more dedicated guilds will steamroll the smaller, less dedicated ones night after night and the game continues to bleed players as it fails to bring new ones in.

Outside of primetime NA this has been incredibly lopsided in terms of player population. It's primetime again right now and while it seems all teams can field full rosters... there's more "strategy" then before so my team or server or whatever you want to call it is living with the other 2 teams spending the entirety of primetime attacking only our objectives. In some instances literally camping outside our main spawn and our spawn tower. Maybe part of this is some of the dedicated players are less interested in WvW and just want to zerg fight over nothing. So we have two enemy zergs meet up at our spawn tower at the start of primetime (because we lose outside of primetime hours so horrifically). This might be a short term win for people who love the idea of alliances but this is going to be a longterm failure and in the short run is going to decimate the casual population. Bad idea overall.

The game mode is easy to farm. Just be prepared to deal with sweats on their thieves, mesmers, rangers and engineers who will harass you non-stop and run away with stealth, blinks at the first sign they're getting outplayed. The only counter is to become one of them and follow up with your own stealth and blinks to catch them. If you're in a group stay tight and hope you have more guardians, engineers and necros and maybe a couple utility classes like mesmer. One thing is for sure, the game mode is just not very fun outside of zergs which desperately needs balancing. And that's why the tiny nerfs done over the last 10 years have targeted stealth (to make the game more welcoming and fun outside of zergs). Unfortunately expansions have basically given more classes stealth, blinks and all that fun stuff that kills the experience of new and inexperienced players. So great job on game design with that, ANet. Certainly doing your part trying to kill off every PvP mode by making it the most unwelcoming on the market. And to compound it the WvW ranks and abilities system introduces a mount and rewards people who have grinded non-stop with the ability to one-shot newer players off said mount picking them off and isolating them so they can be destroyed with stealth, blinks and frontloaded damage. It's almost, no wait, it is exactly like they have no idea how to make any form of pvp a more welcoming and competitive place. I like this game because its PvE is easy to get into. But man this game has fall hard since day 1 on PvP when compared to GW1 or literally any MOBA on the market. I'd rather play Fornite on the Switch.

It's too late in all likelihood. You need a large playerbase for good PvP experiences and to bring in that large playerbase you need a good experience. PvP in GW2 is not a good experience. I can't name another game with as many mechanics that cannot be realistically countered as we see in GW2. Immunity, invulnerability, boons, blinks, stealth, massive aoe condition spam and damage to name a few problems. You need to play a handful of specific classes with a handful of builds that take advantage of a few of what I listed up above and you can absolutely dump on anyone new coming into the scene. And that new player leaves, the playerbase does not grow, veterans slowly leave over time for other games or slowly lose the desire to play games (as I've experienced over the years). It's a vicious cycle. It is what it is. PvP and WvW are material farms. If I wanted to see how competitive I could be I'd launch up League of Legends and play a game or two. They are a PvP game focused on balancing PvP and Guild Wars 2 has never been and will never be close to that.

Exactly this. Some of the things people are advocating are great strategies for making WvW dead content. It's passable now but most of the suggestions I see are basically guides that should be titled "here's how we can make a huge chunk of players quit" and not "my idea to revive and improve WvW".

Remove heart of thorns specializations. As is typical since probably a few years into GW1 - PvE takes precedence and completely destroys PvP and then the fixes come too late to save it.Specializations has been an unmitigated disaster for PvP (including WvW).Like I said, it would be a massive QOL improvement but it's too late to save WvW or PvP.

Do you get many of the additional open world events done? I know the Facet is difficult without a group but it seems each region has at least one open world event whether it's a legendary boss or something else.