I would like to start my post and voice my opinion with a popular and very true quote: "If it's not broken, don't fix it." There's nothing wrong with Guild Wars 2's engine. Even if it really is Guild Wars 1, that's nothing short of amazing. Engines aren't cheap, they cause problems and the entire game including it's API and backend needs to be refigured to work with the new engines. The Devs wouldn't do something that drastic for Guild Wars 2 unless it was absolutely necessary and I do not blame them. That being said, Guild Wars 1 had a variety of issues for it's time - the biggest one easily being the limitations on the servers, which had nothing to do with the engine. Only being able to download data at 2mb/s, the constant rubber banding which always killed us in combat or running. I digress, when I first saw Guild Wars 2 I was quite excited, having played the original game from 2005, 15 years straight as of today. I've unlocked the full Eye of the North, my hall was packed and I finished almost every achievement leading into Guild Wars 2. But why did I quit Guild Wars 2? Simple answer any veteran of the original game and loved it as much as I did would most likely agree: We are limited by our capabilities. What do I mean by this? In the original game, you had a problem, you didn't need a group of 5-6 people to solve it in PvE. Guild Wars 1 introduced henchman at first, which were an AI substitute for players, and later in Nightfall (amazing expansion), a brilliant new hero system that eventually allowed us to control and manually build/alter the runes, weapons and armor of three individual heroes in our party. This opened the gap for a lot of solo play, which greatly appealed to me in the earlier days. I was always going back, completing every single mission on Heroic difficulty and facing the challenges of the game or farming by myself. Not needing a party was one of the best things about Guild Wars. It was still very fitting for group players at the same time. Next reason, and this is the biggest one - Weapons in Guild Wars 2 define and greatly LIMIT the amount of skills your character and class has access to. Anybody who didn't play the original Guild Wars, you wouldn't be familiar with having around 400+ skills to mix and match with a single class by yourself. I remember hours upon hours I spent constructing my own list of some 75+ builds for PvP, PvE, Solo farming end-game content, or mission grinding, whatever I was doing, I had a build thought up to ensure I could be efficient. Guild Wars 2 more or less catered to the new generation of MMO players and build diversity was one of the original concepts that made the game so popular. It's probably one of the best reasons your original game still has over 2000+ players on a daily basis, if not more. (2000 is what I heard as of recent). If there's ever an expansion (and I am saddened that Dervish and Cantha are only now just making it into Guild Wars 2), that brings back build diversity in the way I am referring to? You can bet I will reinstall Guild Wars 2 and start playing it religiously tomorrow.
