What was the straw that broke your camel's back for GW2

[K THEN.5162]

I used to love GW2, and especially WvW. With the wonderful guild I was in and the equally wonderful people I played with, WvW was the dream PvP playground for me where you could pretty much do anything you wanted and not feel like the game punished you for playing that way.

 

But that all changed in spring 2019. For reference, here is a gw2 efficiency graph of my monthly playtime since I started in 2016 (totaling about 3000 hours). See the abrupt drop-off in activity at around the end of April 2019. That was when ANET killed the WvW experience for me in order to sell $25 mount packs. I am of course referring to the warclaw, where once it was released, the mount soured the WvW experience with bugs (permanent mount glitch), exploits (dashing into bay), ridiculous mechanics (mounted enemies preventing capture with no reliable way to dismount), and broken stats (3 dodges, 10k hp, etc.) for MONTHS. Another reason that pissed me off about the warclaw's release is I had just introduced a few friends who didn't own any expansions to the game mode. Just as they started sinking their roots into WvW and taking a liking to it, in one quick March patch, the game treated them like less than dolyaks as they were left behind by the friendly mounted zergs to be ganked mercilessly by the other servers. Needless to say, they stopped their GW2 experience right then and there, and I could not be optimistic about the game mode no longer. As I started to resent the current state of WvW, I could not overlook other glaring issues with the game mode such as the severe lack of balance patches and the incredibly disconnected decisions ANET made when those patches did occur. Although in the past 3 years, I've humored the idea that somethings could have possibly improved due to the passage of time, these returns don't last long as I soon find out that the game mode is basically in the same state as I left it years ago. So, in summary, the terrible release of the warclaw pushed me away from spending time and money into gw2, destroyed my confidence in ANET as a company, and gave me little faith that balance and the WvW experience would ever improve.

 

So with my tragic backstory out of the way, for those who quit playing the game or stopped treating it as your main game, what was the reason that pushed you away from GW2?

 

TLDR: Warclaw bad! Me quit GW2.

Also LMFAO, when did ANET remove the feature to add photos to your posts? I guess that's consistent with ANET's style, rendering features from their game unusable and not fixing them for years.

[Salt Mode.3780]

Truth be told the thing that broke WvW was the ridiculous infamous kitten February patch. 

[Littlekenny.4196]

Stability patch 16/03/15 is where I stopped enjoying the game as much and then I quit from the power creep of rev after HoT release where hammer 2 did more damage than an entire zerg pre HoT. I kept coming back to see if the game got better and hated it every time I tried it until the end of April 2021 after the February patch where it felt good enough to play again.

I'm still playing now and didn't expect to still be playing after EoD.

As a note, I completely changed class and role since I used to play.

[Salt Mode.3780]

yea because doing no dmg is significantly better in this boonball zergfest meta lol 

[Xenesis.6389]

Well...

I've had friends leave because of some of the broken balance/mechanics for some of the classes. I've had friends leave when they nerfed mirage to the ground with the dodge nerf. Bad balancing, especially broken op stuff left on specs for months or even years is probably a main factor for people leaving around me.

I'm still playing, although yes on much reduced hours as well, on 2 specs, but I won't bother roaming anymore. The games ppt system got boring for me years ago so it's whatever, I have enough ranks that I get my rewards at a decent rate, the mount is whatever gets me from a to b like usual. Ultimately I'll leave when I get bored of my last 2 specs and nothing else to try (EoD is lmao bad).

 

They removed images from the forums back when they updated it last year.

 

 

 

[Stand The Wall.6987]

when i realized that its impossible to take a defended keep without a zerg and 75% of the complaints in this forum are people crying that defense is too weak. the biggest problem with this game mode imo has always been how objectives are designed. it seems like there is this tiny window where an attacking group is more or less balanced with the defending group, anything bigger or smaller just steamrolls. bad design. second reason i stopped playing so much is that smaller groups don't have the tools to fight bigger ones, and no i don't mean in objectives i mean in open field. trying to balance population makes less sense then balancing engagements, and is pretty hollow for the inevitable outcome of smaller groups being completely overpowered which is most of the wvw population.

[Junkpile.7439]

Well when they added pips and ruined EotM. No motivation play 6-8 hours/day without high quality game mode/map like EotM.

Edited March 17, 2022 by Junkpile.7439

[subversiontwo.7501]

I wouldn't say that there was any one incident that broke the straw. Instead, I think as with anyone who clings to a straw my relationship with the game goes in waves of hoping, coping and adjusting. For example, I don't threaten to quit or boycott anything and beyond speaking on topics I leave people's relationships to the game, each their own. I can however say that I primarily see paying for things in the game as a mean to support the company behind and I adjust that with happiness, expectation, studio movement and results.

As a result I can point to a number of incidents over the years that have affected my relationship to the game:

The first was EotM in 2014. It should be noted that in the two years leading up to EotM, WvW had already accrued an image of being the forgotten game mode, treated bad despite its potential. EotM also confirmed that for many early players. I've mentioned before that my first guild more or less quit over it. It should also be noted that the problems we have today and we see them "working on" today are the same problems today as they were back then. EotM was the first confirmation of them having abandoned the mode and that it had resulted in losing touch with it.

It may seem odd to say when the mode was finally given something. This is also still seen in the rumblings that go on when people think WvW players are hard to please, do not want new maps or just want servers. The truth is closer to that after two years of neglect we were shown (and given) what can essentially be seen as a tech demo that was far from finished and showed little to no direction in where they were going with the mode, how they understood their own mode and so forth. The color-system has its technical possibilities, but needless to say, it wasn't ready to replace a full live system of servers. It had tech to do things with but no design to do things with it. It had a map but no design to do with things with. People has errenously taken that as the players not wanting to change maps or servers, when it is rather a question of wanting specific problems fixed and changes that are conducive to what WvW is and how it plays. You can only get that with resources who want to work on MMO and world-PvP/battleground projects.

I've spent enough space on this example now to not go into detail on anything else, but clearly, similar issues have repeated themselves with promises of keeping the original world-restructuring engineer team together and iterating on EotM, the 2016 AMA scrapping announcements, when we saw the "temporary relinking system" hurried out in its place become permanent, when we saw the state of World Restructuring at its 2018 announcement (basically no change for two years) or the state of it in comments since (basically no change for two years, again, despite calling it a priority etc.). That's just the same thing dragging on.

It is also related in when we saw the Warclaw, the EotM arena and how easy it reportedly was to create but seemingly difficult to iterate on, the GH, balancing and skill splits, or what we can surmise of the inner workings going on at the company in terms of never providing resources but always taking them (having multiple raid teams, having multiple story teams and no end of narrative design resources, moving everything else into a single competetive team, moving Tyler to PvE, moving McKenna to other games, moving Cal and BenP to EoD stuff and announcing balancing frozen in the meantime etc.).

The list of broken promises and taking without giving is long and ongoing. We have younger players here on the forums being mad at whoever is in charge of WvW without understanding that there is no one in charge of WvW, there is no WvW team and there are no resources given beyond keeping some projects running on/off that they can't be seen pulling out of again, for a third or fourth time. At the end of the day, money walks, they need to allocate resources to succeed (preferrably be transparent about it) and keep them there. Anything else (cornerstone mode or not) is just a facade and any other issues is just a result of that.

I don't envy Anet trying to solve this and balance their resources, but they made their bed when they hired like idiots and set the precedent by overstaffing far more volatile content types and understaffing what they took for granted. At the end of the day, a car can have a nice body, color, interior design and sound system but if it drives poorly it fails as a car. It can have forward drive, backwheel drive or four-wheel drive, making all wheels more or less equally important, but if you let a wheel or two completely fall off it does not drive. I think that analogy says quite alot about Anet the studio and GW2 the game.

Edited March 17, 2022 by subversiontwo.7501

[Shroud.2307]

Honestly, my relationship with GW2 is just too personal to explain on the forum.

To put it as simply as I can, I am not much of a gamer, yet have nearly 20k hours in this game. I used to have a very active social life and I was rarely at home, so games were never my thing. Through a series of coincidences, I was both introduced to this game by a friend and recommended it through Youtube. 
I picked it up, it filled a void, and some things haven't changed in the 8 years I've been playing.

If I were still a active and social person, I would have stopped playing a long time ago.

There are so many things that make me want to quit, but not enough things for me to do instead. So I keep playing despite my gripes because I enjoy talking to and gaming with the people I consider friends in GW2. 
I still love the game and very much love the people in it, but it is entirely circumstantial that I keep playing at all.

The list would be a mile long if I wrote of every last straw there has been. But because I prefer to be optimistic, I'll say this instead - there has never been a change significant enough to stop me from having fun. I enjoy playing regardless of what has happened, and I'm still passionate about the class(es) I love to play after many thousands of hours.

                                                                                                                                                                         

Right now is the closest I've been to quitting, but it's because WvW has been low energy since shortly before EoD. I've felt a very significant shift in activity that I thought would change after everyone had fun with the new PvE stuff. I figured it'd be a week or two and WvW would go back to "normal", but it hasn't felt that way at all. It has felt more like long time players have left for good and new players are already losing interest.
It has been boring lately, and I don't bore easily.

Supposedly there will be some big changes come the summer, but with ANet's constant failure to deliver on Alliances and EoD being completely void of content for WvW, I think it truly was the last straw for a lot of people. At some point the copium just runs out, you know.

Edited March 17, 2022 by Shroud.2307

[ArchonWing.9480]

No last straws, but the closest was when PoF came out and I was like ugh at that set of elite specs. PoF itself seemed super lame and still does to this very day to me. The result was that I didn't buy the expansion and rarely played the game except to sometimes socialize with people.

But Firebrand was the main culprit. I'm a guardian main (about 4900  out of 11000 hours) and the class was a pretty good balance of support and offense, so the idea of a boonbot/dedicated support was pretty gross, and I despised the idea of full on support ever since HoT came along. And I thought with the combination of Scourge that it would ruin the game. It kinda did. I mean yes, we did have minstrel support by that point, but I very much preferred the hybrid nature of zerg going builds.  PvT seemed safe already, but now all minstrels. Very exciting.

 

It was like PoF ignored all the advancement of HoT and doubled down on the excesses.

Of course, if I didn't get Firebrand, I wouldn't be accepted into raids, so I switched to Rev for a while. For some reason I never learned how to play it but hey I can spam 2.

This lasted until about 2019 when some friends got more active. I did get PoF, and good I did since mounts came and meh. They could have done better with that.

As a result, I really dreaded expansions, since HoT had killed WvW with the first group of people I did it with with, and PoF killed a lot of interest for me. EoD has proven harmless, but that's more because it didn't do anything and there was no way they could replace Firebrand with anything else.

Funny enough, around 2018 or so, I decided I really didn't care about Gw2 anymore, and decided, meh, I'll just ecto gamble away everything until I got the ecto gambling portal.  I did get the portal at the loss of a few hundred gold (Losing badly in the last 10 really sucked), but hey, I'm still here I guess.

Actually maybe I could just have written this:

  

1 hour ago, Shroud.2307 said:

If I were still a active and social person, I would have stopped playing a long time ago.

But you folks know I have to be long winded about everything.

Edited March 17, 2022 by ArchonWing.9480

[hobotnicax.7918]

I stopped playing about 6 months ago. I can't really say it was one thing in particular, but it sure was a lot of "little" things over the years. The general lack of care for WvW from the devs has been the main gripe, probably since 2014/2015.

But if I'd pinpoint what really did it for me was:

- Boonball bs

- Too much stealth in the game

- Condi bunker builds and condi spam in general

- Winning became pointless

- Projectile hate making a lot of builds useless in zergs

[kamikharzeeh.8016]

if u mean by "winning" ppt score.. it probably can be applied since 2014, when they stopped tournaments actually giving things for it. obviously "winning" the ppt race means nothing. the server score banks who also work into the linking algorithm are just a very scuffed old mechanic who make zero sense since... yeah, a lot of years.

 

they give some players the illusion of "winning" by only going for a high score there. then those players get sad and angry when 70% of the population doesn't care and has zero interesting in playing for this pointless point per tick (ppt) mechanic

 

and well idk. boons are there to be removed, then people evaporate astonishingly fast. always fun to watch this. like watch any guardian, ranger or rev, if they miss a spinal shivers... goes like bam dead. and that's quite deserved, as this crazy high amount of boons those classes carry - especially on small scale where not every class and build can do that - are a bit unfair in a cloudfight

 

.. projectile block are very important though. range damage is far too safe and easy to apply. ranger has absurd range numbers and angles from where it can spam it's stuff.  also ele autos hit superhard.

 

defending is yet far too easy, if numbers hide behind a lot of siege. siege weapon dmg against players (treb cata) is crazy overpowered.

[SloRules.3560]

Pretty sure it was December 2018, when mesmer was already overnerfed and guild leader left for another game.

Since than mesmer was nerfed even more, at one point even taking away illusionary persona, but you know leaving firebrand and scourge there...

Well i got back for 2 or 3 draft GvG turneys and with that 2ish months of raiding with different guilds, which brings us to now, where i haven't played since October?  Well i did get to cantha and stopped after the tutorial area.

Overall meta is not moving anywhere (at least until june patch), which is a big failure of EoD imo.

[joneirikb.7506]

Basically: 23.06.2015

It just took me a while to understand that that was what did it. I tried to hold on and engage myself for near 2 years after HoT release, but basically played less and less WvW, and PvE wasn't enough to keep me going either, despite loving the HoT maps.

Eventually 2017 right before PoF I just stopped trying to log in daily and force myself through the motions. Since then I've logged in every 1/2 months, played a little here and there. But never reliably.

I really miss pre-hot 😞 And yeah, I end up dreading expansions 😛 (I was almost tempted to start playing again with the 25.02.2020 patch)
 

[TheGrimm.5624]

3 hours ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

"Understanding is a three edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth." - J. Michael Straczynski

 

Completely OT, did you see he is working on reboot, excited and scared at the same time I admit.

[Zikory.6871]

PoFs launch. Firebrand, Scourge, Spellbreaker pigeonholed group composition because they were designed to counter the HoT meta. They never actually fixed anything. 

[TheGrimm.5624]

Haven't broken yet but am allowing for distractions so playing less as we wait for changes. Have found the best way to let things progress is to take some time off and enjoy other things. One thing that has been mentioned before is its ok to take mechanics that players like from other games and ponder would they fit here and be well received. Seeing some of these blends elsewhere, sometimes shamelessly and it has been cool to see different game styles mesh and how they change up the combat mechanics.  

[ilMasa.2546]

It's not a last "straw" ,for me it's more like the chinese water torture aka the dripping machine: 

- every time they make changes for pve which then affect the WvW is a new drop
- every time they rework a class for RAIDs (the kittening function gyro/detection pulse changes) and then i have to play that in WvW is a new drop
-  they add gliders and mounts new drop
- they then nerfs warclaw speed new drop

And so on... so WvW developement/care is actually becoming a real torture. 

[Mixes.7164]

A month ago when elden ring came out. I play a game with devs that care and a community that's active with less whiners than gw2. Having great fun playing other games

[Claymore.1690]

Desert BL and warclaw

Edited March 29, 2022 by Claymore.1690

[Odin.6487]

making core classes 2nd tier to expac classes. things should be balanced but as it stands most core classes are a kittening joke compared to their expac counterparts. 

[Hotride.2187]

For me its back got broken indirectly. Duel spot has been empty for months (and I don't mean 3-4 players empty, I mean I'm alone there). I can't say what broke GW2s back for all the duelists that are no longer dueling, but for me there is just nothing to do in wvw aside from that.

You rarely encounter good players when roaming, so quality of fights is overall low. Blob fights are pretty braindead too.