What do you feel were the harmful changes to the game and player experience?

[itspomf.9523]

Yeah, this is gonna be a negative thread, but I feel the need to vent a bit, having seen something similar on You Know Where.  I'm also curious what other players feel are decisions made by ANet (or NCSoft, in some cases) which have actively proven harmful to the game and the playerbase.

Like the post before mine which inspired this, I'm not asking for what you disagree with or don't like, but what genuinely took something away from the game which once made Tyria and Guild Wars 2 feel truly unique in a land of samey MMOs.  To that end, I'll go first.

The Big One:  New Player Experience, or "Someone Thought the Game Was Too Complicated"

This one still upsets me to this day, as someone who leveled a handful of characters to 80 the old-fashioned way.  But more than the detrimental effect to the story, it took away tons of flavor for the world.   More than the loss of vendors and trading posts immediately outside of cities, more than the absolutely moronic decision to space the Personal Story out in 10-level increments that undermines the once-smooth cadence of leveling on your way to your next objective, more than even the loss of rewards that actually felt meaningful ... was what the fallout of this decision did to the world of Tyria itself.

No longer was there underwater combat in starter zones, because it was deemed "too complicated" for someone to figure out -- in a game about natural exploration and figuring things out as you go.

And that theme continued.  The RC golems, the silly gambling games in LA and other mid-level areas that never returned (or only did recently), the interactive aspects of various early Hearts which made Tyria feel alive and, well ... interactive were gone.  Ripped out.  Oh, the pieces are still there, but they've been reduced to meaningless props; clutter in once-vibrant areas that no just seem out of place and meaningless.

What's the point of that weird thing under the lake outside of Rata Sum without the heart that helped teach you underwater combat?

What's the point of that district at the base of the Black Citadel, when the merchants are gone and half the NPCs just statically stand about?

Every last starter map has relics like this, whether it's the sealed passage in the old flame legion castrum in Plains of Ashford or that heart with the rabbits in Wayfarer Foothills.  Even Queensdale was changed, with numerous champion fights downgraded or outright removed.

Some claim it was because high-level players were farming them and being toxic, but in reality, those fights helped you to learn how to better engage in combat and party dynamics.  They were part of leveling, part of exploring the world, and your first look at the fact there really, truly were things far stronger than yourself -- and that the rewards for seeking them out were worth it.

Number Two:  Hero Points and the Loss of Trait Lines

Why.  Ignoring the truly horrid UI direction which had them be that undifferentiated straw colored icon (or an equally ambiguous green later on) which is difficult to pick out at a glance, instead of the notable Cyan Chevron that once it was, this change took away everything that made leveling make sense.

Before you only needed Skill Points to unlock each tier of skills, spending a set quantity before moving on.  None of this "the skill I want is 40 points away at the end of this track" nonsense; once a tier was available, you could simply purchase it.  It even helped to promote seeking out Skill Challenges, since there were always other skills to use -- and your excess skill points from leveling up were used in the Mystic Forge, rather than "Spirit Shards" today.

But more than than, the change to Specializations completely removed huge swaths of build customization in the name of "streamlining."  Yes, several needed to be folded into baseline, and some truly were in need of being reimagined, but you could also choose lower-tier traits at higher slots.  Instead, we've been trapped in a scenario where each trait in each tier must compete against one another for supremacy, and too often builds use only a fraction of what so-called "diversity" is available to them for no more reason than because the other choices are either inferior or genuinely bad.

Which is ironic considering the empty statements we got from the new Balance Philosophy, but I digress.

Perhaps the worst change, however, was the severance of attributes from trait lines, which were originally a third way to customize your build -- or, as most players relied upon it, a means to compensate for otherwise imbalanced gearing.  You could get an upwards for +300 in two paired attributes from each of the original five trait lines (with the fifth swapping the secondary attribute for direct improvements or cooldown reductions to your profession's special ability).  This obviated the need for the ludicrous number of stat combinations we now have in the game because players could freely create their own.

And speaking of "bad choices," yes, too many of the stat combinations still in the game are hardly beneficial outside of fringe builds.

Number Three:  Undermining the Game for the Sake of Competition and Difficulty

Now don't misunderstand:  there's nothing wrong with being exceedingly good at a game or enjoying punishing content, nor is playing PvP and WvW a bad thing.  Sometimes you want to fight other players, and these modes can even be fun in a cathartic way.  We've all (probably) played the Soulsborne franchise to varying degrees of success and enjoyment, but we wouldn't be playing an RPG if we didn't like a little challenge here and there.

But everything changed when the Mordrem attacked.

For those who remember it, Heart of Thorns when it first released was brutal.  Players died in droves and mere pocket raptors struck terror into players.  There was once a count of the literal tens of millions of deaths attributed to the things, as a cheeky jab at just how difficult the content was.  And the playerbase left in droves.

More casual players and those who had no idea that what builds had worked perfectly fine for open-world PvE content in Core Tyria that suddenly found themselves struggling to even grind for the untradeable materials and equipment prefixes simply gave up.  Others, like myself, set the game down for a year or more, waiting for a better reason to begin playing.  Eventually, the content was nerfed, but the damage was done.

And it happened again when End of Dragons released and severely curtailed the sustain of numerous classes -- notably excepting Necromancer and Guardian -- but was given back to us in the form of the Jade Bot.  Traits were so severely nerfed that many ceased to even be meaningful to take, over simply trying to push for ever better damage in a bizarre return to the Full Zerker style of balance we saw back in vanilla.

We saw similarly with the Mad King's Clock Tower, which has the designer on record estimating that "maybe 5% of people would make it to the top."  And, as interest in content like it and raids steadily rose, as speedrunners left the increasingly abandoned dungeon scene for bigger and better challenges and rewards, that soon spilled over into the core game.

Again, there's nothing wrong with providing content catered to particular interests -- in fact, that's something which Guild Wars 2 has excelled at in the past, such as when it added Fractals and the introduction of bounties and mounts in Path of Fire -- but as balance for PvP and WvW has begun to negatively impact open-world gameplay once again, to the detriment of various Elite Specializations and even entire trait lines of core classes, with "balance patches" becoming increasingly polarizing and controversial, it's hard to feel that ANet is honestly listening to every voice, rather than the loudest or those amplified by content creators and streamers.

And I get it, there's a reason a system was in place for "competitive splits" in skills, but time and again these are being overlooked or even avoided, with changes pushed which make precious little sense (or impact) outside of the limited engagements of a PvP arena or to help reduce griefing in WvW skirmishes.  I'm not saying competitive modes are at fault, either; rather, that developers who do not wish to look at each game mode as its own mode of play and insist that holistic changes are somehow healthy are directly impacting and even impinging the enjoyment of players in all of these modes.

[Shadowmoon.7986]

Abandoning pushing players to get better. Alot of people dunk on HoT, but those meta actually get done still. PoF was the perfect example of a cash grab, so super easy so every could do it, but it has no staying power. When was the last time you did maw of torment, or forged by fire. The problem with LS maps but for the whole expansion.

Then we got the wet blanket of the IBS, where they copy pasted ls3 mobs but cut their damage in half. This was also where you had story bosses the npcs could kill themselves. I would say IBS made the playerbase dumber, making think break bars are just QTE to hit special action key.  EoD at least try to reverse course starting the game with a mandatory tutorial on dodging and break bars.

 

[Infusion.7149]

I don't agree with claiming POF has no staying power as that has nothing to do with difficulty and everything to do with drops: see Serpent's Ire. People don't do POF metas because of lack of RNG rewards, Pinata (a POF meta) gets done due to the drop table and so does Tequatl (accountbound chest). Dragon's Stand doesn't get done unless people need crystalline ores for gen 2 legendaries, people only kill Matriarch in Verdant Brink so I wouldn't call that doing the meta, Auric gets done due to Aurillium and Tangled Depths is done because of Chak Egg Sac.

I used to WvW a while back with a player that was a power trader of some sort who had a sort of fetish for minis. At the time Junundu Wurm was very pricey, now it is below 100g or something really low. Something happened to its drop rate or whatnot that tanked it in 2019. It's a similar scenario with the music boxes.

The number one thing that Arenanet has done contrary to the playerbase IMO is build templates and the associated cashgrab players felt associated with it. Equipment templates pricing you could possibly claim are because they need to recoup storage costs comparable to bag slots. There is zero reason build templates storage need to be monetized as heavily as they are and as limiting as it is considering GW1 had a template system already and the builds in GW1 were more complicated due to freely choosing skills. They could have had a cloud storage cost as they do now and then load by chatcode built into the system. Build templates also highlight the failure of Arenanet to follow through on promises for WvW. In WvW they stated that build and equipment templates would only be swappable at your home area keep. Instead, we have templates swappable out of combat anywhere you want.

The second thing that Arenanet has done that was damaging to the playerbase was outright misinformation.
a)  The introduction of server linking and the announcement of alliances years ago only to abandon the idea internally until Josh Davis revived it was deception. People bandwagon onto server links and the trust of the WvW community is completely ruined. The inability to recruit for WvW at least in capital cities such as Lion's Arch or DIvinity's Reach means PvE and WvW are for all intents and purposes separate even when you pick a server at account creation.

b) Another form of misinformation is officially soliciting feedback on the forums only to ignore it and give preference to select people in private discords. That is probably why elementalist has been nerfed as heavily as it has been as you only get the opinions of people that are heavily invested into rotations. There was also a private WvW discord which one of my former WvW guild leader quit to FF14 because only GvG guilds' input was being taken seriously. If people want their opinions to be heard, they cannot access these channels.

c) Telling the playerbase the 300s cooldowns were "temporary" for PvP/WvW only to finally change them 2 years later after a balance team change. (Thank you CMC for finally delivering on this promise)

d) Icebrood Saga misinformation only to announce EoD later. This could be misinformation or not knowing that they would receive NCSoft's funding for an expansion.

e) Telling the WvW playerbase they are looking at rewards for years. We have only received mistforged armor in 2017, warclaw which nobody asked for in 2019, Conflux in 2020, Warlord's armor shared with PVP in 2020, and a mist lord weapon set in 2019 which is shared with PVP. Thankfully we seem to be getting another set (War Machine) but the amount of development that goes into this mode is palty plus the fact that the extremely basic achievement (5 defenses/captures) was buggy was memed by the entire WvW community.
--- There was a God of WvW title added but you basically get nothing for it other than the title. 
--- If WvW needed funding there are ample numbers of suggestions such as siege skins, keep claim sounds and effects, and a whole host of other things besides warclaw skins.

f) Initially trying to make GW2 an esport in terms of PVP (it was in ESL at one point if I remember correctly) only to abandon it and also not banning players who wintrade mATs and other such allegations if true.
--- there doesn't need to be a huge $400K cash prize but use the sponsorships and partners to leverage some sort of reward instead of pixels. Alienware / Dell, Amazon, DXRacer, Turtle Beach, HyperX, Steelseries, etc.

Edited November 28, 2022 by Infusion.7149

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

3 hours ago, Shadowmoon.7986 said:

Abandoning pushing players to get better. Alot of people dunk on HoT, but those meta actually get done still. PoF was the perfect example of a cash grab, so super easy so every could do it, but it has no staying power. When was the last time you did maw of torment, or forged by fire. The problem with LS maps but for the whole expansion.

Then we got the wet blanket of the IBS, where they copy pasted ls3 mobs but cut their damage in half. This was also where you had story bosses the npcs could kill themselves. I would say IBS made the playerbase dumber, making think break bars are just QTE to hit special action key.  EoD at least try to reverse course starting the game with a mandatory tutorial on dodging and break bars.

 

The last time I did those events was a few weeks ago, back when I was grinding out Amalgamated Gemstones to craft HOPE and Xiuquatl.  The PoF events are still run quite regularly (multiple times a day), with Serpent's Ire and Maws of Torment being done irregularly.  I also disagree about the difficulty of PoF being easy.  The increased aggro range and packs of enemies made glass cannon builds far more dangerous to run, with several enemies capable of downing the more frail players in a single move (the Djinn come to mind).  The Eater of Souls is an infamous boss fight that had to be nerfed to let the average player succeed.

The problem that PoF had was a lack of centralizing focus.  The devs listened to the complaints about HoT being controlled by their respective map metas, so they went in the opposite direction and made no centralizing metas to speak of.  This meant that, unless you were hunting bounties in groups, the maps has less going on than Cursed Shore.  Very few people knew about how to gather the currencies or what to do with them.  I'll talk a bit more about that in a bit:

 

2 hours ago, Infusion.7149 said:

I used to WvW a while back with a player that was a power trader of some sort who had a sort of fetish for minis. At the time Junundu Wurm was very pricey, now it is below 100g or something really low. Something happened to its drop rate or whatnot that tanked it in 2019. It's a similar scenario with the music boxes.

That was me.  Well, the Wurm, not the music boxes.  See, I had the exact opposite experience: I was actively hunting for a few of the PoF drops at the time, one of them being the Mini Junundu Wurm.  I had a very difficult time getting people together to do the event, for two reasons.  First, nobody knew the wurm mini existed, so there was little interest no matter how much I barked in chat.  Second, once I told people about the mini and how it was worth more than the gold cap, all of the players gave up trying to grab it immediately.  They figured out it was too rare to bother going for, and that the native rewards for completing the event weren't worth their time.  This made Junundu Rising have extremely low participation and retention.

So, I did what everyone else does: I complained on the forums.  Me and a few others raised up enough of a raucous that the devs changed the events.  Now, they have fixed rewards (3 rares and an amalgamate) alongside of their RNG rewards.  Likewise, the drops of several items, including the Junundu Wurm, were made significantly more common.  

[Maria Murtor.7253]

Removing the old PvP dailys. After this, Hot-join was dead. 

[Hashberry.4510]

Power creep. Its just a dull loot and/or afk fest. Fun specs getting squeezed through a raid sized hole. Blech.

Edited November 28, 2022 by Hashberry.4510

[Ian.8340]

I definitely wish they would revert the sustain nerfs. 

[Infusion.7149]

On 11/28/2022 at 12:39 AM, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

The last time I did those events was a few weeks ago, back when I was grinding out Amalgamated Gemstones to craft HOPE and Xiuquatl.  The PoF events are still run quite regularly (multiple times a day), with Serpent's Ire and Maws of Torment being done irregularly.  I also disagree about the difficulty of PoF being easy.  The increased aggro range and packs of enemies made glass cannon builds far more dangerous to run, with several enemies capable of downing the more frail players in a single move (the Djinn come to mind).  The Eater of Souls is an infamous boss fight that had to be nerfed to let the average player succeed.

The problem that PoF had was a lack of centralizing focus.  The devs listened to the complaints about HoT being controlled by their respective map metas, so they went in the opposite direction and made no centralizing metas to speak of.  This meant that, unless you were hunting bounties in groups, the maps has less going on than Cursed Shore.  Very few people knew about how to gather the currencies or what to do with them.  I'll talk a bit more about that in a bit:

 

That was me.  Well, the Wurm, not the music boxes.  See, I had the exact opposite experience: I was actively hunting for a few of the PoF drops at the time, one of them being the Mini Junundu Wurm.  I had a very difficult time getting people together to do the event, for two reasons.  First, nobody knew the wurm mini existed, so there was little interest no matter how much I barked in chat.  Second, once I told people about the mini and how it was worth more than the gold cap, all of the players gave up trying to grab it immediately.  They figured out it was too rare to bother going for, and that the native rewards for completing the event weren't worth their time.  This made Junundu Rising have extremely low participation and retention.

So, I did what everyone else does: I complained on the forums.  Me and a few others raised up enough of a raucous that the devs changed the events.  Now, they have fixed rewards (3 rares and an amalgamate) alongside of their RNG rewards.  Likewise, the drops of several items, including the Junundu Wurm, were made significantly more common.  

I guess the person I no longer have any contact with made a supremely poor investment. 

Artificial scarcity rather than utility and actual intended rarity I suppose.

[patton the great.7126]

Fishing, Capes, skiffs, to name a few. Complete abandonment of competitive game modes this includes PvP, WvW, and yes even Raids. Adding fluff patches of god awful rewards does not count as content necessary to keep modes alive. 

[Ashen.2907]

The launch/prelaunch nerf to difficulty. Almost everyone I knew left the game within the first few months to a year due to a lack of sense of adventure brought about by lack of challenge compared to beta era difficulty. 

[Tsakhi.8124]

I might get "confused" to death, but I sincerely believe that Unidentified gear is unnecessary; it's just one more step that doesn't need to be there. It's not game breaking, per se, but it is most certainly inconvenient. 

[Jura.2170]

On 11/27/2022 at 10:33 PM, itspomf.9523 said:

For those who remember it, Heart of Thorns when it first released was brutal.  Players died in droves and mere pocket raptors struck terror into players.  There was once a count of the literal tens of millions of deaths attributed to the things, as a cheeky jab at just how difficult the content was.

 

yes please , can HoT please be made hard again ? ^^
especially Dragon's Stand
and pocket raptors ^^

 

 

[Infusion.7149]

6 hours ago, Tsakhi.8124 said:

I might get "confused" to death, but I sincerely believe that Unidentified gear is unnecessary; it's just one more step that doesn't need to be there. It's not game breaking, per se, but it is most certainly inconvenient. 

If you played prior to it you would know how annoying it is to have full inventory of blues and greens, especially in WVW.

Edited November 30, 2022 by Infusion.7149

[Crono.4197]

Adding raids in HoT was a harmful change to the game and player experience. Raids should never have existed in a game like Guild Wars 2. Only made the game more toxic.

[The Boz.2038]

8 hours ago, Tsakhi.8124 said:

I might get "confused" to death, but I sincerely believe that Unidentified gear is unnecessary; it's just one more step that doesn't need to be there. It's not game breaking, per se, but it is most certainly inconvenient. 

It's there so your inventory doesn't get absolutely mauled every time you do a dungeon, lol.

[Antycypator.9874]

It's not a "change", but more like a default feature in game. Timers.

Wanna do AB meta? Sure, but let me first introduce you to 15 MINUTES OF WAITING.

Wanna do TD meta? Sure, but what about 10 minutes of waiting between rewards?

"Pre event" before Fire Elemental, almost nothing happens there.

Timers after timers before certain metas (Chak Garent, DE).

Time-gated stuff, like Provisioner Tokens.

[Dreams.3128]

On 11/27/2022 at 5:33 PM, itspomf.9523 said:

Yeah, this is gonna be a negative thread, but I feel the need to vent a bit, having seen something similar on You Know Where.  I'm also curious what other players feel are decisions made by ANet (or NCSoft, in some cases) which have actively proven harmful to the game and the playerbase.

Like the post before mine which inspired this, I'm not asking for what you disagree with or don't like, but what genuinely took something away from the game which once made Tyria and Guild Wars 2 feel truly unique in a land of samey MMOs.  To that end, I'll go first.

The Big One:  New Player Experience, or "Someone Thought the Game Was Too Complicated"

This one still upsets me to this day, as someone who leveled a handful of characters to 80 the old-fashioned way.  But more than the detrimental effect to the story, it took away tons of flavor for the world.   More than the loss of vendors and trading posts immediately outside of cities, more than the absolutely moronic decision to space the Personal Story out in 10-level increments that undermines the once-smooth cadence of leveling on your way to your next objective, more than even the loss of rewards that actually felt meaningful ... was what the fallout of this decision did to the world of Tyria itself.

No longer was there underwater combat in starter zones, because it was deemed "too complicated" for someone to figure out -- in a game about natural exploration and figuring things out as you go.

And that theme continued.  The RC golems, the silly gambling games in LA and other mid-level areas that never returned (or only did recently), the interactive aspects of various early Hearts which made Tyria feel alive and, well ... interactive were gone.  Ripped out.  Oh, the pieces are still there, but they've been reduced to meaningless props; clutter in once-vibrant areas that no just seem out of place and meaningless.

What's the point of that weird thing under the lake outside of Rata Sum without the heart that helped teach you underwater combat?

What's the point of that district at the base of the Black Citadel, when the merchants are gone and half the NPCs just statically stand about?

Every last starter map has relics like this, whether it's the sealed passage in the old flame legion castrum in Plains of Ashford or that heart with the rabbits in Wayfarer Foothills.  Even Queensdale was changed, with numerous champion fights downgraded or outright removed.

Some claim it was because high-level players were farming them and being toxic, but in reality, those fights helped you to learn how to better engage in combat and party dynamics.  They were part of leveling, part of exploring the world, and your first look at the fact there really, truly were things far stronger than yourself -- and that the rewards for seeking them out were worth it.

Number Two:  Hero Points and the Loss of Trait Lines

Why.  Ignoring the truly horrid UI direction which had them be that undifferentiated straw colored icon (or an equally ambiguous green later on) which is difficult to pick out at a glance, instead of the notable Cyan Chevron that once it was, this change took away everything that made leveling make sense.

Before you only needed Skill Points to unlock each tier of skills, spending a set quantity before moving on.  None of this "the skill I want is 40 points away at the end of this track" nonsense; once a tier was available, you could simply purchase it.  It even helped to promote seeking out Skill Challenges, since there were always other skills to use -- and your excess skill points from leveling up were used in the Mystic Forge, rather than "Spirit Shards" today.

But more than than, the change to Specializations completely removed huge swaths of build customization in the name of "streamlining."  Yes, several needed to be folded into baseline, and some truly were in need of being reimagined, but you could also choose lower-tier traits at higher slots.  Instead, we've been trapped in a scenario where each trait in each tier must compete against one another for supremacy, and too often builds use only a fraction of what so-called "diversity" is available to them for no more reason than because the other choices are either inferior or genuinely bad.

Which is ironic considering the empty statements we got from the new Balance Philosophy, but I digress.

Perhaps the worst change, however, was the severance of attributes from trait lines, which were originally a third way to customize your build -- or, as most players relied upon it, a means to compensate for otherwise imbalanced gearing.  You could get an upwards for +300 in two paired attributes from each of the original five trait lines (with the fifth swapping the secondary attribute for direct improvements or cooldown reductions to your profession's special ability).  This obviated the need for the ludicrous number of stat combinations we now have in the game because players could freely create their own.

And speaking of "bad choices," yes, too many of the stat combinations still in the game are hardly beneficial outside of fringe builds.

Number Three:  Undermining the Game for the Sake of Competition and Difficulty

Now don't misunderstand:  there's nothing wrong with being exceedingly good at a game or enjoying punishing content, nor is playing PvP and WvW a bad thing.  Sometimes you want to fight other players, and these modes can even be fun in a cathartic way.  We've all (probably) played the Soulsborne franchise to varying degrees of success and enjoyment, but we wouldn't be playing an RPG if we didn't like a little challenge here and there.

But everything changed when the Mordrem attacked.

For those who remember it, Heart of Thorns when it first released was brutal.  Players died in droves and mere pocket raptors struck terror into players.  There was once a count of the literal tens of millions of deaths attributed to the things, as a cheeky jab at just how difficult the content was.  And the playerbase left in droves.

More casual players and those who had no idea that what builds had worked perfectly fine for open-world PvE content in Core Tyria that suddenly found themselves struggling to even grind for the untradeable materials and equipment prefixes simply gave up.  Others, like myself, set the game down for a year or more, waiting for a better reason to begin playing.  Eventually, the content was nerfed, but the damage was done.

And it happened again when End of Dragons released and severely curtailed the sustain of numerous classes -- notably excepting Necromancer and Guardian -- but was given back to us in the form of the Jade Bot.  Traits were so severely nerfed that many ceased to even be meaningful to take, over simply trying to push for ever better damage in a bizarre return to the Full Zerker style of balance we saw back in vanilla.

We saw similarly with the Mad King's Clock Tower, which has the designer on record estimating that "maybe 5% of people would make it to the top."  And, as interest in content like it and raids steadily rose, as speedrunners left the increasingly abandoned dungeon scene for bigger and better challenges and rewards, that soon spilled over into the core game.

Again, there's nothing wrong with providing content catered to particular interests -- in fact, that's something which Guild Wars 2 has excelled at in the past, such as when it added Fractals and the introduction of bounties and mounts in Path of Fire -- but as balance for PvP and WvW has begun to negatively impact open-world gameplay once again, to the detriment of various Elite Specializations and even entire trait lines of core classes, with "balance patches" becoming increasingly polarizing and controversial, it's hard to feel that ANet is honestly listening to every voice, rather than the loudest or those amplified by content creators and streamers.

And I get it, there's a reason a system was in place for "competitive splits" in skills, but time and again these are being overlooked or even avoided, with changes pushed which make precious little sense (or impact) outside of the limited engagements of a PvP arena or to help reduce griefing in WvW skirmishes.  I'm not saying competitive modes are at fault, either; rather, that developers who do not wish to look at each game mode as its own mode of play and insist that holistic changes are somehow healthy are directly impacting and even impinging the enjoyment of players in all of these modes.

That last section seems to be just a very long-winded: 'And this is PvP/WvW's fault that the balancing is like this.' 

Nononono, let's fix that thoughtline. PvP/WvW did not affect open world balance, in fact, most of the time, the issue was reversed. PVE mechanics end up being so kitten strong and then trickle into the competitive modes that they end up breaking those two areas and therefore leading Anet to do a form of PVE/WvW/PvP split.

And if you want an example? Ye' ol' grandfather Chronomancer when he first introduced alacrity into the ga,e and Chronomancers were so obliviously broken that anyone that was doing any form of content that wasn't OW would always have pocket Chrono or know someone that plays Chrono so kitten much because alacrity in its unnerfed was absolutely busted. Chrono usage then trickles between WvW and PvP once people say how tanky Chrono got and it was game over from there. I still remember when Chrono could legit 1v5 on points while buffing the rest of their team with no repercussions. 

Mind you, that is only [1] example of how PVE mechanics ended up impacting and spilling into all other kinds of content.

[Tsakhi.8124]

3 hours ago, Infusion.7149 said:

If you played prior to it you would know how annoying it is to have full inventory of blues and greens, especially in WVW.

 

2 hours ago, The Boz.2038 said:

It's there so your inventory doesn't get absolutely mauled every time you do a dungeon, lol.

True, true! I didn't even think about that, to be honest. Then again, I have a crappy memory, too. XD 

[Raknar.4735]

Overreliance on boons & addition of stats like concentration.

100% boon-uptime should have never been a thing. Boons should have been short time boosts.

[Mungrul.9358]

My big one is tying stats to gear.

 

And they could have partly remedied this by making all gear stats freely changeable, but instead, they locked this functionality behind legendaries.

If everyone could change stats as easily as with legendaries, we would see a LOT more build variety.

 

But even then, it wouldn't have had the flexibility of the first game's stat system, because stats are confined to combinations.

 

I much prefer having a pool of stats to allocate as I see fit.

[Izzy.2951]

Not investing more money into GW2 development, specially Spvp new maps, modes, new battle island lobby with all there and in TYRIA!.

Same for raids, fractals etc...

Same for achivement reworks, like adding story quests to journal. And then making the collections work in a new tab like quest where u activate desactivate, and have markers when u need to collect things on map. So ppl dont have to watch 30 min videos tabbing in and out and get burned of the game and how boring it is to do that.

[Spook.5847]

Along with everything you said; the general homogenizing of effects, powers, and abilities/interfaces; the constant nerfing to PVE builds; and, more recently the uncompromising, uncaring beatdown that we got for Halloween, and now Christmas with the food items being taken because it is too much trouble to code a flag or whatever (and no compensation by like making recipes to get those same foods reasonable in cost).  I see a lot of that, and i have heard many times "oh gee, the code is so OLD that nobody really knows how to handle it" etc. 

 

It's all just bottom line poor service.

[Nephalem.8921]

@itspomf.9523

Your 2nd and 3rd point contradict each other. First you complain about the simplification of traitlines and then you complain about hot being too hard for home brewed garbage builds. The trait and build system is still too hard for casuals but its also what makes gw2 unique.

The elite spec design would not work with the old system. It needed a redesign. was also impossible to balance.

Most harmful change for pve players was probably toughness scaling in fractals or swamp of the mists. the dungeon murder was not nice either.

@Crono.4197

You never ran dungeons before raids? Or failed tequatl. Necros and rangers were kicked instantly before raids even existed. And raid players are carrying you through open world metas. isnt that nice of them?

Edited December 3, 2022 by Nephalem.8921

[Nephalem.8921]

On 11/28/2022 at 9:03 AM, Ian.8340 said:

I definitely wish they would revert the sustain nerfs. 

Chose any condi build. Equip trailblazer or cele. Never die. It could be so simple.

[Rogue.8235]

On 11/30/2022 at 11:34 AM, Mungrul.9358 said:

My big one is tying stats to gear.

 

And they could have partly remedied this by making all gear stats freely changeable, but instead, they locked this functionality behind legendaries.

If everyone could change stats as easily as with legendaries, we would see a LOT more build variety.

I've actually seen a system like this in another game.  Gear stats were a generic power level, and actual stats were freely selected in a triangular gradient between damage/tankiness/healing.  It had its own problem though.

Also, it's hard for me to imagine how the GW2 economy would work without the current gearing system.  The economy is so inextricably tied with crafting materials, it would collapse if crafting materials were no longer in such high demand.

Anyways, I always thought that a stat system that isn't based on items/gear/equipment or trait/skill/talent systems are a great idea.

 

Anyways, back on topic.  The biggest change that I disagree with and which changed the game for the worse is the abandonment of the original 9th profession.  They introduced it, had a profession trailer like all the others, but then never implemented it.  The game would have been so much better if they kept that original 9th profession.