Studio update makes it look like the game is abandoned

[Vayne.8563]

On 9/17/2023 at 4:23 AM, Izzy.2951 said:

IBS was a living world release. IBS maps had way more quality and new assets/enemy models and animations. We had way more strikes with actually new bosses not reused ones like Boneskinner just as an example. IBS metas are still way more played and better than the Metas in SoTo.

So basically having in mind that IBS (aside masteries and DRMS) is x10 times better than SoTo is concerning at least. Specially since we know a dev stated they ordered to do an open end for gw2 with the ending of LWS4 and ppl called IBS the worst era of gw2 even maintenace mode.

People can keep dreaming, but the resources put on gw2 and the state of the game is pretty bad and concerning. Actually we are going down the the same path as gw1 did until gw2: QoL updates, balance, automated bonus events, outfits and some story (gw:beyond) now we get reused maps for it at least.

 

Boneskinner was a creature from the open world in Bjora Marches.

[Vayne.8563]

On 9/17/2023 at 5:55 AM, Kozumi.5816 said:

This is the biggest issue with EoD and especially SotO. They released "one and done" expansions for a live service MMO. Their leadership does not know how to make a MMO and never will, it's been 11 years and they're still incapable of learning.

Maybe, but I don't play other MMOs I play this because I like it better. Maybe you need to stop using your definition of an MMO as the defacto definition of what an MMO should be. If you mean they don't know how to make a WoW clone, you'd be right. Or at least this game wasn't meant to be like other MMOs. If you wanted a bog standard MMO, there are plenty of choices. I've played many of them and ended up here, because most MMOs suck... at least for my demographic.

Edited September 18, 2023 by Vayne.8563

[Kozumi.5816]

5 minutes ago, Vayne.8563 said:

Maybe, but I don't play other MMOs I play this because I like it better. Maybe you need to stop using your definition of an MMO as the defacto definition of what an MMO should be. If you mean they don't know how to make a WoW clone, you'd be right. Or at least this game wasn't meant to be like other MMOs. If you wanted a bog standard MMO, there are plenty of choices. I've played many of them and ended up here, because most MMOs suck... at least for my demographic.

MMO doesn't mean WoW clone. MMO means repeatable content and long term goals, not a single player one and done experience.

Edited September 18, 2023 by Kozumi.5816

[Vayne.8563]

1 minute ago, Kozumi.5816 said:

MMO doesn't mean WoW clone. MMO means repeatable content and not a single player one and done experience.

Plenty of repeatable content here, you just don't want to repeat it. Tell me if you weren't into instanced content and you wanted to play open world stuff, and you're not into PvP, what games are there. This is a game focused on the open world. Lots of people repeat meta events all the time and enjoy them. You don't get to define what repeatably content is. There has always been room for a game focused on the open world. And you may not care about that content, or find it fun, but obviously someone does.  You do not get to define what makes an MMO.

In fact, arguably, sitting in a city waiting for a queue to pop so  you can play with 10 people in a group is less of an MMO that the metas in HOT, or even Dragonstorm or Tequatl.

[DarcShriek.5829]

22 hours ago, MalekithDG.6124 said:

I dont think the OP is a simple doomer like you described man. Do you have any arguments regarding his/her concerns? Seem pretty based to me... I mean can you argue to me that from the standpoint of raids/dungeons/pvp/wvw that this game is alive? When was the last content added to those?

We all know SotO wont be the last expansion. We all know there will be more overworld stuff, more strikes, more fractals, more masteries, new mechanics etc. BUT those are what we have left, everything else is abandoned and uncatered. OP's concerns are that there is nothing of value being talked or none of the issues are being addressed by ANET. If they keep adding random mechanics like weaponmaster training or new weapons without frequent balance patches, strikes without addressing powercreep, new maps with lots of reused assets and metas with unfun gameplay then we cant really say the game is alive even though population is top tier and content keeps coming.

Death of a game occurs on different levels. Competitive scene dies long before game does for example...

Raids were dead before they even started.  Not enough people interested.  So, they were replaced with strike missions, which are strongly supported.  The design was changed to meet the desires of the community. 

Dungeons were replaced with Fractals in less than a year.  Seriously, if you judge the state of the game from dungeons, you are majorly off track.  Fractals are supported.  Currently, a fractal rush is taking place.

Yeah, PVP is in a bad place.  It has been for years and doesn't seem to be affecting the overall health of the game.

WvW is pretty much the same state since HoT.  Again, the popularity of the game has waxed and waned during this time.  WvW doesn't seem to be affecting the overall health of this game very much.

Seriously, you chose something that hasn't been supported for 10 years to claim that GW2 is dying.  You seem to be playing the long game with your predictions of doom and gloom.  Usually, after a decade, people realize they may be wrong.  But not you.  Keep the faith.

Edited September 19, 2023 by DarcShriek.5829

[Kozumi.5816]

4 hours ago, Vayne.8563 said:

Plenty of repeatable content here, you just don't want to repeat it. Tell me if you weren't into instanced content and you wanted to play open world stuff, and you're not into PvP, what games are there. This is a game focused on the open world. Lots of people repeat meta events all the time and enjoy them. You don't get to define what repeatably content is. There has always been room for a game focused on the open world. And you may not care about that content, or find it fun, but obviously someone does.  You do not get to define what makes an MMO.

In fact, arguably, sitting in a city waiting for a queue to pop so  you can play with 10 people in a group is less of an MMO that the metas in HOT, or even Dragonstorm or Tequatl.

I actually do get to define what repeatable content is.

Content that doesn't give rewards worth re-doing is not repeatable. If you do not need legendary armor, rifts and SotO meta rewards are so pathetic they are not worth doing.

SotO strikes do not give enough meaningful rewards to be worth repeating outside of once per WEEK, and it's not really worth the effort of gathering 9 other people for 5g.

All of SotO is "one and done" unless you need legendary armor - and even then, rifts are so ungodly boring and repetitive they're still trash repeatable content, on top of the two new meta's being awful, one being a literal loot pinata that doesn't even fight back.

Edited September 19, 2023 by Kozumi.5816

[Vayne.8563]

9 minutes ago, Kozumi.5816 said:

I actually do get to define what repeatable content is.

Content that doesn't give rewards worth re-doing is not repeatable. If you do not need legendary armor, rifts and SotO meta rewards are so pathetic they are not worth doing.

SotO strikes do not give enough meaningful rewards to be worth repeating outside of once per WEEK, and it's not really worth the effort of gathering 9 other people for 5g.

All of SotO is "one and done" unless you need legendary armor - and even then, rifts are so ungodly boring and repetitive they're still trash repeatable content, on top of the two new meta's being awful, one being a literal loot pinata that doesn't even fight back.

Sorry but it's not true. You don't get to  define. Do you have any idea of how many people do Tequatl or Dragonstorm daily? Some people have a list of daily stuff they do that's so long they have no time for anything else. The assumptions you're making are that everyone plays like you or everyone is looking for the same types of rewards.  Dragonstorm gives you five gold worth of stuff, for about 12 minutes.  But your definition of an MMO is still just that, your defintion. It has nothing to do with reality except your reality.

To me this game is MORE of an MMO than any MMO I've played.

[Astralporing.1957]

1 hour ago, Vayne.8563 said:

Sorry but it's not true. You don't get to  define. Do you have any idea of how many people do Tequatl or Dragonstorm daily?

Do you know what Tequatl and Dragonstorm have in common? They are not SotO content.

[Vayne.8563]

2 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Do you know what Tequatl and Dragonstorm have in common? They are not SotO content.

Massively true. I picked two super profitable things. Fishing is also very profitable and some people do that. See, this is a themepark MMO in the true sense of the word and everyone gets to decide what to do, in a wide range of things to do. It's odd that way. In every other MMO everyone is sitting at the end of the newest zone doing just that, and that sucked badly. In the game, everyone is spread out doing different things. Almost like a theme park.

A lot of peeople hated the last meta of EOD, and some people liked it and it still gets done today. AB is like space mountain because most people ride it. It's okay that other features are used by other people. Some people really do want open world legendary armor and they're doing that content. Some people don't care. Some people want the stuff from Soto and they're doing that content. I really enjoy one of two zones of Soto and I spend time there. It doesn't matter that it's not the most profitable content, because everything can't be. Took fishing a while to catch on with some people too, but as a solo farming activity it's relatively popular.

It's great to make a fun joke and try to throw off what I've tried to say but I've done the Amytas Meta a decent amount this week, and that's not even my favorite of the two. Shrugs.

[MalekithDG.6124]

14 hours ago, DarcShriek.5829 said:

Raids were dead before they even started.  Not enough people interested.  So, they were replaced with strike missions, which are strongly supported.  The design was changed to meet the desires of the community. 

Dungeons were replaced with Fractals in less than a year.  Seriously, if you judge the state of the game from dungeons, you are majorly off track.  Fractals are supported.  Currently, a fractal rush is taking place.

Yeah, PVP is in a bad place.  It has been for years and doesn't seem to be affecting the overall health of the game.

WvW is pretty much the same state since HoT.  Again, the popularity of the game has waxed and waned during this time.  WvW doesn't seem to be affecting the overall health of this game very much.

Seriously, you chose something that hasn't been supported for 10 years to claim that GW2 is dying.  You seem to be playing the long game with your predictions of doom and gloom.  Usually, after a decade, people realize they may be wrong.  But not you.  Keep the faith.

I dont have faith man, I dropped the game. Will be back after wing 8 or hefty WvW update, alliances wont cut it at this point. I wish you enjoyable strikes though.

[Futa.4375]

I have a serious question: did most of the team take a break right after the release of SotO? If so, what kind of business goes on vacation before making sure that most things are fixed in a timely fashion?
SotO introduced a massive amount of broken things, we got very little fixes and it almost has been a month since release.

Edited September 19, 2023 by Futa.4375

[eutha six.5647]

Not abandoned, but it looks as if it was passed down to the second string 

[babana.7521]

this thread has veer off its course so badly, its not about the topic anymore. 

[Kozumi.5816]

4 hours ago, Futa.4375 said:

I have a serious question: did most of the team take a break right after the release of SotO? If so, what kind of business goes on vacation before making sure that most things are fixed in a timely fashion?
SotO introduced a massive amount of broken things, we got very little fixes and it almost has been a month since release.

It's a very good question and what I've been asking for weeks now.

[zaced.7948]

it seems that it's abandoned because it mostly is. apparently already during IBS anet was supposed to put gw2 into maintenance mode and be pulled off to another game by ncsoft. i assume that project failed so they got put to work on gw2 again while ncsoft figure out how to make more money with anet than gw2 does.

from what is publicly known half the staff has been fired so they're running on half capacity and i don't think there is much investment coming in from ncsoft. it seems that they're also putting off-season events on automatic rotation which to me is a sign that probably a big chunk of devs at anet are working on automating whatever they can in the game.

i predict after soto we will get one even smaller expac, maybe two if ncsoft can't figure out until then what to do with anet and then the game will join gw1 in maintenance mode town. so we probably have around 2-3 years of semi-active development on gw2 left. i wouldn't expect much from it. and since the server costs for gw2 are probably significantly higher than gw1 (which can probably be run on an abacus) it might even get shut down completely in a relatively short timeframe.

 

and obviously they are not going to address any issues with the game. there isn't much time to milk the very last bit out of what is there. broken builds and 50k dps seem like something they actually want since it trivialises content and allowes even the mechanically impaired or the lazy or the unwilling to breeze through content and farm some instant gratification. after all those people are by far the largest demographic of gw2.

and i wouldn't expect for fractals or anything actually to be fixed. not anytime soon, perhaps not ever. bugfixes are time consuming and don't generate income. you will have to get used to the fact that gw2 is in it's geriatric years now. things will break that can't be fixed or aren't worth fixing.

 

actually, a good comparison would be guild wars beyond. those were pieces of content still developed until the end (which were never finished btw, they just abandoned the elona chapter of beyond) but with a lot of reused assets, some reskins and just in general a bunch of tying loose ends and some story tchotchkes to try to keep players tied to the franchise until gw2 release. soto is exactly that, so expect about just that. it seems to me some people are expecting some kind of renaissance for gw2 from soto but i'm fairly certain those people will be very sad in two or three years.

Edited September 20, 2023 by zaced.7948

[Mistwraithe.3106]

25 minutes ago, zaced.7948 said:

it seems that it's abandoned because it mostly is. apparently already during IBS anet was supposed to put gw2 into maintenance mode and be pulled off to another game by ncsoft. i assume that project failed so they got put to work on gw2 again while ncsoft figure out how to make more money with anet than gw2 does.

from what is publicly known half the staff has been fired so they're running on half capacity and i don't think there is much investment coming in from ncsoft. it seems that they're also putting off-season events on automatic rotation which to me is a sign that probably a big chunk of devs at anet are working on automating whatever they can in the game.

Wow. So what you are saying is that Anet have been lying about expanding the dev team and all their future plans? You have secret sources which know what is actually going on and we should believe you over them (and over what we have seen with our own eyes over the last couple of years) because you said so?

This whole thread is pretty pointless. Fortunately those of us that disagree with OP can move on from this thread and enjoy playing the game...

Edited September 20, 2023 by Mistwraithe.3106

[Kozumi.5816]

10 minutes ago, Mistwraithe.3106 said:

Wow. So what you are saying is that Anet have been lying about expanding the dev team and all their future plans? You have secret sources which know what is actually going on and we should believe you over them (and over what we have seen with our own eyes over the last couple of years) because you said so?

This whole thread is pretty pointless. Fortunately those of us that disagree with OP can move on from this thread and enjoy playing the game...

Btw, they said "alliances this year" in 2021. It's now 2023. I wouldn't put much weight into Anets word.

Edited September 20, 2023 by Kozumi.5816

[zaced.7948]

30 minutes ago, Mistwraithe.3106 said:

Wow. So what you are saying is that Anet have been lying about expanding the dev team and all their future plans? You have secret sources which know what is actually going on and we should believe you over them (and over what we have seen with our own eyes over the last couple of years) because you said so?

i don't have any insight in anet but as a software dev for many years, having worked for a fair amount of companies i'm seeing patterns that i have seen before. time will tell but i wouldn't be overly optimistic.

and it's not like any company would publicly say anything that damages its income until the very last moment.

[Vayne.8563]

44 minutes ago, Kozumi.5816 said:

Btw, they said "alliances this year" in 2021. It's now 2023. I wouldn't put much weight into Anets word.

We said alliances. Anet never called it that. They called it World Restructuring, which is still coming. Alliances was only a small part of that, to appease the WvW vets who were complaining about not being able to play with their friends anymore. Alliances were the biggest problem with the system. We've had several world restructuring updates without alliances already and each one was better than the one before.

The very fact that the community things World Restructuring and Alliances are the same thing is exactly the reason why you can't listen to them.

[Vayne.8563]

6 hours ago, Futa.4375 said:

I have a serious question: did most of the team take a break right after the release of SotO? If so, what kind of business goes on vacation before making sure that most things are fixed in a timely fashion?
SotO introduced a massive amount of broken things, we got very little fixes and it almost has been a month since release.

I don't know, I counted a lot of fixes in the last patch and the patches before that and there are fixes that aren't listed in the patch notes as well. If you think the fixes in that two week patch indicates a team on vacation, I don't know what to tell you, but I can tell you your expectations are unrealistic.

[Poormany.4507]

1 hour ago, Mistwraithe.3106 said:

Wow. So what you are saying is that Anet have been lying about expanding the dev team and all their future plans? You have secret sources which know what is actually going on and we should believe you over them (and over what we have seen with our own eyes over the last couple of years) because you said so?

Anet said IBS is "expansion level" content too, and that clearly wasn't true. As mentioned, they won't publicly come out and say they're investing less into the game, if they actually are. SotO, and to a lesser extent EoD, had a ton more obvious reuse and cut corners than any of the previous expacs did, while already being a mini-expac with less maps/new features.  So it seems reasonable that many players are concerned that Anet's either running on a much smaller staff team than before at the expense of content and/or they're siphoning off resources/staff to side projects (again).

Edited September 20, 2023 by Poormany.4507

[QueenKeriti.5176]

15 minutes ago, Poormany.4507 said:

Anet said IBS is "expansion level" content too

IBS did come out with Grothmar, Bjora pt 1 and 2, Drizzlewood pt 1 and 2 (all of those maps with their own meta events), EOTN, the godawful DRMs that could have been turned into something if they weren't all crunched last minute, multiple masteries (EM Pulse, anyone?), and probably some other stuff I'm not remembering. That's pretty expansion level, tbqh. Honestly, the setup for the story pre-Champions actually had promise that I was excited for.

I wouldn't be surprised if NCsoft got pissed at Anet over IBS (likely because you don't tend to make money by giving away content for free, and it is kinda crazy that LW was free for as long as it was) and told Anet to drop IBS and make EoD as a fast cash grab, which was then rushed but got the gist of the dragon saga over with. It didn't help that COVID happened right when Drizzlewood came out, which affected everything back then. Drizzlewood's episodes + Bangar in his cage weren't even voiced until quite a while later.

While I've heard the story of SoTO is better, and I'm happy the writers are getting into more of the stories they wanted to tell, I feel like the SoTO in general is another "we pivoted at the last second on what we were working on (for whatever leadership decision or other) and had to drop what we were originally planning (Gyala and the oni and stuff), so we had to put something together as fast as we could and try to make it look nice." 🙃

 

[Kozumi.5816]

57 minutes ago, Vayne.8563 said:

We said alliances. Anet never called it that. They called it World Restructuring, which is still coming. Alliances was only a small part of that, to appease the WvW vets who were complaining about not being able to play with their friends anymore. Alliances were the biggest problem with the system. We've had several world restructuring updates without alliances already and each one was better than the one before.

The very fact that the community things World Restructuring and Alliances are the same thing is exactly the reason why you can't listen to them.

O....k?

In a 2021 official blog post the company announced alliances were "THIS YEAR". In 2021.

[Vayne.8563]

6 minutes ago, Kozumi.5816 said:

O....k?

In a 2021 official blog post the company announced alliances were "THIS YEAR". In 2021.

Yep, and then a lot of stuff happened. Covid, people moving to amazon, change of company leadership, sure. But, World Restructuring, the IMPORTANT part of what we've been calling Alliances is still happening. The fact that some WvW players who post here can't seem to get that straight is why I said what I said.

[IAmNotMatthew.1058]

23 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Do you know what Tequatl and Dragonstorm have in common? They are not SotO content.

I love how Dragonstorm is being heralded as good content, while people tried to drag it through glass on release for being boring, too long and unrewarding.

Turns out like with most metas in GW2, adjusting the rewards and gameplay down the line makes them good, who would have thought that?