The 3 big reasons WvW Players left the game. (Personal experience)

[DanAlcedo.3281]

Disclaimer: These are the 3 big reasons people left WvW and Gw2 from personal experience. 

 

1. Specialization and Stab rework. 

Before the change, it was common for us to have 20+ Warriors in our daily 40+ guild zergs. People LOVED  to play that class and scream HAMMERSTUN over TS in unison. 

The reworks killed Warrior outright and created a pure Pirate Ship meta. 

I have seen so many people quit because the fun they had was gone. 

 

2. HoT gear. 

Before HoT, you could simply play Wvw and use your Tokens to buy gear. 

With Hot, we got Marauder, Minstrel and Trailblazer stats. Crazy strong Sigils and runes. Even OP food. 

And all of it required to play hundred of hours of PvE. Be it the mastery grind, currency grind or just money grind. 

It was also inconvenient For example. Having to craft your own food for every raid instead of just buying it cheap from the tp. 

Recruitment was a massiv pain in the butt. 

Having to tell new players that having them around is a negativ without them Grinding for 2-3 weeks in pve for gear. 

Wvw players want to play Wvw. Not being forced to play PvE. 

That was the biggest quit wave I have seen. 

 

3. The Meta. 

Not only brought HoT insane powercreep to the game and reinforced the pirate ship meta. *cough* Release CoR *cough*

It was also sheer aids throughout. 

The condi meta. 

Remember old Condi Reaper and old epidemic? 

Add stealth Bugs to it, where the enemy zerg could kill you before they unstealth. 

People hated it. So much so that it was the last big wave of people quitting that I personally witnessed. 

Anet even once nerfed the only counter to the condi meta. That was the last straw for many people I knew. 

 

 

What are the reasons you witnessed that made people quit? 

 

 

[floppypuppy.5789]

Largest recent quit wave I can remember was a few months into PoF when it became clear that basic survival in a group was more about having a good firebrand than anything from individual agency. Firebrand was also one of the most wretched and thankless classes to play.

 

Edited June 17, 2023 by floppypuppy.5789

[Gorani.7205]

32 minutes ago, DanAlcedo.3281 said:

What are the reasons you witnessed that made people quit?

1. Megaservers & Link ups
The loss of server identity and teaming up with "other people" that you will lose again after a few weeks drove a few of those away, that did the small, but important things in the old days: refreshing siege, sitting in towers to scout and give news etc. Of course those were also the times of "no pips", when you could do that as a casual activity and still contribute, even if it had zero rewards.

2. Rift widening between "core" and "elite" professions
While HoT started with the trend, it took a full swing at fellow roamers when PoF came out and Scourges could roll over the keyboard with their faces and everything died around them (a little over exaggerated, but still true at its core). Meta build took over (e.g. Firebrands in zergs) and the individual skill factor got smaller over the right build and stats.

3. Losing single player agency
This is an ongoing trend that started long ago. While in the past a single player's decision and action was important (e.g. what upgrade to fund, which WvW ability to improve). Now, everything seems to be channelled towards attacking things with the tightest and largest ball of players ("boon ball"). Putting upgrades in structures? Unimportant, because there is hardly an incentive to defend and profit from those upgrades. WvW abilities, with the exception of Gliding and Warclaw have not been developed, although there possibilities to expand on harvesting, traps, special action keys etc. Many friends that left had lived the roamer's / scout's / steward's life and can't do that any more.

[Riba.3271]

1. Siege and Objective balance

Buying time with small numbers? Impossible. Taking objectives with small numbers? Impossible. Lord scaling, emergency waypoints, claim buffs, just make it impossible to hit an objective and find suitable amount of defenders. Defensive siege does nothing if there are shield gens up. Most offensive siege does nothing if there are shield gens up.

2. Terrible combat environment for outnumbered groups

Objective auras stats preventing ganking/dueling, gliding, watch towers, faster upgrade times and massive boon durations all make it difficult to play with smaller numbers.

3. Server linking system

New people who like WvW these 2 months, will in most cases dislike it next 2 because change in commanders, pug quality/amount, enemies and timezones. It has nothing to do with server pride, but consistancy and ability to find something suitable.

 

They have tried to fix "combat" like 100 times in past 5 years, surely after 5 more they will realise the fault is within changes that came around HoT. Passive stats were terrible idea, because the one challenging thing you can do while outnumbering or being outnumbered, is 1vs1 enemies around, but passive stats combined with gliding away ruin that.

Edited June 17, 2023 by Riba.3271

[Deniara Devious.3948]

From my point of the view the TOP reasons to leave Guild Wars 2 and WvWvW were:

1. Overpowered elite specs. They basically made this game mode pay to win (you need expansions also for mounts and gliding + the elite specs + expansions armor/weapon stat combinations and consumables. This also shoehorns most players to play could of meta build instead of more build variety)
2. Skill balance has always been problematic and the elite specs, new runes, sigils etc. just made it worse. A good design principle is "less is more", so instead of the just piling up more and more, which makes balancing impossible, they should have stick to core.
3. Introduction of awful desert borderland map (least played map, not suitable for WvWvW, red has disadvantage, the desert is full of exploits, really bad placement of cannons etc. for defense, too long distance between towers, keeps and camps)
4. Replacing the lake in Alpine borderlands with ruins (ruins of power more gimmick added to the game, the developers think more complexity and gimmicks is good. The area often has no other players, telling the sad truth how "popular" it is)
5. Server linking system and population imbalance (in EU 3 servers are always without a link and often outnumbered all the time. They should just permanently merge some least played servers)
6. Outnumbered "buff" is essentially useless. There is no incentive for the bigger population servers to attack each other, so they tend to gang up on the least populated one. So basically we have 1+1 and 1+1 servers both non-stop attacking the sole server without the link. And Arenanet often places the unlinked server in tier1 meaning 4 weeks in a row losses.
7. Almost complete lack of communication from Arenanet and developers. (if you communicate in reddit or somewhere else, why even have these official forums?). Arenanet also seems hostile towards communication, since match up threads aren't allowed. Now imagine any competitive group sports or esports, where you are not allowed to discuss actual match ups.
8. Many items and reward tracks require pve grind, meaning those people who love WvWvW are either left without them or must also play something, which they don't enjoy
9. No meaningful way to report cheaters and have them banned. There is NOT even an option in "report"-tool for WvWvW exploits. Griefers who waste all the supplies and pull tactics before enemy is even there are also a problem.
10. Alliance betas (the least fun weeks to play, just a mess... if alliances will be anything like the betas, I will probably quit the game)

[Xenesis.6389]

1. Combat and profession misplaced balance.

2. Guild leader left because of 1, which led to others leaving.

3. Other friends left because of 1.

🤷‍♂️🍦

[Chaba.5410]

32 minutes ago, Riba.3271 said:

It has nothing to do with server pride, but consistancy and ability to find something suitable.

Consistency is obtained by joining a guild.  Why ignore the obvious?

[Riba.3271]

2 hours ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Consistency is obtained by joining a guild.  Why ignore the obvious?

For 1 timezone for your own server maybe. And even then, if you enjoy open tags, pugs will change a lot. What tier enemy guilds are in and where your server will stabilize in, are also important factors for entertaining guild raids.

But ye, this thread was about why WvW players left. Maybe raiding with exact same people for years in same meta isn't that sustainable? Yup, rely on Guilds..

Edited June 17, 2023 by Riba.3271

[Chaba.5410]

9 minutes ago, Riba.3271 said:

For 1 timezone for your own server maybe.

Not for your own server.  For your playtime.  You work, you eat, you sleep.  You play at specific times regularly.  Find a guild during that time.  Or form one.  Most players aren't no-lifing this game.

[Draygo.9473]

The number 1 thing was burnout from the early WvW tournaments. Everything else listed while caused some people to leave wasnt anywhere close to the tournament burnout issue. 

[ArchonWing.9480]

TB and Minstrel were definitely overpriced, but how the heck could you not afford Marauder gear lol? That's always been cheap.

The reasons why I saw people leave:

1.) Guild halls and guild designs. HoT took away guild buffs and basically resold it back to them. Scribe was insanely expensive and this murdered a bunch of small guilds overnight. It was one of the things that led to the emphasis on blobbing.

2.) Abandoned content, abandoned everywhere. This game has been very infamous for making important content and just forgetting about it. Guild Halls are pretty abandoned. How about that useless tiny guild arena that uses pve rules? Nah, forget about that. Would you like to do a dungeon? Oh, yea that used to be a thing in this game. What about a raid? Oh, yea I'm serious, Guild Wars 2 had raids. How about a new fractal; one comes out every few years!

 

Tactivators have been left in a pitiful state where permissions are broken to this very day  Also many sectors of the game are even more abandoned than WvW if you can believe that.

3.) In HoT, they put their eggs in one basket towards high end raids in order to attract hardcore MMO degens. All balance and class designed were focused entirely on that, with little concern for other game modes. PvE devolved into a pile of boon vomit,. which also affected other game modes.

Remember when they only nerfed ghost thief after someone solo'd a raid with it?

I mean, as much as I'd love more challenging pve content in this game, they did not take their most loyal players into consideration. The former was always just going to flock to the next big thing, and Gw2 even at that time would not be. These types desire constant content releases of the next ball smashing raid, they could never maintain that.

4. Then came PoF, imo the worst expansion and the only one to acutally make me quit the game for a bit.

One of the most blatant changes was the obsession with10 person buffs, since raids were 10 people and apparently having you being able to give 10 people buffs in wvw would lead to utter nonsense. Now I don't exactly know when this abonimation happened but I blame it on PoF anyways. This was eventually undone for all game modes but that didn't solve everything so baked into the design.

5. PoF had some of the most kittenous specializations to ever walk into Gw2. Almost all of them are/were massive sustain monsters, except for maybe like Deadeye but who the heck likes dealing with that? This was the death knell to an already dead small scale situation.

6. Pure indecision. Insane amounts of flip flopping around. such as with scourge shades, and of course just the entirety of the Mesmer class. Do we have to precast our mantras or not? Who knows; they sure don't.

7. 2019, which I would consider the absolute nadir of Gw2. This coincided with the layoffs and the game almost looked like maintenance mode with nonexistent content in both pve and wvw. There was NO direction whatsoever, and if PvE had no direction, WvW was screwed. We were cursed with the nonsense of the Icebrood Saga.

I thought the game was going to die at that point, but for one reason or another it seems to have turned itself around and the outlook has been somewhat better, though not great.

But the damage was done, for sure.

Edited June 17, 2023 by ArchonWing.9480

[kamikharzeeh.8016]

8 hours ago, floppypuppy.5789 said:

Largest recent quit wave I can remember was a few months into PoF when it became clear that basic survival in a group was more about having a good firebrand than anything from individual agency. Firebrand was also one of the most wretched and thankless classes to play.

 

wdym, that was and is still alike since the last 5 years at least.

life and death by stability, esp once they removed the dmg form all 2ndary cc having skills, it became just a cc spam fiesta. obviously not that much enjoyable - slower messier fights, less damage across the board but you would get cc chained on and on and on and on ... till u die from some random dmg or condi, even a pet could manage that alone after all

at least supports now get good participation, that probably helps a lot to make people not only play killparticipationscambuilds idk

 

likely, the long-time-nothing-changes - issue that Wvw has, was the biggest problem and surely caused many people to quit, i would guess

but also stuff like, weird balance patches, where it is absolutely not possible to understand what is really planned. like, the direction in where the balancings go is like superblurry

 

[floppypuppy.5789]

1 hour ago, kamikharzeeh.8016 said:

wdym, that was and is still alike since the last 5 years at least.

life and death by stability, esp once they removed the dmg form all 2ndary cc having skills, it became just a cc spam fiesta. obviously not that much enjoyable - slower messier fights, less damage across the board but you would get cc chained on and on and on and on ... till u die from some random dmg or condi, even a pet could manage that alone after all

at least supports now get good participation, that probably helps a lot to make people not only play killparticipationscambuilds idk

 

likely, the long-time-nothing-changes - issue that Wvw has, was the biggest problem and surely caused many people to quit, i would guess

but also stuff like, weird balance patches, where it is absolutely not possible to understand what is really planned. like, the direction in where the balancings go is like superblurry

 

Nope, you missed the point completely.  Specifically the necessity of high skill Firebrands caused a large wave of people to leave gw2, not some nebulous generic issues.

To this day far more players prefer to just log out if there is a lack of firebrands than to endure playing one.

[bunnyrabbitbackstraps.4956]

11 hours ago, DanAlcedo.3281 said:

What are the reasons you witnessed that made people quit?

Just general neglect of the game mode for so long. That manifested as a lot of the other issues that people have brought up in this thread but a lot of that could have been avoided if Anet paid attention to WvW and actively engaged the players who participate in it.

[babana.7521]

The only reasons I know of is Sciatica, and Work. lol. A guild from my old server forming up, trying to get to "greener pasteur" they left for other server, a month later (approximately) the leader that took everyone away got a new job and never seen them ever again. Another guy who stop playing was because of old age and Sciatica, he just couldn't sit down for  long period of time anymore.

 

Another one left because of Build Template. 

Edited June 18, 2023 by babana.7521

[JTGuevara.9018]

11 hours ago, DanAlcedo.3281 said:

Disclaimer: These are the 3 big reasons people left WvW and Gw2 from personal experience. 

 

1. Specialization and Stab rework. 

Before the change, it was common for us to have 20+ Warriors in our daily 40+ guild zergs. People LOVED  to play that class and scream HAMMERSTUN over TS in unison. 

The reworks killed Warrior outright and created a pure Pirate Ship meta. 

I have seen so many people quit because the fun they had was gone. 

 

2. HoT gear. 

Before HoT, you could simply play Wvw and use your Tokens to buy gear. 

With Hot, we got Marauder, Minstrel and Trailblazer stats. Crazy strong Sigils and runes. Even OP food. 

And all of it required to play hundred of hours of PvE. Be it the mastery grind, currency grind or just money grind. 

It was also inconvenient For example. Having to craft your own food for every raid instead of just buying it cheap from the tp. 

Recruitment was a massiv pain in the butt. 

Having to tell new players that having them around is a negativ without them Grinding for 2-3 weeks in pve for gear. 

Wvw players want to play Wvw. Not being forced to play PvE. 

That was the biggest quit wave I have seen. 

 

3. The Meta. 

Not only brought HoT insane powercreep to the game and reinforced the pirate ship meta. *cough* Release CoR *cough*

It was also sheer aids throughout. 

The condi meta. 

Remember old Condi Reaper and old epidemic? 

Add stealth Bugs to it, where the enemy zerg could kill you before they unstealth. 

People hated it. So much so that it was the last big wave of people quitting that I personally witnessed. 

Anet even once nerfed the only counter to the condi meta. That was the last straw for many people I knew. 

 

 

What are the reasons you witnessed that made people quit? 

 

 

You forgot the, possibly, biggest quit wave of them all: HoT release and Desert Borderlands

I remember the post-HoT days when ALL three of the borderlands were desert. That exodus was no joke. I remember roaming all three sides some days and barely seeing a single soul some days.

Anet, as a result, took swift action and brought in the server-linking system we know today in order to keep wvw alive.

[kamikharzeeh.8016]

8 hours ago, floppypuppy.5789 said:

Nope, you missed the point completely.  Specifically the necessity of high skill Firebrands caused a large wave of people to leave gw2, not some nebulous generic issues.

To this day far more players prefer to just log out if there is a lack of firebrands than to endure playing one.

there isn't a necessity for high skill FBs though, they just need to be somehow understanding the class to give stab and blocks. there's not that much tryhard groups left in the game, and most quit around 2020-21~, to need very good FBs ngl

plus, idk where exactly u get the data of how many ppl left from. there#s always some leaving, some returning, some new... queues are still around as always

[Chichimec.9364]

Hmm, my personal experience seems to be a bit different  than that of many other folks in this thread. For  a bit of context - I started playing WW the weekend after the warclaw was first introduced, which was March 2019 iirc. These days I'm running with a WvW guild that plays two hours a day, seven days a week. Over the last year to year and a half, a number of folks have left the guild. Never once did I hear someone say they were leaving because of some change in WvW that they didn't like. What I did hear was folks leaving for irl reasons - having a new baby, changes in work schedule, or even getting a new, more demanding job, things like that.

At the same time as people have been leaving, new folks have been joining. In fact, we're bigger now than we were a year ago, so more folks have been joining than have left. Some of the folks in the squad have been playing  WvW for eight to ten years, others are fairly new, some are brand new. Of course, there are things in WvW that my guildies and I are not happy about but the game is still engaging enough to keep us  coming back every day. Today, we were running a squad of 35-40 people and had some heavy fights along the way so clearly we are not the only ones still playing WvW.

Edited June 18, 2023 by Chichimec.9364

[Zepoolpe.9217]

To avoid TL:DR, I'll sum up all my reasons in one word: Anet.

Edited June 25, 2023 by Zepoolpe.9217

[Justine.6351]

Because,

Nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf nerf...

[Thron Stal.9367]

On 6/17/2023 at 9:41 PM, DanAlcedo.3281 said:

Disclaimer: These are the 3 big reasons people left WvW and Gw2 from personal experience. 

 

1. Specialization and Stab rework. 

Before the change, it was common for us to have 20+ Warriors in our daily 40+ guild zergs. People LOVED  to play that class and scream HAMMERSTUN over TS in unison. 

The reworks killed Warrior outright and created a pure Pirate Ship meta. 

I have seen so many people quit because the fun they had was gone. 

 

2. HoT gear. 

Before HoT, you could simply play Wvw and use your Tokens to buy gear. 

With Hot, we got Marauder, Minstrel and Trailblazer stats. Crazy strong Sigils and runes. Even OP food. 

And all of it required to play hundred of hours of PvE. Be it the mastery grind, currency grind or just money grind. 

It was also inconvenient For example. Having to craft your own food for every raid instead of just buying it cheap from the tp. 

Recruitment was a massiv pain in the butt. 

Having to tell new players that having them around is a negativ without them Grinding for 2-3 weeks in pve for gear. 

Wvw players want to play Wvw. Not being forced to play PvE. 

That was the biggest quit wave I have seen. 

 

3. The Meta. 

Not only brought HoT insane powercreep to the game and reinforced the pirate ship meta. *cough* Release CoR *cough*

It was also sheer aids throughout. 

The condi meta. 

Remember old Condi Reaper and old epidemic? 

Add stealth Bugs to it, where the enemy zerg could kill you before they unstealth. 

People hated it. So much so that it was the last big wave of people quitting that I personally witnessed. 

Anet even once nerfed the only counter to the condi meta. That was the last straw for many people I knew. 

 

 

What are the reasons you witnessed that made people quit? 

 

 

So true

[Thron Stal.9367]

On 6/18/2023 at 12:01 AM, Deniara Devious.3948 said:

Almost complete lack of communication from Arenanet and developers. (if you communicate in reddit or somewhere else, why even have these official forums?). Arenanet also seems hostile towards communication, since match up threads aren't allowed. Now imagine any competitive group sports or esports, where you are not allowed to discuss actual match ups.

Word!

[Thron Stal.9367]

On 6/18/2023 at 8:28 AM, floppypuppy.5789 said:

Nope, you missed the point completely.  Specifically the necessity of high skill Firebrands caused a large wave of people to leave gw2, not some nebulous generic issues.

To this day far more players prefer to just log out if there is a lack of firebrands than to endure playing one.

No one wants to play one now thanks to ANET who keeps making them worsse and worse. 

[apharma.3741]

Stab changes.
Dan summed this up himself but for most people it was simply the pirate ship meta as we called it then and everyone hated it. First group to go in just died to endless CC. Remember back then there was no target cap on all ground targeted CC skills and there was no ICD on removing stacks of stab. It was just boring seeing 2 zergs standing there ranged attacking, faking a push then cowering back, going on for 10 minutes till someone said kitten it and pushed and died.

HoT (multiple reasons).
Some of this was covered but really it was a lot of things and it followed on from the above stab changes to make a really crippling blow to WvW that it has never recovered from.
First HoT brought desert border ON ALL BORDERS and almost no-one liked it. It was common to see hundreds of people queued for EBG while every other border was empty. It was despised by many and was harder to get around than now due to verticality, often you'd be on a cliff with no way down and have to run for 5 mins to get to the lower section. Awful, just awful.
Add in the power creep, stats creep and meta, this was covered by Dan, we went from groups fearing to push each other to boon balling into each other endlessly because everyone had so much defensive power you had to co-ordinate corrupt a single necro then hammer bash them out of the group immediately to prevent a fast rez. You would even see a guardian running JI just to start a stomp and finish it on the downed player. It was awful and the reason one of my closest friends quit the game including her guild.
We were also sold elite specs as a side grade and they were a straight, massive upgrade with many really awful mechanics on top of core and we had dev silence for months on balance and meaningful changes while pro league went on. This video is from a year and a half after HoT launched but it gives you an idea of how much of a mess and how much broken stuff was in the game back then, this was entirely possible at HoT launch and you even had an AoE distortion/blurr well at the time:

PoF and the future.
This is where WvW was left to slow bleed but with PoF came the warclaw and any form of roaming had the final nail put in the coffin and thrown in the ditch. Roamers couldn't fight for more than 1-2 minutes before another person turned up on a warclaw and then you were on the wrong side of the balance equation and often more would turn up and you can't run away from them. Small to large scale also suffered here because more people or a zerg would show up promptly so if you didn't take something within 2 minutes then you were swamped with enemies which has led to zergs turning up, building 5 or more rams/catapults to get in as quick as possible then waypoint. Often with some servers (you know who you are) they would just leave and waypoint if someone got in and invuln was available. I've seen a lot of people just leave after PoF or play significantly less.
At this point all hope has been lost and older people just play to meme and mess around, new players just see it as some kind of farm and don't even bother to learn how to play it. Just follow commander and auto.

The absolute biggest loss was the stab changes and HoT following just after that was fixed, it resulted in this linked server system as population had declined so much. Many of my friends were just kittened off from it in WvW, not all of them left immediately but it started the ball rolling and when a shiny new game came out they left. Some might say bronze was empty, I was in last bronze and yes it was pretty empty but tier 7 and 8 were still relatively lively, about what I've seen in the beta off hours. We also have to remember before HoT Edge of the mists had a lot of people running around it all day as they queued for gold tier servers.

[adammantium.8031]

Lack of support for guild vs guild combat. The days long ago of zerg busting and community-driven gvg events were glorious, but short-lived. A lot of serious players lost interest when that didn't go anywhere.

Disappointment over alliances delay. Saw a good number of people come back and get hyped for alliances years ago, but just lose patience (obviously) and left again.

That said, I'm not down with the doom-mongering premise of this post. There are still plenty of players as the game is doing well as a whole. And I am broadly hopeful that alliances will solve population problems.