Valento.9852

Ahh, are they still balancing ele based on pvp/wvw?

Headstart player here. Just thought about jumping in and giving my 2¢. See, the game went through so much over the last decade that the things that the playerbase is receiving are quite huge. We started off with an unclear direction (gear, economy, LFG tools, progression, etc), at least for an MMORPG such as GW2. Dang, when HoT was teased countless rumors were flying about what that thing could be, because we almost had no spare hope left for what this game could evolve into. I remember I screamed when they announced it was, in fact, an expansion! But wait, GW2 would never ever have one expansion, just regular story releases and whatnot. Guess the market prices itself and it's ruthless, but then again what would we be doing in a stale game after all? Then they've challenged their fixed mindset about the holy trinity: it will never happen. But it did! Well, sort of, the trinity flows more dynamically than normal and it's broken into multiple pieces. Piece by piece, things started changing for good, amongst so many heated discussions and curious developments company-wise. The amount of time we gave this game into repeating gold grinding in the past is far beyond comprehension, it's not even close to what we have now. This game is and will remain a B2P model because of how it started and the big players behind it. That won't however hinder their abilities to grow and make money, but that's topic for another time. Specializations, a.k.a traits, balancing happens quite normally for a F2P model game cadence to be completely honest. The feedback is important, but they will milk money from unbalanced classes and tbh that's another thing that should be expected. One thing should be expected (and this is targetted at the devs) is world polish. It's unreasonable to have quite a few annoying, long-standing bugs tied to graphics. This is why one of my main complaints since roughly 6 years ago was to upgrade DirectX. It takes a lot of resources, money and research, but whatever, everything has only one direction: forward. Or downward... the choice lies at the hands of the big players mentioned before. About the game getting worse: that's the price you pay for denying the chance for a product to grow for way too long. You can't stop the flow of the game + fixing the already existing bugs. That's a painful cycle that you must endure and overcome, there's no magical way to get everything beautifully in place. Game has potential, just like it did 10 years ago. You really have to put on the work and that's about it.

That's my biggest concern that pushes me from the game tbh. It's been a long journey, lots of mismanagement and I'll never truly understand (aside from jokes) what ArenaNet priorities are. A graphics engine is costly but it's much much needed.

I'm a headstart player (played early 2012 closed beta weekends) and I am brazilian too. It makes me utterly ashamed that folks from Brazil still come here asking the same kitten again. Everyone here understands the challenges a company faces when localizing a game and so do I, and it pisses me off that they mention the country as if we all had the same opinion when, in fact, that's far from true. I never saw the need for a translation and I still do not see the need.

This is the main reason I still can't come back. It's been 9 months now...

You know, before I leave I'd like to make a suggestion. I don't care if it will stick, but whatever: set a portion of GemStore to require a different currency only acquired through money, not gold->gem conversion, while offering a way to exchange this golden gem to the normal gem. This way you won't be affected by extreme farming, and can be more flexible because you will be earning real money for this set of things. As angsty as the playerbase may get, you need to stop with RNG and still make money; setting apart Real Money-only items from those ultimately acquired in-game is a decent way of doing so. Free yourself as a company, ANet, and free your playerbase. Serious players will understand. Stop pushing it. Just, stop... before you're left in the dust.

It's not the skins, it's the method by which they're sold. They're making them random so we buy more to get the skin we want (like loot boxes). This is the kind of crap that's gonna push me away from this game to go find another. I've already moved away. I started playing GW2 since March, 2012 (closed betas), I've been with the game through the ups and downs, spent however I could in the GemStore, but there's a limit regarding what they consider additional content, and GemStore is by far not "content" to me. Currently, my finances have become a bit more stable and I've started playing a P2P game (FF...) and I don't feel like thrasing my money away like I've been doing in this game. I've stepped away from a B2P model as it ultimately becomes a F2P-like ripoff of sorts. I never imagined a B2P MMORPG would embody this tendency, but it is what it is, and I'm glad not to be part of it anymore.