Asgaeroth.6427

Yes, lets just call raid sellers legit and that makes the problem go away. I am sure that the people soaking up millions of gold year after year are totally just stockpiling it and using it for benevolent purposes. Professional gold resellers in GW2 do not bot, botting in GW2 is small time. You really think running some accounts to drum up a few thousand mithril a day is perpetuating the RMTers? It takes hundreds of accounts to meet the same level of gold you get from carrying a few raids a night. RMT is exclusively centered around raids, and that is by Anet's specific design. Nothing else in the game twists arms to buy gems to the same degree as raid carry. Close the thread, move along, nothing to see here, an RMTer said the method they use to RMT isn't very effective, problems are solved.

Anet completely missed the mark here for me. It is more hammering square pegs into round holes and not addressing any of the issues. An adjustment to the reward currency mechanics and challenge motes, big deal. This would have been an OK mid patch update to strikes like 2 years ago. I want difficulty options for 10 player content because I like difficult content. I want difficulty modes because I also really love doing easy content between difficult content sessions. We can't have difficult content because Anet "expects" everyone to want difficult content (surface level, the reality is they just want people to stay buying gold every week to pay for carries) and tries to ram everyone who does not want difficult content down the throats of the people who do want difficult content. We can't have easy content because "reasons". All we have is this frustrating middle ground content that is designed to be impossible for most people and trivial to some people. Hmmmmmmmmmmm, I wonder why a company full of very smart talented people would be mysteriously hung up on tiny issues that you can fix with a 1970s calculator? HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM, what could possibly be the reason for that? HMMMMMMMMMMMMM.... so mysterious.

FFXIV can ban paid carries because they offer difficulty options, and there's a way for all levels of ability to experience the content. GW2 has no difficulty options for content and the base content difficulty is tuned way beyond what most of the players are capable of. This is a trivial to solve issue, have difficulty options. It is something they could pass to an intern as a morning project. There's a specific reason that we have both legal paid carries and exceptionally difficult raids. It isn't to oppress the disabled and differently minded, it isn't to appease elitist snobs. That is the end result for the players, but the reason we will never see a fix is because Anet is in on the scam. Ion at Activision hit on it too, and WoW has also gone this way. The thing players are most forced to spend real money on gold is for paid carries. It is a bottomless source of revenue, it is likely Anet's primary source of revenue. When Blizzard implemented officially supported paid carries and gated all progression behind those paid carries, their gold sales skyrocketed to unprecedented and unexpected levels. Blizzard has doubled down every patch on supporting paid carries even in the face of unprecedented player loss. The reason we can't have versatile raids and the reason LFG sections will eternally be spammed with paid carries is because people will swipe that card every single week for those paid carries.

Official DPS meter would be a disaster. How else are people going to distribute their keyloggers if no one downloads their "DPS meter" that for no apparent reason requires a Windows 95 networking redistributable?

I enjoy the process of scroll and tome boosting chars to 80, there is actually quite a few fun loots to collect. The only issue is that there's like 40 items the chest spam gives that have to be deleted. The improvement I would like to see is make all the items in the level up reward chests that can't be salvaged or vendored able to be salved or vendored. Is it really going to break the economy if the useless delete equipments could be quickly vendored for 1 copper each? These chest give valuable boosters that cost many gold to buy, 1c vendor price on the random trash items would not have a negative effect. It wouldn't even add an extra half silver to the reward pool.

Add a new skill line to each mastery section that consumes all the extra points available for minor account bonuses like karma, gold, xp, and magic find. Would be nice to have a minor reward for full mastery completion and have something to do with our extra points. Make it unlock after all the current lines are completed so people don't accidentally spend important points on a very minor track.

Items change in value constantly for all kinds of reasons. New content comes which increases availability and reduces demand on items that drop in that area. The money meta evolves over time. Stat sets grow and shrink in popularity. New recipes come out that use items in new ways. Hype drops off on older recipes. New sinks come out to shake up stagnant markets. Drop rates get adjusted for any number of reasons. When you list an item you are gambling that listing fee that you can sell the item before the price of the item changes. That is the intent of the system. As far as buyer's remorse, that's a total dead end in general. There's nothing in existence that you can be certain will be worth the same for a long period of time. Even precious metals don't give you an absolute certainty of retaining value. Your coin collection is worth bupkis if a company trivializes robotic asteroid mining infrastructure. Don't cry over spilled milk.

Been having really bad issues with input delay in larger fights, noticed consistently in LWS4 metas, ley anomaly, and squad vs squad wvw fights since the Jan 19 patch. On continental US with good ping to servers and reasonably stable internet over Cat6. Don't think it is an issue on my end, running Ryzen 7 1700, 16gb DDR4-2666, RX 580 8gb, stock Windows 10 20H2, current WHQL drivers, 512gb NVMe SSD with plenty of space and health, standard power profiles and clock speeds on CPU/GPU/RAM/VRAM, overkill cooling on everything. Game typically runs flawlessly and I don't get those unplayable performance dips in large scale that cause people to yell "MY FRAMES!!!!1" at world bosses. I wish it was on my end, I built this thing in 2017 and want an excuse to build a new one :^)

Revamp and rebalance instanced pve content and put it all in one place. Would be nice to have a unified portal object for all 5 man content and another unified portal object for all 10 man content. 5 man portal and 10 man portal should have a nice menu and each content type have it's own tab like what fractal scales have. Then put both portals everywhere that the scatterbrained portals we have now are. And rebalance all of it with 4 difficulty modes and modifiers on all the higher difficulties for all content. There's so much content just rotting away because nothing is done with it and it is not accessible for a spectrum of reasons. The instanced PVE content is some of the most amazing technical and artistic work that was done on GW2, but work was stopped short where it mattered most, letting us play the stuff and making it rewarding and fun to farm.

This has rather little bearing on an existing game that's basically in maintenance mode as far as the engine itself is concerned. The age of the game and the limited ArenaNet development resources are why it has to go this way, not why it shouldn't go this way. With a broader and more realistic perspective, this is obvious and unavoidable. It's nice to live in a world where you can say "just do X thing and it's fine". The problems start when the people who actually have to do X thing live in reality, and the people who proposed X thing can't see the spectrum of problems that make X thing completely unrealistic.

… in the App Store. Most users aren't married to the App Store. The tussle over Fortnite was about App Store billing structure, which is the same reason you can't buy Fortnite on Steam. (And the reason "how do we put Guild Wars 2 on Steam?" has been a months-long process for Anet even though just uploading a game to Steam takes like a single afternoon.) You can install any software you want directly, or through a storefront like Steam, GOG, Epic Games Store, &c. without giving Apple a single cent of your money. The only obstacle is a single clicky box saying "hey, did you download this installer from a website you trust?" They're not locking you out of anything, though. The OGL layer is still there. x86 binary translation is there. The forced 64-bit thing was annoying (why no legacy layer for that?) and the app-signing thing is annoying, but neither of these have had a visible impact on Anet's ability to provide a GW2 Mac client so far. If they want to take the same approach that Steam did where they just slap "This product is not compatible with Mac OS version blah blah" on the product page and call it a day, I wouldn't begrudge them that — I'm sure the end of the OS 10.x line is a big deal under the hood and it's okay if they don't have the resources to continually iterate on an old game. I'm not here to defend a giant computer manufacturer, but you are absolutely reaching to try to paint a cost-cutting move as something they've been forced into by a hardware/OS roadmap that mostly affects new computers while we're talking about the needs of an existing customer base still playing their ten-year-old game. There's more to it than the technical issues. If Apple doesn't think they can onboard you onto Apple Pay and sell you $2 million of development kit, they wont even respond to your emails. The Apple MO is to stonewall developers who aren't 100% in the program. They make it as difficult as possible to work with them because they know most studios are going to bend over backwards to get access to the Apple customers, you know, those people who pay $3000 for $750 hardware configurations because it has rounded bezels? Apple has a really good scam going and it is hard to wrap your mind around the horror of dealing with it until you've had to.

Could you rephrase that? I have no idea what you are trying to say.

Apple doesn't appreciate software with 3rd party billing services. Apple doesn't appreciate software being available on their platforms that wasn't entirely made in Apple's extremely expensive development tools. Apple's new chips are good enough to justify clamping down on old x86-64 software. Apple plainly doesn't want you to be able to deal with ArenaNet, and they are seizing the opportunity to lock you out now that they have the "our ARM chips are good enough for general compute now" excuse. If you aren't happy with software unavailability on your Mac, sell it. You can buy an equivalently spec'd general purpose x86-64 machine brand new for your used Mac price. Being mad at ArenaNet over Apple's misanthropic view is pointless. This happening should not be a shock to Mac users. ArenaNet isn't in a position of folding at the first sign of resistance here, they are one of the longest holdouts who tried the hardest to make the relationship with Apple work. Apple doesn't want it to work, so it is never going to work. ArenaNet's mistake was thinking they could get through to Apple and they let this drag on too long.

Basically, it's not a consequence of how raids are designed. It's caused by how the game is designed. This was for the most part unintentional, btw. The old gw1 freestyle skill system worked relatively well, so they went with it again when they started working on the continuation. Unfortunately, adding to it a new trait system, boons, food bonuses, and (as one of the relatively late decision changes) stat bonuses to gear unbalanced that to a massive degree. What might have worked okay when operating separately turned out to be borderline ridiculous when it got stacked on top of each other, with each subsystem reinforcing the others. Unfortunately, since it was unintentional, the consequences got noticed way too late. And now we have to live with them. You're looking at it backwards in my opinion. The core design may have problems, but they are not insurmountable. I am not an inexperienced raider. I cleared every heroic raid in WoW as main tank while it was the current raid from Wrath to the end of Pandaria. The problem is GW2 raids are not tuned around the game design, they are tuned around arbitrary checks that make no sense for the majority of players. All of GW2's best mechanics, best art, best everything is in these raids. We as customers paid them to make all these advanced assets and they are just wallowing in nothingness. I love the GW2 raids, they are in many places masterworks in the industry. They are just sadly locked behind the worst of GW2, the clunky grouping, the elitist build snobs, etc. There's nothing about that that is unfixable and it is nothing that has to be lived with. The baseline raid difficulty doesn't need to be on par with Ascalon story mode, it just also should not be so ridiculously daunting. The DPS check on gors is unwinnable in a pug, I've tried to teach the fight to like 75 groups at this point, it's just impossible. A middle ground had to happen and still could happen. The raids don't need to be 2 hours of trying to fill and then replacing 3 slots every two wipes, they could be so good if they just took the edge off the baseline difficulty. And to me the worst of it is the people who yell GIT GUD at every raid difficulty discussion are so self defeating. So many people say the problem is for some it's too easy and for some it's too hard. The raid community is really small because of this problem. If there was more people able to see the layouts of the instances and get comfortable with them, there would be more people working their way up through the ranks to a harder difficulty. If we had difficulty options, there could be a facemelting absolute "and then we doubled it" mode for the people bored with the way too brutally difficult version we have. Every problem with raiding in GW2 is solved instantly with difficulty options. It's blatantly obvious and is a standard necessary modern MMO feature. How could anyone with any amount of ability to think critically not see it?

I would give anything to play the raid content. It has been bothering me for 5 years every single day. Raids are exactly what I want out of GW2, and I was so excited for them to come. I just never expected them to release them at a baseline difficulty that required the degree of precision and build specificity that they do. There is definitely grounds to have a trinity style or very hardcore raid difficulty for the people who like that, but that's not what GW2 puts forward primarily. It's just such a missed opportunity. People don't play raids because they are brutally difficult, even if you think they are not. It is all about perspective. You deserve to have your difficulty, we deserve to have ours too. Not letting us have our difficulty for over 5 years has permanently damaged this product and permanently damage ArenaNet. Yelling GIT GUD isn't going to change that. For every one person that wants to play at peak human performance, there probably 80 million that don't. The raids would be played if they were playable, it is unconscionable that they haven't been improved yet.

There was a guy in gw2 facebook who made an guild for ppl that arw new to raids and wants to play off meta builds. Sorry i cannot give more details as my memory is a bit pepega. It's just not what I am talking about at all. There are fundamental problems with the raiding experience that can not be solved with the "just do X thing and it is fine". It is not helpful in any way to say go scour Facebook if you want to wear soldier armor in raid. True, in order to succeed in raid content, a player needs a certain mindset. Most important here is willingness to actually cooperate and play together with other players. Everything else is secondary. Even the "required" performance is insignificant given there are build which can achieve absolutely sufficient results on basically only auto attack rotations. Still, a player needs to be willing to adjust and adapt their build in order to serve the group, even when running simple builds. There is no room for the solo hermit who both is unwilling to play with others AND refuses to improve his performance to required levels. One of both can work, say guild members covering for weaker performance, or being a social outcast but bringing decent performance in PUG groups. Both does not work. and yet here the casual guilds I know don't subject themselves to "raid culture" and are rather flexible in how people play. The only requirement is to play with the group and if you turn toxic, you get the boot. Yes, the LFG is not the best place for certain players or certain content searching players. That's why it is often not recommended over and over and over for getting into raiding. Again this leads back to a players desire to become part of a group and leave the hermit live style behind them. Raids were originally designed as this games challenging content for organized groups. The fact they can be PUGed at all is basically already a failure in design and a testament to them being to easy (or to how well players can specialize and organize even under the most limiting circumstances). Turns out, you need to be chill and accepting of other players mistakes if you want them to extend the same benefit to you. Again, stop talking about the LFG. It's not the place you should be at IF you actually were interested in raiding. Untrue. You simply are incapable to seem to find players who fit what you want. From all you have said you seem to want the fluidity and efficiency of a pro or experienced raid group, while yourself being unwilling to provide a similar performance or adhere to standard protocol. Yet you are unwilling to extend the same courtesy to fellow raiders getting frustrated by weaker groups, who would have the potential to be more relaxed and less demanding. In short: you want to get carried. There are chill raid groups/guilds. They take longer to clear content. They take longer to kill a boss. They often have to train far longer until they progress. Yet during all that time, they have fun. If that does not sound appealing to you, well then raiding is not for you. For the 3rd time in this reply: the LFG is not the place you would or should be looking IF raiding is actually your goal.You post all that without having any consideration for my perspective. I have great consideration for your perspective and wish you to have the raids that you want to do. You denounce me so deeply and passionately, but you can't see what I am saying, or why I am saying it. You probably never will. I don't want a carry, anyone can get a carry for some gold. I want the content to be playable in LFG in a similar way to the rest of the game. Every pixel of the game up to raids forces you into LFG. I love LFG, I pug dungeons, fractals, metas, and strikes pretty much all day every day. To me it is a great system and works exactly as I would want my MMO to work. There just simply isn't a good reason for raids to be in the state they are with the wonderful systems and gameplay foundations we have beyond gatekeeping elitism and hate. We have vastly different outlooks on what raiding is and what it should be for. The reason you see raids as a failure is the same reason I see raids as a failure, but we have polar opposite ideas on the solution. There is room in the game for both perspectives, and the game needed both perspectives to be considered to be successful. My initial post or there-abouts I said this same thing, so we're circling back around and around again. Raids suck to you because there is too many concessions for people who want them easier. Raids suck to me because there is too many concession for people who want them harder. We have one middle ground difficulty that is trash for everyone. How is the solution to that problem in any way complicated? It is so obvious it might as well be Don Trump's spray tan.

To me the "difficulty" of the content itself is not the core issue. I personally can do the content at a competent DPS contribution level. The real difficulty of the content is contending with people like you who hold these hateful beliefs about raiding. Your mentality is just baked into the current design at this point. You can't get away from it, period. You can't escape it with guild groups, you can't escape it with silently pugging "chill groups", or any other lifehack. The discussion for me is about how to get away from elitists and otherwise horrible people who have that skill forward and efficiency forward mental tick. It can't be done without scaling difficulty, and to me that is proven by fractals. Up to T3 fractal is a really good experience and you barely ever run into people like you. Once you go into T4, even if you list "chill group", you get a revolving door of clones of you having a raging fit about things. With raids, we're stuck with that one difficulty. Your contention is anyone who can't hang with you should simply not have access to the content. My contention is that is extremely harmful to the game and is completely arbitrary.

There was a guy in gw2 facebook who made an guild for ppl that arw new to raids and wants to play off meta builds. Sorry i cannot give more details as my memory is a bit pepega. It's just not what I am talking about at all. There are fundamental problems with the raiding experience that can not be solved with the "just do X thing and it is fine". It is not helpful in any way to say go scour Facebook if you want to wear soldier armor in raid. That's not how I play anyway, and is not the issue that prevents me from enjoying raids. It's the day in day out 24/7/365 oppression of raiding culture that is the problem. I don't want to play with people who adhere to the stupidity that is going on in raid LFG. The main reason it exists in the state that it does is because if you don't have the correct builds in the current base line raid difficulty, you just are not going to get anywhere with it. Those "chill groups" of "like minded players" are a big frustrating mess pretty much every time. That horrible experience mostly doesn't exist because you can sit and watch raid LFG for a week and not see a non-elitist group listed, because people try that once and then uninstall the game. If you don't mesh well with the efficiency culture that the current raids are exclusively catered to, you have three options: buy them from some RMTer, ignore them entirely, or grit your teeth and fake your way to whatever thing you need out of it and then ignore them entirely. Where is the healthy enjoyable long game in there? It just is not how it should be. The only public facing raid LFG channel with any activity is 95% RMTers farming their gold back and 5% strings of build acronyms. This is not a hard thing to solve, but all these raid discussions ever are are people demanding useless symptom whack-a-mole for a disease with a trivial cure.

It's the same circular argument for 5 years. I say my opinion, and 30 raiders hand wave it with the specific things I said don't work for me as hand waves. It's not just as simple as don't join hardcore groups or make your own casual group. Virtually every group requires specific builds, so joining "like minded" groups isn't a good option. The content very much isn't tuned for "chill groups" so listing also isn't a good option. If it even fills in a reasonable time frame, you're still just looking at endless wipe misery and rage quits. A good 90% of GW2 players are stuck in this blind spot that the raiders can't see. There's so many little things that the raiding community sees as routine that very much are not, and they feel that criticism of raiding is only at the smaller subset of things that they see as challenging. No one is asking you to change your perspective, I just want other perspectives to be considered. The game would be a lot better for it. You're not seeing the bigger picture of why it doesn't work for so many people. Anything you can say about why I am wrong and raids are fine I've tried to make it work, and 20 more things you haven't thought of on top of it. The solution I want is to sequester the current raiding culture away in it's own LFG section like the vile hive of 15 acronym party names and rage fueled GAMERS that run them that is T4 fractals, and give us people who don't like engaging with that access to the content after 5 years waiting. You're not going to sway me from wanting that.

From your perspective this is true. This is not everyone's perspective. If I try to lead a raid we can't even get to a second phase because of getting instantly crushed with incomprehensible damage and getting no damage on boss. It's just endless misery and no progress and constant rage quits. If I join a raid it's nonstop getting screamed at about this weapon or that trait and "kill yourself you insert slur here" for joining a raid without knowing this or that. AKA more endless misery. I don't even run objectively bad builds, I have well above average HPS and DPS by arcdps's measure. It's more a problem of the mentality that the fixed raid difficulty produces, not that I can't play GW2 good. I would much rather play a mode that can be cleared by a wide variety of compositions and skill levels than listen to this meta arguing day in and day out. I just wish there was a way to play them without all this nonsense. The people who think they are too hard, the people who think they are correct, and the people who think they are too easy are all forced into the same instances and that breeds these ceaseless arguments and limitless toxicity and hate. There's just no good reason for it and it has eroded the quality of the game severely. Well about the incomprehensible damage, check combat log to see what killed you after the fight. ( try to spot what do what and step out of bad stuff)Learn to not stand in front of boss helps.If you join someone going for a clear without knowing anything ofcourse they will chew you out.There is a way find like minded people and start learning them, just dont expect to just go in wack the boss a few times and collect loot, that is what open world is for.I understand that there is plenty of people who want to play the raids this way. That's fine, you deserve to have the raiding you want to have. You've had it for 5 years. What I want is the slightest consideration for those of us who have been left behind for all the reasons in your blind spot. You can't fix my issues with raiding by saying "just do X Y and Z thing and it's fine". It's something necessary to say, because even though I've said it on this same page already, every reply directed at me is just "do X Y and Z thing and it's fine". It does not work for me, I am not new to this. Discussing raiding is just yelling into a void, but I feel so strongly about it that I feel compelled to keep needling at it. I am not posting complaining about X raid lead was mad about Y thing. I'm not complaining about one individual mechanic that is too hard. That is just a natural part of the level of difficulty associated with the one raid difficulty we have. If you have a raid difficulty that is geared towards coordinated groups using optimized builds, the culture of people zealously devoted to coordination and optimization will dominate it. This is just an inescapable truth that we have to deal with and should be considered in the game design. I want to farm the content without having to associate with these vicious hateful impatient people who dominate raiding. I can go in t3 fractal 10 hours a day and not encounter a single angry salty person. I have still to this day after 5 years never gone in a raid instance that wasn't just pure hell from the interactions with "raiders". I want a dang easy mode.

From your perspective this is true. This is not everyone's perspective. If I try to lead a raid we can't even get to a second phase because of getting instantly crushed with incomprehensible damage and getting no damage on boss. It's just endless misery and no progress and constant rage quits. If I join a raid it's nonstop getting screamed at about this weapon or that trait and "kill yourself you insert slur here" for joining a raid without knowing this or that. AKA more endless misery. I don't even run objectively bad builds, I have well above average HPS and DPS by arcdps's measure. It's more a problem of the mentality that the fixed raid difficulty produces, not that I can't play GW2 good. I would much rather play a mode that can be cleared by a wide variety of compositions and skill levels than listen to this meta arguing day in and day out. I just wish there was a way to play them without all this nonsense. The people who think they are too hard, the people who think they are correct, and the people who think they are too easy are all forced into the same instances and that breeds these ceaseless arguments and limitless toxicity and hate. There's just no good reason for it and it has eroded the quality of the game severely.

The problems are in the one size fits all raid design. Not everyone wants to engage with the game in the same way. The people who want crushing miserable instant death mechanics and bleeding edge DPS checks deserve to have them. That is what Anet's raid design has leaned towards for years. But, they also have a lot of concessions sprinkled in there to shut those of us up who desperately want a more casual raiding experience. Those concessions suck in the context of a difficulty forward progression raiding system. Since we only have one difficulty, no one can be happy and no one can enjoy the content to it's fullest. The way raiding is right now makes me really angry. It has kept me from enjoying GW2 since HoT. I love the game and it means a lot to me, but to me there's this hideous stain on it that just will not come out. Raids are just way too hard for me and there's so much content locked out of reach. I would really like to just play it without being saddled with all this garbage of builds off the website and 25 acronyms that mean something slightly different to every raid leader. Split raids into 3 difficulties, a normal version that is tuned for accessibility, a legendary version that is the current version, and a nightmare version to challenge people unhappy with the concessions in the current version. Change the achievements that need to be gatekept away from casuals for whatever reason to be for legendary or higher, and add some weekly or daily motivators to get people checking out the introductory raid mode. You can shout me down and pick my opinion apart all day if that makes you happy, but I don't have the same perspective as you and I am not trying to invalidate your perspective. I am simply trying to express my perspective and what has soured GW2 for me the worst for the longest. You explaining to me how raiding is easy and I just need to do X Y and Z to enjoy it isn't going to change my perspective.

Raid launch sucked the life out of GW2 for me. I really tried with the first raid, we bashed our heads into it and just bounced off. Almost daily three hours of wipes getting nowhere, no one having any fun, no one getting anything out of it but pure misery. Could not get anywhere with it, only maybe 1% of any of my 5 guilds were precision/twitch skilled meta build players, and even if you got all them together it was still just endless misery of dying over and over and over and over to cheap one shots and way too short enrages. So quite rapidly all my friends, all my family, and all my guilds just evaporated from the game. This also correlated with a heavy drop off in game population as a whole. WvW died, PvP queues died, map meta groups disappeared, the entire game died. The current raid design is what hurt Anet as a company above all. It was the worst decision they ever made and we're still here all these years later begging them to fix it. It doesn't matter if you think the raids are hard or easy, it means absolutely nothing to anyone but you. The raids should be accessible to the majority of players in some way in a game like this, especially with our limited content development. If they had launched raids with the same mentality that they launched fractals, GW2 may well have never suffered the mass die off of population. I just can't understand why it is still so broken today. No one can use the raids at all, I don't know a single person who has cleared a raid in years, and I associate with a huge amount of people in this game. They just serve no purpose in this state. In August my main WvW guild tried the first raid and it was so horrible and miserable that they argued about it for weeks. You can't get away from how disgusting they are. And the worst part about it all is, there is so much there for us. It's so close but totally unreachable. I would give anything to have access to these instances as fun farmable pug-able areas with enticing rewards. They could be populated 24/7 drawing people into the game with 1 day of work. That would also familiarize people with them and push more people upward through the ranks into the crushing miserable 1 shot and enrage timer sweaty meta garbage that the 42 people still playing raids love.

In terms of raids and strikes, yes, ANet missed out on this. In terms of Fractals? No. If you want CM and T4 rewards ,you have to play well. It's kind of just how fractals are designed. Easy gives paltry rewards, but will be done faster if you're team is good and the lower levels are lighter on the mechanics and rarely punish mistakes. Fractals get more complicated as the scales go up, adding instabilities and new mechanics while making failing old ones actually lethal. I'd say ANet needs to adopt that sort of thing for all their instanced content sooner rather than later. Don't think Anet is ever going to consider improving it. Anet has been long term stubborn on this. They had an esports type vision for raids, they thought raids would rocket them to the top of the industry or something. The go-to play it your way MMO just needed content development to move towards catastrophically crushing nearly impossible bosses that needed the sweatiest minmaxed meta builds to clear. In reality they introduced unprecedented scale hideous elitist toxicity to the community and caused a mass exodus from the game, over five years ago. It doesn't take five years to shift strategy on balance issues. Raids could be universally beloved and very active content with one week of work by a new hire, if that. If Anet wanted it fixed it would have been a very long time ago. There's a reason they make us suffer still all these years later. I started GW2 to get away from WoW raiding. Pre-raid GW2 was the best game I ever played. When raids came out and it became very clear they were going to be exclusively mythic-like difficulty my entire love for GW2 and Anet as a company evaporated. I quit for over 4 years and came back recently, and the very first thing I read in guild chat is drama about 3 hours of wipes on VG. Seriously, how Fing long is long enough? When can people other than the top 0.1% and RMTers see this ancient raid content? It's just spiteful at this point.

It's an unavoidable problem. Anet decided that there's one difficulty for all and if you don't like it you can uninstall or pay RMT scammers to do it for you at your own risk. The solution is scaling difficulty for all content so the 99.9% of people who are currently excluded from end game content can again play the game in a reasonable way, but the sweaty turds who spam git gud in every discussion about the crushing difficulty spikes of GW2 are massively over-represented in feedback so that will never happen.