Best and Worst Decisions Anet has made?

[DakotaCoty.5721]

@Helbjorne.9368 said:Worst:

• Refusing to balance PvP and PvE separately

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ This, really.

[Fractured.3928]

@Azoqu.8917 said:

@GreyWolf.8670 said:

@Fractured.3928 said:

@Helbjorne.9368 said:

@Shirlias.8104 said:I don't see the problem.For every single elitist which needs a player in party which is with perfect build and rotation, there will be plenty who don't care about it.They could be toxic, i do understand, but if so why do you would join em?

Because they want to just press 1 and get carried through content, and with DPS meters it shows that's exactly what they're doing, and they're upset about getting called out.

Found the toxic person that was being talked about in the quoted post.

Yup.

Well he's not wrong. If you have a group of friends that enjoy your company and are willing to group with you through content, then that's great. If you're PUGing, everyone should be expected to carry their own weight and not holding the majority of the group back. Yes players from both sides need to get better at reading LFG messages, good players joining casual runs should not complain about DPS and should provide tips when appropriate, while casual players should not be joining groups looking for "exp" or "speed run" and complaining that they got kicked for doing bad DPS and being called out for it.

As for the topic on hand, here are a few issues (not best or worst, but good and bad):Good - Raids and creating a combat system that rewards good play and not just good gear. 100cm is also equally amazing.Bad - Allowing Legendaries to be able to be bought by credit cards (at least they fixed this somewhat by making you have to do some stuff, though still too much money associated with them).

You're right, I won't deny that. But to go on a forums and basically make the assumption that anyone not for DPS meters is just an auto attack leech, is toxic, and doesn't help any argument.

[Chadramar.8156]

Worst:

• Gendered armor. I'll never not utterly hate this.
• Raids, and any story being gated away behind them.
• "Esports".
• Not keeping PvP and PvE completely separate.
• The levelling system overhaul. I'd never want to have to start from scratch again, thank goodness for scrolls and tomes.
• The direction of the post-PS story development away from the Pact and "this is my story" to being a faceless bystander to NPC drama-llamaing. None of whom even seem to like me (the "old guard" Caithe and Rytlock aside, plus maybe Canach), but hog all my attention and support whenever it suits them anyway while never giving anything back.
• Taimi and Braham in particular, and Eir's pitiful fridging solely for his story instead of developing what should have been a "legendary" character.
• The rush-job that was HoT 's story, its various unfinished plot points, and the utter nonsense that the Elder Dragon of Mind's weakness (a BS concept in and of itself IMO) is its mind.
• The terrible build and role diversity.
• No UI customization.
• The massive human bias when it comes to pretty much all aesthetics. Where's all the sylvari, charr and norn stuff so my characters can look the part?

Best:

• Sylvari, in looks and lore.
• Charr, in looks and lore.
• Gliding (and the special gliding skills in Bloodstone Fen).
• Mounts.
• The wardrobe system.
• The Caladbolg mini-story.
• The early cultural chapters of the personal story.
• The concept of the Pact in the personal story. I loved the idea of everyone coming together like that.
• The first visit of the Zephyrites was a lot of fun.

[Fractured.3928]

Am I the only person who thinks Taimi is awesome? She is the only "lively" character in the group, and I think she is fun. She is pretty much "convenience trope" incarnate, and wouldn't mind if they removed that a bit. But I really like her character.

[Sir Vincent III.1286]

@Fractured.3928 said:Am I the only person who thinks Taimi is awesome? She is the only "lively" character in the group, and I think she is fun. She is pretty much "convenience trope" incarnate, and wouldn't mind if they removed that a bit. But I really like her character.

Nope, read up.

[Silmar Alech.4305]

worst (means for me: these take away the fun):

• ever-overflowing loot which essentially no value of individual items that leads to significant inventory management time requirement
• the tiny number of charges in recycle kits and harvesting tools
• no build templates
• not being able to freely reconfigure traits (at game release)
• abandonment of dungeons; not enough instanced group content
• combat system allows way too huge difference between damage output of good and bad players. A good player does 10 times more damage than a bad player, and more
• white, blue and green equipment is totally useless
• requirement to get new equipment items for every new attribute combination. Not being able to consolidate multiple attribute sets into one piece of equipment
• build-, equipment-, equipment-upgrade system way too complex
• no normal/hard mode: game is too difficult for casual players and too easy for hardcore players
• character-specific color unlocks (at game release)
• no skin unlocks (at game release; wardrobe remedied this)
• no guide for new players to show how to play (npe is guide that only introduces and shows the game features, but not how to use them in the intended way)
• in HoT you need the masteries to level the masteries in a comfortable and joyful way. Deadlock; leads to not playing HoT, which leads to not leveling masteries, which leads to not playing HoT.
• grindy nested collections, mainly in HoT. If you want a higher collection, you are forced to do lower collections fully, altough you don't need and don't want these.
• one or two atrociously expensive rare items in many of the collections
• huge cost to transfer worlds for WvW
• production of legendary raid armor, but no legendary pve armor (raids are pve, but raid armor is not available for all but the tiniest fraction of pve players. It is not even available for most of the raid players)
• the temporary nature of living story season 1
• to not do anything about the motion sickness induced by riding the mounts in the upcoming PoF expansion. Cannot buy PoF because of this, which leads to leaving the game

[Sylvari.2953]

Best:Autoloot, salvage all option, "passes" (like Royal Terrace) and other QoL features.Gliding and mounts.Aesthetics and map exploration.No new level cap and gear tier (+ craftable endgame gear).No gender/race locked classes and no powerful racials.No monthly subscription and premium accounts.Not pay to win.

Worst:Outfits. Huge step back from trasmutation.Neglecting dungeons and underwater combat.Allowing dps meters.Raids (unpopular opinion). They should have made challenging open world content and new dungeons instead.No replayable Living World season 1.Nerfing the hell out of Necros.

[Figlilly.3907]

The wallet, the wardrobe, shared inventory slots, gliding, convenience tools, the megaserver. There are many other things I admire about GW2, but these are the things that have been introduced since I started playing. I would hate to go back to the days before them.

Edit: I forgot this but I was so happy when the WvW lands were no longer required for world completion. Doing that, for a non WvW-er, was a pain in the neck. Actually, it got me into WvW for a little while so it did accomplish its goal if that is what it was. Was relieved when I no longer had to do it after my first two characters though. To me, that was a bad decision made right.

[Game of Bones.8975]

Bad: Introducing underwater exploration/combat, but not expanding on itGood: Not expanding on underwater exploration/combat

I think they had good intentions with adding the Z-dimension (jumping, flying, falling, swimming), but the swimming adventures never took off.

[ilMasa.2546]

Worst decision: Blindly Pushing and wasting resources/time into the "E-sport" thing.Best decision: Dump the whole "E-sport" thing.

[STIHL.2489]

Best Creating a horizontal end game that focused on the acquisition of cosmetic gear as opposed to the pursuit of more power.

Worst Revising the once abundant horizontal end game into a few select game modes that focused on the pursuit of more power and special abilities.

Best Fractals, mainly the way they reworked them to be more accessible and enjoyable.

Worst Abandoning Dungeons. Now to be clear, what made this bad was that they simply abandoned dungeons. A better choice would have been to Keep the Story dungeons in Place, alive and well, and revamp the Explorer paths into new Fractals, where they rewarded both their respective dungeon token, and fractal rewards.

Best The very Idea of WvW. Great Idea!

Worst Pretty much leaving WvW to die away with almost no development or care over it's early formative years, so now it's just K-train for the most part.

Best sPvP & WvW Tracks and Rewards. A bit on the Too Little/too late side, but.. still a great addition to the sPvP/WvW game mode.

Worst Using PvE classes in a PvP Arena/environment (This also applies to WvW), that has never worked. Anet should have made unique classes for PvP that were more balanced and designed to face off against each other.

Best Dynamic Events,World Bosses. These are Awesome!

Worst HoT maps.. well.. maybe 1 or even 2 of those multi tiered maps would not have been so bad if they were broken up by more easy to transverse maps between them. I mean really they could have pumped out like 8 maps for the effort they put into the 4 they made, and would have wager that players would have liked the 8 maps more.

[Conncept.7638]

Worst: The active defense system being separated from all other game systems. Or in laymans terms, that dodge is not affected by build choice, and is a catch-all against all offensive build choices. The developers decision to deal with this without making a new system to support defensive build choices damned the game to three years of dodge-or-die berserker meta, inspired the content of a horrible expansion where most classes had to slot a strict defensive meta just to deal with frustratingly spammed and generally ill-thought-out mechanics, and caused the games "elite" content the developers heralded for years as something new and different, to just be watered down trinity content you can find in nearly any other MMO, void of any strategic or tactical depth. Just real time puzzles in a combat setting, you figure out the patterns and comply, in exactly the same way every run. Raids aren't bad content, but they are just souped up and more harshly timed and tallied versions of existing content, and GW2s developers said they were going to do something new and different, and in the end they just didn't.

This one mistake has lead to years of bandaid solutions, coverups, and compromises; if they had just addressed this from the start the last 4-5 years would have gone better in pretty much every imaginable way. But instead they just forced out content without a combat system that gave players any reason to repeat content, experiment with playstyles and builds, or improve their skill level. In the end all that content only served to burn themselves out and disappoint and alienate the lions share of their playerbase in the process.

Runners up for worst: Having an RNG reward system, gear acquisition being so inconsistent and complicated it requires a freaking encyclopedia to figure out how to get a build, lying to the playerbase about specializations being powercreep/specializations even being powercreep in the first place.

BEST: You know I didn't think it would be at first but this post sat for a good hour while I thought about this, and this category is hard to make a decision in, because they really have done a lot of good things, to the point that nothing really stands out above the others. The most wide reaching is probably specializations, while I have my gripes it was a really good compromise between the MMO tradition of adding new classes and new abilities (with new levels) to each class, and the GW tradition of adding new skills without adding a level grind. The changes to the armor system that removed basic/advanced transmutation charges (or whatever they were called) was great. I still want more inventory management systems but everything you guys have done in that area so far has been spot on. The new LS maps and PS instances have been great as well. I don't do fractals but honestly past the first month or so of whining that typically follows any change whatsoever, I've heard nothing but good things.

Honestly if we exempt HoT, and a few combat system decisions which I believe to be responsible for how bad HoT was in the first place, most of what they developers have done on this game has been incredibly good, even if I, and pretty much everyone else, frequently forget that and give them an overly hard time on the rare occasions they do make a mistake.

[Tabasco.1743]

Best!

1. ♫ pleasant alarm jingle ♫ GOOD-MORNING. GOOD-MORNING. GOOD-MORNING.
2. "By Ogden's hammer, what savings!"
3. Old Lion's Arch. T_T
4. The Wardrobe system. Best of any mmo.
5. Chauncey Von Snuffles III.
6. The Sylvari character creator. The artists and animators need to be credited.
7. The crafting system, and account-wide material storage. THANKYOU.

Not the best:

1. dungeon team dissolved.
2. The aura effect nerfs on player characters in PvE.
3. The orders of Tyria disappearing from the story. (I was a Magister of the Durmand Priory. I miss reporting to Gixx, and going on missions of exploration from the factions.)
4. Town clothes tonics. no thx.
5. "By Ogden's hammer, what savings!" --IS NOT IN THE GAME. How am I supposed to know where the good deals are if I don't hear this Norn's declaration of savings?! I'm probably wasting money left and right.

[WARIORSCHARGEING.2637]

for me it is this

best free to play all you like

now where to even begin with the worst yeah its a very long list their .

DPS meters anet its self should have done already made it possible for the need of them to not to even been in the game at all

no hard ware up grades making the game better for us allBlindly Pushing and wasting resources/time into the "E-sports

underwater exploration/combat, not making it more better

dungeons no more

Raids blocked by elitism and proism thus making it so others can not even try to raid

the hot pack its self all together

Not keeping PvP and PvE completely separate and apart from each other

living story its selfliving story maps

No UI customization.Trahearn and all his talking and never shutting up

New Player Experience

Elite Specs

Balance patches every 3 months

doss attacks

meta eventsJumping PuzzlessPvP

Refusing to update/ optimize their engine

Stating that updating/ overhauling GW2's graphics would be "too much work" but yet they could fix super adventure box

Ignoring issues with existing content in favor of pushing new content

Removing Thumbs Down

Meta Event Chains

Town clothes tonics

content guide

and the list goes on and onno 4K support

no multi cpu support

no SLI supportno new ryzen thread ripper support

no DX11

no HD sound

being forced to look at other web sites when forced to do events

price fixing for crafting ascended gear

price fixing for up grades

no guild events

noting for guilds to do

noting at all for guilds to offer players other than node farming

broken chat system

only 2 world events a year guild wars had many more

not making it so players need to go out and buy new bank or bag slots . when told about not putting all new mats into storagemaking players horde mats due to the other problem

devs not talking on official forums

no technical support mods or devs for that forum

long wait times on support tickets

not supporting guild wars

bugs and broken story lines and events

not fixing broken story events

bugs

now I do believe this fully covers it all for me personally

after playing this game since April 28, 2005 to now . playing guild wars 2 for this long . and not seen no changes that are need to this game .

after recent events today I went to my local game stop and canceled my deluxe path of fire pre purchase got my money backand will never buy another thing from this company ever again .

but still will play my account when I am not in the mood to play other games . it is just all these things over the years that has stopped making the game fun for me any more.

[Einlanzer.1627]

@Conncept.7638 said:Worst: The active defense system being separated from all other game systems. Or in laymans terms, that dodge is not affected by build choice, and is a catch-all against all offensive build choices. The developers decision to deal with this without making a new system to support defensive build choices damned the game to three years of dodge-or-die berserker meta, inspired the content of a horrible expansion where most classes had to slot a strict defensive meta just to deal with frustratingly spammed and generally ill-thought-out mechanics, and caused the games "elite" content the developers heralded for years as something new and different, to just be watered down trinity content you can find in nearly any other MMO, void of any strategic or tactical depth. Just real time puzzles in a combat setting, you figure out the patterns and comply, in exactly the same way every run. Raids aren't bad content, but they are just souped up and more harshly timed and tallied versions of existing content, and GW2s developers said they were going to do something new and different, and in the end they just didn't.

This one mistake has lead to years of bandaid solutions, coverups, and compromises; if they had just addressed this from the start the last 4-5 years would have gone better in pretty much every imaginable way. But instead they just forced out content without a combat system that gave players any reason to repeat content, experiment with playstyles and builds, or improve their skill level. In the end all that content only served to burn themselves out and disappoint and alienate the lions share of their playerbase in the process.

Runners up for worst: Having an RNG reward system, gear acquisition being so inconsistent and complicated it requires a freaking encyclopedia to figure out how to get a build, lying to the playerbase about specializations being powercreep/specializations even being powercreep in the first place.

BEST: You know I didn't think it would be at first but this post sat for a good hour while I thought about this, and this category is hard to make a decision in, because they really have done a lot of good things, to the point that nothing really stands out above the others. The most wide reaching is probably specializations, while I have my gripes it was a really good compromise between the MMO tradition of adding new classes and new abilities (with new levels) to each class, and the GW tradition of adding new skills without adding a level grind. The changes to the armor system that removed basic/advanced transmutation charges (or whatever they were called) was great. I still want more inventory management systems but everything you guys have done in that area so far has been spot on. The new LS maps and PS instances have been great as well. I don't do fractals but honestly past the first month or so of whining that typically follows any change whatsoever, I've heard nothing but good things.

Honestly if we exempt HoT, and a few combat system decisions which I believe to be responsible for how bad HoT was in the first place, most of what they developers have done on this game has been incredibly good, even if I, and pretty much everyone else, frequently forget that and give them an overly hard time on the rare occasions they do make a mistake.

I've made numerous posts over the years about how Vitality should affect endurance regeneration instead of or in addition to its effect on health. The fact that endurance regen is not affected by any defense stats is the primary reason offensive stats continue to reign supreme in almost all situations.

Because, I agree, having the combat system largely revolve around active defense, but then having active defense be divorced from all attributes and most aspects of character build is beyond silly.

[Alga.6498]

Best:The music, theme, soundtracks!Vanilla maps are so beautiful, I wish the new maps were too but.. yeah some of them are 'okayish'....Wardrobe system.Account-friendly system such as dyes, money, etc.The death of Trahearne.

Worst:Abandonment of Underwater content.Abandonment of dungeons.Cancelled of the Town Clothes system.Still no Paragon Elite Specs for neither Guardian OR Warrior as we head into Elona.Some NPCs still uses unique clothes, skins, armor as we players STILL can't have or equip it.Ending Eir's life from a random Mord mob.STILL no news for the Deep Sea Dragon, we'll prob be fighting this dragon on the freakin' land I'm sure.Taimi is ANet's posterbaby, she never SHUTS UP!!!Braham is still alive, along with the lame Dragon's Watch Guild and their boring heroes.Flashy oversized wings, colourful auras, supercancerous colours and weapons, the designers must be from Korea.Raids and raids-locked weapons such as the White Mantle. I want these skins to be purchable in a different way for us non-raiders.Abandonment cultural idea, story, armor, weapons- what's the point of playing other races while they're talking, can equip the same gear, etc the same?!?? There's no difference???! (except for vanilla story and older cultural armor+weapons)

[Helbjorne.9368]

@Fractured.3928 said:

@Helbjorne.9368 said:

@Shirlias.8104 said:I don't see the problem.For every single elitist which needs a player in party which is with perfect build and rotation, there will be plenty who don't care about it.They could be toxic, i do understand, but if so why do you would join em?

Because they want to just press 1 and get carried through content, and with DPS meters it shows that's exactly what they're doing, and they're upset about getting called out.

Found the toxic person that was being talked about in the quoted post.

I don't even PvE, I just think it's funny all these leeches are upset they can't get blindly carried anymore. If you want to get carried through content that's fine, but find a group for that. To not carry your own weight in a PUG is like inviting some acquaintances over to help you move with the offer of pizza and beer, then slowly packing one box while they do all the heavy lifting.

[Omar Aschi Popp.7496]

The first 2 replies say it plainly enough.Crash and burn

Literally every decision from the April 2014 patch to present day and POF is the worst.

EverySingleOne

You died in April for me.

I won't even bother with the list. None of you will read it.

[Rhanoa.3960]

@STIHL.2489 said:

• Best Creating a horizontal end game that focused on the acquisition of cosmetic gear as opposed to the pursuit of more power.
• Worst Revising the once abundant horizontal end game into a few select game modes that focused on the pursuit of more power and special abilities.
• Best Fractals, mainly the way they reworked them to be more accessible and enjoyable.
• Worst Abandoning Dungeons. Now to be clear, what made this bad was that they simply abandoned dungeons. A better choice would have been to Keep the Story dungeons in Place, alive and well, and revamp the Explorer paths into new Fractals, where they rewarded both their respective dungeon token, and fractal rewards.
• Best The very Idea of WvW. Great Idea!
• Worst Pretty much leaving WvW to die away with almost no development or care over it's early formative years, so now it's just K-train for the most part.
• Best sPvP & WvW Tracks and Rewards. A bit on the Too Little/too late side, but.. still a great addition to the sPvP/WvW game mode.
• Worst Using PvE classes in a PvP Arena/environment (This also applies to WvW), that has never worked. Anet should have made unique classes for PvP that were more balanced and designed to face off against each other.
• Best Dynamic Events,World Bosses. These are Awesome!
• Worst HoT maps.. well.. maybe 1 or even 2 of those multi tiered maps would not have been so bad if they were broken up by more easy to transverse maps between them. I mean really they could have pumped out like 8 maps for the effort they put into the 4 they made, and would have wager that players would have liked the 8 maps more.

Vertical Progression is OVERRATED done to DEATH!

[Bunter.3795]

Best:

Wardrobe system.Account wide dye system (should have been in game at launch)Shared inventory slots

Worst:

NPEadding raidsno colorblind modeabandoning dungeonslack of attention to WvWno separate pvp/wvw/pve balanceUnid loot

Best and worst:

Change to conditions. I appreciate that conditions were basically pointless before HoT and the system had to change but the affect it's had on wvw I could do without.

[Hyper Cutter.9376]

@Terrahero.9358 said:The NPE, most specifically the trait overhaul, was so terrible they had to overhaul the entire trait system again. That it even passed common sense and made it into the game still baffles me to this day. The new system is still, imo, worse than the old system that gave you much more freedom where you wanted to put your points and didn't make skill challenges seem to obsolete. All that system really needed was to be able to freely respec.The first trait system was a dumpster fire. When people would rather take multiple minor traits over a major or grandmaster one, something is very wrong.

There are existing traits that are combinations of old traits and they still don't get used, that's how bad the old traits were.

[IndigoSundown.5419]

Best Decision: Shared loot and harvesting nodes, which removed the competition for those things one finds in other games.Worst Decision: Traits 2.0, including, but not limited to, placing Adept traits (which became unlocked at L36) in L60 areas.

[kKagari.6804]

Worst: Spaghetti code so bad Arenanet admits it is difficult to do things that should be easy to do

[maddoctor.2738]

BestShared Loot and NodesActive Combat SystemCollectionsWardrobeGlidingDefiance BarRaids

WorstOutfitsTemporary contentStacking damage buffs

[Chadramar.8156]

@"Game of Bones.8975" said:Bad: Introducing underwater exploration/combat, but not expanding on itGood: Not expanding on underwater exploration/combat

Heh. Can't help but agree with you there. Underwater combat is a classic example of "great idea, terrible execution", but fixing it would eat a lot of resources that are badly needed elsewhere (such as completely splitting PvP/WvW completely from PvE).

@IndigoSundown.5419 said:Best Decision: Shared loot and harvesting nodes, which removed the competition for those things one finds in other games.

Can't believe I forgot this one! It's definitely a huge appeal.