Zephire.8049

1) Expansions are how Anet makes money, especially now that they've moved away from the previous Living World model. Given the base game is free, they need to charge money for the expansions. Making them tradable would cut into that revenue and make stealing credit cards more enticing, and there's already an issue of people buying stolen expansion keys to save a few bucks. I'd love to be able to buy expansions via gold but virtual gold doesn't pay developer wages, rent, or server leases. 2) There's leaderboards for races but most people don't care about leaderboards outside of maybe friends or a guild. Content where challenge escalates the further you go isn't bad but leaderboards aren't something the vast majority of players care about. Achievement points also act as a way for players to compete but, again, it's usually between friends or guildmates. 3) If people leave after the first map (around level 20 or so, possibly less) that means they didn't jive with the game. And that's fine. Trying to pair them up with players who have spent money/years playing sounds like that system one game company wanted to do that would pair non-spenders with spenders to guilt the non-spenders into buying stuff. That revelation did not go over well for players and non-players alike. 4) The game was never intended to have open-world PvP and the engine can't even do it because open world PvP how you want it to because it wasn't even a thing in GW1 and GW2 uses a heavily modified version of the GW1 engine. People have been asking for it and/or duels for a decade and the answer is always no because the game cannot do it and open world PvP is one of those things people think they want until they do it. Even MMOs that cater to that playerbase quickly run out of players and GW2 very much does not cater to that playerbase and never has. 5) No idea what this has to do with new players but given Anet can't even manage 5v5 or WvW, I don't see them handling 20v20 any better.

I did the SW legendaries somewhere between HoT and PoF and even then it was "camp the fort of the one you need" because it wasn't designed so people could cross half the map and still tag them for credit, especially before mounts. They also aren't the only things around so if they're given too much HP, that means fewer people doing other events for a longer period of time. Events that can and do fail if people don't do them and cost everyone on the map time if that happens. Once you get the masteries, there's not even much of a point to them, either—a bit of karma and a noxious seed pouch are not things that people get excited about. Bloodstone beasts are also RNG (granted you have some control over it to a degree) and have stuff tied to them while also having more HP and moves than the SW legendaries but get skipped a lot of the time just because they take too long and give too little once you've done the achievement. There's also the bandit champions and executioner which are more in line with what people want from open world champs/legendaries but aren't typically done outside of the achievement or to do X events on a map simply because they take too long and give too little loot to be worth it. Better something die "too fast" but be done regularly than ignored and rarely done, in my opinion. And agreed about SB. I used to set a timer for it when doing map comp since it made that heart faster (also the monastery heart) and easier while providing a nice mental break. Now it's easier and faster to not do it since it takes ages to do and the loot isn't anything to write home about. You could do just enough to do the heart and bounce but, personally, that feels bad, especially if you see new players trying to do it, so I just don't bother anymore.

I wouldn't trust the current team to do that. They "modernized" the three starter world bosses in the past year or so—Fire Elemental, Shadow Behemoth, Svanir Shaman—and now they're HP sponges that take ages to kill even when there's 50+ level 80s there who are trying to kill it ASAP. I don't know how they're supposed to be fun or engaging for new players, honestly.

The small 2021 drop was because that's when the guy who built the MC buy order wall was banned so prices could finally drop. The 2022 drop coincides with when they made MC available via strikes and raid vendors and change their availability from fractals to be from Nightmare, Shattered, and Sunqua to be from a vendor. But I think it's concerning that the current prices are about on par with the price they were when a guy was intentionally manipulating MC prices. Supply and demand have decoupled and it's taken only a year to reach their historical price height when originally that took 5 years (8 if you count the first three years when it was practically a flat line).

They rarely listen to feedback and only when it suits them. There were over 50 pages of feedback for the June 2023 balance patch, not including all the numerous individual threads on here or feedback on other websites, and they listened to maybe one thing while going ahead with everything else then acted surprised when some of the changes the feedback said were going to be terrible were... terrible. It should also be noted the DE kneel change, depending on what specific change you're talking about, happened two balance teams ago. The current balance team which has shown repeatedly they do not listen to feedback even when they directly ask for it.

Servers only matter in WvW. Everywhere else, you're playing with people regardless of server. If you're not seeing many people, you're either on an overflow map, are playing off-peak time for your region (EU or NA), or are on an EoD map. Also don't trust the player status for GW2 (or really any MMO) on the internet unless it's Steam stats for something that is only available through Steam or directly from the developer. There's no other way to get numbers, it's just estimations and guesses by people who can't access the raw data.

I still haven't bought SotO and played <5 hours since July because I can't abide what they're doing now. Pre-orders are bad enough but selling something that comes out piecemeal and delayed enough so that refunds or charge backs are no longer an option is worse and far scummier. There was never any guarantee that SotO's story or content would actually hold up and be on par with Living World seasons, let alone feature-complete expansions—instead of waiting a couple days/weeks to see what the consensus is, it's wait a year or so until it's complete. Maybe it will be like LW4 where it's much better if you can play it in one continuous streak instead of waiting for each segment, but I'm not going to pay for that experience and disagree with the decision to sell it at all on a "Trust Me Bro™" marketing spiel. If they want money, going back to the quality of LW3 and 4 (minus the mess that was individual releases) and charging for the individual episodes would be better that SotO's design. That way it's even cheaper and people can decide whether something is worth it without waiting a year.

That's because it is GW1's engine. Which is why I've always preferred a new engine over just upgrading to DX11. That's decades of technical debt and an engine that was made when single cores were a thing and before DX10 came out, with who knows how much (or little) documentation and "quirks" by people who worked at Arenanet in the early 00s (e.g. the start of putting any and all graphic options in post-processing with the exception of a handful of them). There's only so far it can be upgraded. A new engine would be work but it would allow for further optimization and address the conflicts there are with building a modern MMO on a C-RPG engine from two decades ago. Eventually kicking that can down the road will stop working.

Considering GW2's engine predates the iPhone, which is largely considered the first modern smartphone, by several years, porting it likely isn't easy given the mountain of technical debt they have to deal with. They can't even optimize for modern PC hardware, asking them to port and optimize for a completely different hardware and OS is a big ask. Even getting GW2 on Steam was like pulling teeth, and that was minimal changes compared to this. It's more achievable and faster to stream it from your PC or through a service like GeforceNOW than to wait for native mobile support which, as far as we know, isn't even walking up to the table and we have no idea how long it would take to come to fruition if/when it got there.

Mechanist mace in June or July. The conditions (and barrier?) it applied was changed to a different part of the auto-attack chain with no word in the patch notes. Removing PvP and WvW potions from daily chests that had already been claimed but not opened. Not sure if EoD pets finally making use of a ranger talent got patch notes or not. Removing -coherentui from launch commands resulting in people suddenly not being able to play and not knowing why. And that's just off the top of my head.

I don't think #2 is even a given. There's been times I've crossed into a zone briefly and gotten credit for defending an objective I was never even near while other times I've killed players and siege but gotten zero credit. Nothing like getting credit for defending SMC when all you did was flip one of the sentries and ran off to a camp, or not getting credit for a 10+ minute siege while also having a growing stack of bags and a shiny new daily chest for defeating 3 enemy players.

A big issue with the cake was initially how it would remove your food buff and then couldn't be reapplied while you had the malnourished buff (debuff?). After they fixed that, it's a fine open-world/world boss/chill content feast where you don't need to max stats out. The rock was also an issue (and still is, imo) in that it breaks charr models. Cool concept, bad/rushed execution. The amulet and its infusion were nice, though. It got out-shone by the "free" legendary amulet from the Return To achievements, but the infusion is still nice either for its 20% karma, visual, or both. Not getting a title, at least, that sucks. There's no monetary value to it and honestly it's not that impressive, but it was still nice to get.

The new birthday gift is kind of insulting. You can compare it to the 10th anniversary one on the wiki and it's identical for everything except instead of a title, you get 5 Proof of Legends. No title, generic "Birthday Gift" item. It's not like they had a year to figure out a title at the very least, or they didn't have a template for these rewards plus a title.

Yeah, no. That was (secretly) done last year and it played a part in one of the worst balance patches in 10 years. The balance lead at the time is also to blame, but youtubers/content creators rarely know or care about content they don't do or people who don't play on their level. The last thing the game needs is further balancing around the top 1% of instanced content that the vast majority of the playerbase has no interest in/no ability to do but have their in-game lives dictated it. "Catalysts are a meta-defining class and need to be nerfed" and "I don't know how thief works so I'll just wiki it" anyone? If they cared about feedback, they get plenty on this forum, Reddit, and various Discords. But since they didn't even respond or listen to any of the feedback they explicitly asked for and still have yet to address concerns from 2 months ago, it's probably safe to say they don't care about what players think because they're balancing around something month(s) out and/or think devs know best and can't be biased. Youtubers/content creators will do nothing when that's the company's mentality.

Good point. It's a shame, too, since those initial collections were really good—Chuka's is still one of the highlights of the game for me in 10+ years. But if I had bought HoT and been psyched about Gen 2 legendaries, well, I'd have been upset if it took upwards of 3.5 years and an additional expansion (as you can't access LW4 without buying PoF, and this was before HoT and PoF were bundled) before getting the one I was looking forward to the most.