DoomNexus.5324

I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion but look.. I'm tired of the clownfiesta ranked has become (quite some time ago) and just want to get into some chill matches of Stronghold or unranked Conquest and get my loot. All the stuff will still be time gated to the season (which I think is the main point?) and I don't really see a good point for further gating it behind ranked-only. As a bonus for the competitive ranked players: all the casuals who are only there for loot can simply queue unranked and don't bother you laddering anymore.

I don't really play Ranked anymore and don't care about it as Anet themselves didn't care for the game mode for at least 8 years, so I want to make this short. In the recent post introducing the Push mode I couldn't help but notice there was a satement saying: As a Stronghold-enjoyer I have personally never felt the queues to be overwhelmingly long (usually a tiny bit longer than Conquest but not by much) nor was the match quality noticably worse than Conquest (ranked or unranked). So if only 10% of matches (not even all, just Unranked mind you) can sustain an entire pvp mode, I am 100% convinced now more than ever that "splitting the queues" has absolutely 0 substance for being a valid argument against additional modes or permanent 2v2/3v3 queues and all the other great proposals the community has made over the years that were quickly slammed down by simply stating "the population can't handle that".

Oh no... I was hyped about hearing getting a new pvp mode but escort - or "push" - modes are boring af. Really disappointed now ngl. Why not remake GW1 pvp modes like fort aspenwood or at least make 2v2/3v3 selectable for unranked and/or make them regular ATs. There are soooo many low to medium effort options yet you decide to copy-paste the least fun pvp mode from FF14 (that probably takes several years to release - if we even ever get it because GW2 will probably go into maintenance when GW3 comes out) instead of at least recycling your own IPs content (GW1 modes). I really don't get it...

Money. That's why it was announced by a c-suite guy of NCSoft and not from someone in ArenaNet. It's been revealed during an earnings call where shareholders expressed concerns about future revenues. Soo, yea. GW3 will most likely be a cash cow to generate more returns for investors. At least I'm not looking forward to GW3 as it will probably just be everything wrong with "modern" GW2 on steroids.. edgy characters, horrible story writing, no competitive content, .. and since it's supposed to generate a lot of revenue I'd bet my kitten that NCSoft won't allow any experimental stuff like GW1 or GW2 had. So you'll likely get some crunched/rushed, cookiecutter live service garbage with heavy focus on DEI to get that sweet sweet ESG money. At least I'm not spending any money anymore on GW2 apart from expansions (and only on my main account) because of this, so no additional gems/upgrades anymore. My only hope is that gw3 will turn out to be a mobile game or some other kitten and gw2 will still get support with expacs similar to now. However, considering Anet is a rather small game studio I highly doubt it and I'd expect gw3 to put gw2 into maintenance mode like gw2 did with gw1.

As per usual I don't like the story and everything associated with it. Cringe dialogues, annoying characters, lame story telling, no pacing, .. GW2 never stood out with particularly great story (although the lore has always been pretty cool) but dropped off even further in this regard ever since even back after HoT and has been on a steady decline since then. @edit: I really like the lore and the idea behind the story is also pretty cool but the execution and missions are a rather subpar experience in my opinion. In base game we at least had some good characters like Tybalt for comedic relief but now everything always has to be grandiose and "ahh look at me I'm the commander/wayfinder, we don't know each other but have to band together and fight the evil!". 90% of the story is just listening to boring/bad, unskippable dialogues. Maybe a big part of it is also because I really don't like the voice acting. Biggest issue I had with Aurene too. Idk, really looking forward to finishing all the missions, thank god the story is done in only a few hours and isn't really replayable content anyway 🙏 But at least everything else is pretty cool, as usual 👌 The world is beautiful and I actually like the mobs this time. The blighted beasts/titans are basically an improved version of Kryptis in my opinion (or kind of similar to the GW1 destroyers in a sense). Personally, not the biggest fan of the Kodan architecture but it does fit the race and is believable, could've been way worse too. I just hope there will be other homestead house skins in the future because the rest of the area looks awesome. Haven't really played with the spear yet but I think it's a really good way to introduce new weapon skills this way. Would be pretty cool if the next expansion would introduce a dual-class system again, where you could choose weapon/utility skills from other classes (without traits, so the primary class still has an advantage in this regard).

Probably a bug but I had to relog after unlocking the mastery, otherwise dragging it onto a regular weapon slot showed red and it wouldn't equip.

Imagine a dojo tells newcomers they'll get 3h of training and afterwards they can only do martial arts in tournaments where all weight classes and skill levels can enter.

Anet doesn't want pvp engagement tho. It's a breadcrumb so the remaining 5% of pvp players left in the game don't lose hope in Anet until GW3 drops.

Wait, there are still people who have hopes for pvp? Wake up, GW2-Anet doesn't give a kitten, stop it, save your time, money and nerves. They couldn't be bothered 8 years ago and they will certainly not start to care with GW3 in the pipeline.

I agree on how it turned out but I'd argue that this is not because we got mounts but because Anet tries to accomodate for them and imo even overshoots the target. I'd prefer the old map style where you can get around on foot just fine and mounts only speed up getting around or let you get to hard to reach places easier. That's why people wanted mounts in the first place. They are only fun if they make travelling easier but if the maps are designed accordingly it cancels out the advantage they bring - might as well just not have mounts and keep the old map style. And as I said, imo Anet overdoes it. Even with a fully trained skyscale navigating around in soto is way worse than being on foot in basically every old map.

Yea. But my main point was that imo even with a fully trained skyscale the maps are just kitten to traverse. Everything is now juuuuust tall enough that you can't straight up fly up but have to rest/reset at some point. I don't even want to get into navigating those maps without fully trained mounts, let alone on foot.

I'd still prefer Anet to invest less into voice acting the entire game in 25 different languages and instead focus more on good replayable content.. Maybe I'm alone here idk but I think the quality of the story and dialogues has dropped off significantly essentially after the base game. HoT was ok imo and mainly stood out with its great metas, which are actively played to this day (only downside were the abysmal maps) and gliding, which was a very welcome feature and the introduction of the horizontal progression. But with PoF and LS4 started the downfall, stalled a bit with EoD, which was... okay-ish but really picked up speed again with SotO. In general Amnytas is a really cool map but just essentially copy-pasting the bastions 6 times (which are themselves copy-paste of the awful-to-navigate wizard's tower) is pretty meh.. Initially I thought Nayos is pretty cool but the more I've been playing on that map the more I dislike it. What I really hate about the newer GW2 maps is also that the team seemingly tries to adjust for mounts, which in theory is pretty good but I think it's pretty badly executed since you are just making the maps more difficult to navigate and considering the Skyscale has such a limited height and resetting while flying is pretty cumbersome makes everything put together just a more kitten and annoying version of just running around on foot in older maps. Why even have a dragon if I have to cling on a wall and reset my endurance several times to get up normal walls in the new maps? Doesn't make sense to me.. Idk, to me most of the fun of having mounts was because it felt better to get around. And now you basically have to have a fully trained dragon just to get around semi-unhindered.

Imo GW2 should just in general have way more pvp modes - why not just make 2v2 and 3v3 permanent as an unranked queue and give unranked season rewards as well? Maybe directly get progress for season rewards (at a lower pace maybe?) or copy-paste the chests without ranked specific drops such as the ascended shards of glory if Anet really wants to keep the "good" stuff locked behind ranked. And FINALLY make GvG its own game mode... Poor guilds who have to set up their own fights in WvW.. Could be a generic 20v20 or 50v50 or whatever imo where you can sign up with your zerg, then also non-guilds can join or smaller guilds can team up with randoms to make fights slightly more even. Idgaf about longer queue times due to the split queue at all either. The game mode is dead so queue times are not great anyway and even if the queue pops quickly it's a kitten match because the mm couldn't even form proper teams.. And Stronghold also exists and is played, we already have a working split queue so this argument was non-sense from the very beginning.

And it still annoys me because that's not at all how Glicko-2 (the rating system GW2 is supposed to be based on) handles volatility lol. It should track the consistency of an individual player over several matches and adjust rating changes based on their volatility. So a more consistent player will have more meaningful rating changes (aka volatility is low, therefore the gains and losses will be higher) while a more volatile player isn't punished as hard when they are having a bad day (with the draw down of not being rewarded as much on a good day). But for this to work Anet would need a system that evaluates a player's performance and they won't implement that (even tho other complex team games like CS2 can, so it's not impossible). So, I understand why they opted for this kitten volatility system but think it ultimately holds back the game mode at lot actually. I think the above is also one of the reasons for this. If you win the first few matches it should not be uncommon to immediately jump several skill divisions, so when you are actually g1 and win 3 matches in a row (even just because an opponent is afk/throws) then you may end up in g3 or even p1. Anet implemented volatility like this to let players get to their appropriate skill class in less matches, but imo with the coin flip of a matchmaker and low population it just gets chaotic af and it makes the placement phase way more chaotic.

They just need to bring back the pvp modes in GW1 ngl. And finally introduce GvG as an actual game mode with a reward track and stuff.