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[ScatheZombie]

I haven't played since Heart of Thorns release, but before that the problems were...

Lack of a good progression system for end-game content.
Poorly balanced dungeons and group encounters.
RvR zerg-fests.
Constant sweeping itemization changes.
Content updates came either too slow or were too shallow.
Crafting system special materials with low drop rates.
Poor balance between average player wealth generation and basic play costs for gold.
Class trinity replacement largely removed distinct specializations and styles of play.

It's not a bad game. It just had a lot of serious systemic design issues that, while not game-breaking, actively dissuade traditional MMO players from continuing to play.

 

[Affeinvasion]

I loved the base game but the new areas they added before the expansion just felt like uninteresting grindfests. Especially the desert one. I assumed that the expansion would add more if the same so I stopped playing.

I think it does exploration better than any mmo and I absolutely loved the jumping puzzles.

 

[nan0]

I like healing, and GW2 doesn't let me be a healer.

It does, after Heart of Thorns. Healing Druid is a viable choice for Raids.


The issue is IMO that there is no classic endgame content like in other MMOs. There is no equipment grinding treadmill, and you kinda have to decide for yourself what you want to do. It's mostly getting rare armor/weapon skins and achievement hunting (which can be roughly compared to questing), but you can still decide your focus (PVP, Raids, Exploring, Fractals, WvW)

I personally stopped (after 30+ days /played with almost all classes) because there is no sense of progression except for maybe Fractals and the rare Living World updates.

 

[inky]

I played it quite a lot at launch but after around 300 hours the shine fell off.

It was OK, but for as much as it tried to distance itself from the staples of MMO design it didn't feel like it accomplished much of its own and a lot of people reneged about the changes. Like, I get all these things are different, I don't have to compete with other players for resource nodes! I don't have be specced tank to lfg! (they made up other requirements instead anyway), etc. just felt like minor variations instead of whole new ways of playing a game.

When it launched the quest rewards were terrible, the late areas unfinished and there wasn't much to do. I liked the crafting and WvW and jumping puzzles, but once you've done most of that was boring combat and broken quest chains.

I know a lot has changed, but every time I've tried going back I get bored around the 5 minute mark so I imagine I've moved on.

 

[ShdwDrake]

I've only played GW1. It seemed like the perfect game to bring to consoles (iirc it only used like 10 buttons on the hot bar, which easily fits on a controller; no subscription model; everything instanced so no massive zones with high populations except for town). I didn't play a ton, but it seems to be fairly similar to something like Destiny. I suspect the series would have a lot more visibility on console where there are fewer options for MMOs.

For me, it's a big bummer. I thought GW1 was really cool, but most of my friends are only on console, and the few friends I have who play a lot on PC and are interested in this style of game are already pretty happy with just playing WoW intermittently.

This is the biggest thing that actually killed Destiny for me. GW1 was the first thing I compared it to when I played it and it just didnt stack up.

 

[KKRT00]

I played quite a lot of it, but didnt have staying power for me as sandbox MMOs have for me.

People really call the combat boring in this game? How is this possible.
Its had probably the best combat in any fantasy based MMO i've played. Thief and Mesmer were amazing.

 

[Spirit of Jazz]

I had more fun with it at launch than I did with FFXIV. I thought the exploration and world quests were really well integrated at the time and the craft systems was pretty fun to learn. As for combat I can see why you'd hate it if you like playing a tank/healer but it offers far more for DPS players than something like FFXIV where you're just going through your skill rotation.

I still think the original was a much better game though.

 

[Chanser]

GW1 had factions, 2 didn't.

 

[Lucifon]

I like it but there was a lot of copy pasting quest design. Also seems like they've been pretty slow in making a splash about updates. Heart of Thorns was October 2015 but there's been almost no public splash about updates since then, so outside perception could mistakenly think the game is pretty dead.

I know they have had fairly decent updates, but they've not made a big enough deal about them. Game has overall been handled quite poorly considering what they have.

 

[Baleoce]

If they implemented official controller ui / support, I'd actually go back in a heart beat.

 

[RagManX]

Still bitter over the closing of City of Heroes. Won't let NCSoft have any more of my money.

 

[Eridani]

I played quite a lot of it, but didnt have staying power for me as sandbox MMOs have for me.

People really call the combat boring in this game? How is this possible.
Its had probably the best combat in any fantasy based MMO i've played. Thief and Mesmer were amazing.

I played thief at launch through the entire story and a couple of dungeons. I don't remember doing anything other then using a bunch of samey dps skills and spamming dodge all the time. There wasn't really much depth (especially compared to GW1) and there are far better MMOs as far as pure action gameplay goes.

I also played quite a bit of PvP, and while the combat was a bit better there, it was still so much worse then GW1 PvP that I just couldn't get into it.

 

[Maledict]

Ultimately, their model for group combat didn't work. Before released it seemed like their idea was partially that any class could do any role from the holy trinity in its own way (Mesmers can tank using clones, elementalists tank in earth form, etc etc). However, the model they went with removed the holy trinity and didnt replace it with anything, so instead group combat was massive dps tests combined with lots of rolling to get out of really badly telegraphed AE effects. All at speeds way too fast to be enjoyable for most players.

That was the deal breaker for me - GW2 has the most unfun, uninteresting, group combat off any MMO. They failed at what they set out to do to by replacing the Holy Trinity, and instead its just a mess and mishmash of broken systems. It doesn't help that its incredibly hard to even understand the effectiveness of your abilities as you dont even have a damn proper combat log and the UI is so difficult to get meaningful information from in fights.

 

[Kai Dracon]

Arena Net made the mistake of hyping the game up as being literally MMO 2.0 and couldn't deliver. They then decided that players wanted stuff like raids instead of GW2's unique content like bi-weekly living world story chapters.

It failed to make people who want to play WoW happy.

It failed to make people who didn't want to play WoW happy.

Based on everything I've heard from people who worked there, it's simply mis-management at the end of the day.

In terms of what they could do going forward... it's tough because they don't want to give the game more typical MMO endgame and progression systems. But they don't want to make the game too unique either to attract a different kind of player.

It feels like Arena Net needs a change in management in order to finally come to a decision on WTF they want to do.

 

[Linkark07]

I really tried to like it but something didn't click with me. Either the story, the gameplay, lack of holy trinity (knew there wasn't any but still), boring dungeons. Basically, just gave up and never looked back.

 

[Kenzodielocke]

Comig from WoW, this game kinda sucked. Looked pretty, though.

 

[AkelisRain]

I played an entire year straight, and felt as if I was not being rewarded for my time. Guild wars 1 is the much better game.

 

[Psychoward]

Skills tied to weapons was a novel idea but in the end that meant I had my rotation set for most characters by like level 35

The zones felt very samey compared to something like wow

Endgame dungeons weren't very fun

Wvw was a cool concept but still not as fun as world pvp

Arena pvp was unbalanced

 

[KKRT00]

I played thief at launch through the entire story and a couple of dungeons. I don't remember doing anything other then using a bunch of samey dps skills and spamming dodge all the time. There wasn't really much depth (especially compared to GW1) and there are far better MMOs as far as pure action gameplay goes.

I also played quite a bit of PvP, and while the combat was a bit better there, it was still so much worse then GW1 PvP that I just couldn't get into it.

Also played on launch and didnt built Thief for DPS.
Thief was extremely mobile due to Bow having teleport and having quite a lot of speed buffs, it had like 3 stealths, which also served as good support skills. You could heal up 3 times in combat.

Mobile, versatile, self sufficient and could also serve as a support. You could pretty much 1vs1 anybody.

 

[RS4-]

Bought it day one because of how much I enjoyed GW1 beta or whatever; haven't played it since.

Terrible mistake just jumping right into it thinking it'd be like the first one lol.

 

[Izuna]

I was SUPER big on the original game. Even playing it years after GW2 was released.

I didn't want to play GW2 because apparently it was more MMO and had jumping.

 

[gogosox82]

It changed too much from GW1 and was just Wow-lite. I somewhat enjoyed it and did like the artstyle but got bored after I got to max level.

 

[Locke09]

Setting aside the disappointment of expecting a sequel to Guild Wars and getting a game with mostly superficial connections to the first game, there's a big problem with the story of Guild Wars 2, in that new players can't access a largish chunk of it.

ArenaNet's first pass at the "living world", while exciting at the time, means there's a chunk of the bridge between the base story and the expansion story that people who started after Season 1 can't access. The story jumps from a celebration to investigating a character introduced and killed in Season 1, accompanied by a cast of characters introduced in Season 1. I think there's an in game video (or something - never watched it) that explains what happened, but it's a poor solution for a problem of their own making.

Add to this the fact that someone who buys the game + expansion today doesn't get access to the Living Story Season 2 content or most of Season 3 unless they shell out more money - and each Season 3 chapter has a map you can't get to unless you "own" that chapter - it's not the most friendly game for new players looking for the story. And this doesn't even get into the time they've spent on "features" - like reworking the Trait system - only to throw that out a few months later for a newer version.

 

[Hojaho]

Also played on launch and didnt built Thief for DPS.
Thief was extremely mobile due to Bow having teleport and having quite a lot of speed buffs, it had like 3 stealths, which also served as good support skills. You could heal up 3 times in combat.

Mobile, versatile, self sufficient and could also serve as a support. You could pretty much 1vs1 anybody.

Don't forget Dagger/pistol on your other weapon set, heartseeker into dark field !

 

[Pellaidh]

For me personally, the game had a ton of problems, even ignoring the fact that it was basically a complete opposite of Guild Wars 1. This mostly from launch though, but I doubt they fixed most of the issues

- The PvE content content mostly involved running around in a mindless horde, bashing your attack key and completing zone events. Most of the leveling and story experience featured almost no skill or team-play, and the five or so dungeons were mostly ignored (so it was very hard to find a group for them). And then fractals introduced a gear treadmill, which I thought was supposed to be completely against Guild Wars philosophy, but I guess not.

- The PvP was awful. The arena mode only featured one game mode (control points), which was no fun to play. The world PvP was just a laggy mess where the main thing that mattered was which side had more players and where you spent more time hitting castle gates then you did other players.

- The idea of character combat roles was completely abandoned, with everyone basically being forced to play some sort of a DPS character. If you like playing support (which I do, and Guild Wars 1 had the most amazing support oriented classes I've ever seen in an MMO), then you're out of luck. This was supposed to be done in order to eliminate the "holy trinity", which is weird logic to me, since Guild Wars 1 didn't have one despite featuring widely different character roles.

- The combat itself wasn't that great. Dodging didn't add that much (for the most part, you just press shift to avoid glowing red circles), and the complete removal of things like energy, interrupts (and baiting them), skills that required good foresight and timing, as well as a removal of focus on good use of buffs and debuffs made me actually like the combat much less than in Guild Wars 1.

- Likewise, character builds were massively simplified compared to Guild Wars 1, to the point where I didn't feel like I could make my Warrior play significantly differently by choosing a different build.

- The patches focused mostly on introducing new "living story" content, rather than fixing core issued with the game. Arena PvP, in general, felt like it was completely ignored.

Really, as someone who spent a 100+ hours playing support in PvP arenas in Guild Wars 1, the game was just a complete opposite of what I wanted from the sequel.

 

[Mifec]

While it has better quest design, a better combat system then Wow and FF14(a game I quit this year due to it's atrocious quest design), a more beautiful world and more interesting chars( fuck Trahearne though) it simply lacked endgame content at the time of release which made me quit.

I felt like I missed too much because I never got back to it.

 

[Eridani]

Also played on launch and didnt built Thief for DPS.
Thief was extremely mobile due to Bow having teleport, it had like 3 stealths, which also served as good support skills. You could heal up 3 times in combat.

Mobile, versatile, self sufficient and could also serve as a support. You could pretty much 1vs1 anybody.

Sounds fun, except none of it really mattered in PvE. Mobility was completely useless since the quest/dungeon design was terrible and didn't really demand it. Same with stealth really. So in the end the only thing that really mattered was spamming dps. And self healing adds absolutely nothing to the fun factor.

Basically, all the support skills felt completely and utterly useless. Compare that to GW1 where a single protective spirit could completely turn the tide. A single skill in GW1 was more fun then the entirety of GW2 to me. So yeah, can't say I agree about the combat being fun at all.

 

[Mephala]

For me the world was amazing, the characters and lore were pretty fantastic. Aesthetically it was quite pleasant as well. Jumping puzzles and random world boss events felt great. Scaling levels to area was interesting and WvW pretty fun...

What pushed me away was ultimately the combat. I don't always like the holy trinity in fact I usually pick characters who are outside of these roles but the game just wasn't very fun to play in combat for me. The harder the content, the longer the fights the more bored and annoyed I became.

Grinding for some of the end game stuff wasn't enjoyable for me either.

 

[Maledict]

Oh, and yes - the outdoor group combat and big boss fights were *terrible*. Like, honestly some of the worst fights in an MMO. Chase a huge horde of players spamming your best dps abilities on a boss which my randomly kill you, at which point you'll get relaxed and carry on. They were fucking awful from start to finish.

 

[heybrian]

From what I remember from playing ~50hours of it around launch the only thing I enjoyed in the game was the jumping puzzles. The lack of the Trinity made the combat feel aimless. The lack of end game content gave no incentive to keep playing. The holiday events were fun but ultimately didn't do much for me and it seemed like end game was all a game of dress up for your character.

That said, I'd give it a second chance if it came to consoles.

 

[Hojaho]

For me personally, the game had a ton of problems, even ignoring the fact that it was basically a complete opposite of Guild Wars 1. This mostly from launch though, but I doubt they fixed most of the issues

- The PvE content content mostly involved running around in a mindless horde, bashing your attack key and completing zone events. Most of the leveling and story experience featured almost no skill or team-play, and the five or so dungeons were mostly ignored (so it was very hard to find a group for them). And then fractals introduced a gear treadmill, which I thought was supposed to be completely against Guild Wars philosophy, but I guess not.

- The PvP was awful. The arena mode only featured one game mode (control points), which was no fun to play. The world PvP was just a laggy mess where the main thing that mattered was which side had more players and where you spent more time hitting castle gates then you did other players.

- The idea of character combat roles was completely abandoned, with everyone basically being forced to play some sort of a DPS character. If you like playing support (which I do, and Guild Wars 1 had the most amazing support oriented classes I've ever seen in an MMO), then you're out of luck. This was supposed to be done in order to eliminate the "holy trinity", which is weird logic to me, since Guild Wars 1 didn't have one despite featuring widely different character roles.

- The combat itself wasn't that great. Dodging didn't add that much (for the most part, you just press shift to avoid glowing red circles), and the complete removal of things like energy, interrupts (and baiting them), skills that required good foresight and timing, as well as a removal of focus on good use of buffs and debuffs made me actually like the combat much less than in Guild Wars 1.

- Likewise, character builds were massively simplified compared to Guild Wars 1, to the point where I didn't feel like I could make my Warrior play significantly differently by choosing a different build.

- The patches focused mostly on introducing new "living story" content, rather than fixing core issued with the game. Arena PvP, in general, felt like it was completely ignored.

Really, as someone who spent a 100+ hours playing support in PvP arenas in Guild Wars 1, the game was just a complete opposite of what I wanted from the sequel.

I think support are essentials now in Raids.

Also, not sure what you mean by "the complete removal of things like energy, interrupts (and baiting them), skills that required good foresight and timing, as well as a removal of focus on good use of buffs and debuffs". Most of that is still very important imho, specially in PvP.

 

[ProBusinessgamer]

to be fair, how do we know its not popular? Do you or anyone have monthly active user data? or is this just a opinion?

 

[Mashing]

Something that bothered me when I first started playing was the AWFUL sound mixing. Did they ever fix that?

 

[Maledict]

Not everyone plays for pop. And even then, the Mesmer in GW2 is but the palest shadow of what a Mesmer was in gw1.

As someone else said, basic skills from gw1 can feel hugely powerful, whereas almost all my skills in gw2 feel inconsequential and spammy. The game really took a nose dive in terms of complexity and depth, and whilst normally I think that's a good thing they didn't replace it with anything.

 

[SargerusBR]

Lack of endgame on vanilla release.
WvW is resumed to which server has the biggest zerg.

The UI is gorgeous tho, the best one ever implemented in a MMO.

 

[Vincent Alexander]

This. Guild Wars 1 was fantastic, a shame they changed so much

Agreed. I loved the hell out of Guild Wars 1. GW2 is funnish and all, but didn't capture what I loved about the first one.

 

[Kade]

to be fair, how do we know its not popular? Do you or anyone have monthly active user data? or is this just a opinion?

The OP isn't talking about the game's population, which they have addressed in their post.

 

[Buzzi]

I liked it a lot, played for four months since d1 (actually since beta) and spent about 400h on it.

While it had some really great differences from most MMOs (loved the jumping puzzles and holiday events), the late game felt to be the same hardcore thing I can't enjoy, like endless farming for better/cooler equip. I felt no more reasons to play (although I never completed the last story quest) and dropped it.

As far as I remember, it had a lot of success in its early days, like 3-4m players, and for a pay to play game in 2012 it was good. But then it probably lost a lot of active players for one reason or the other, mostly to the big multiplayer games we all know about. Didn't inform at all since that time about its changes and sometimes the will to install it again comes up.

 

[Nirolak]

I felt the base game was quite solid, and then their first year of updates showed a lot of promise in terms of them understanding what type of content actually worked well for the game, but then they just sort of imploded.

They also never took the core mechanical issues seriously and thus never addressed them. Most service games try to rework their gameplay structure over time into something progressively better, and we didn't really get that here.

They also did a lot of things to annoy players like harshly limiting inventory space to try and get you to spend more money and making most of the end game content consist of comical and unsatisfying grinding for insufficient rewards.

At this point they would basically need a Guild Wars 3 to get attention again. I notice they have job postings listing things like making physically based shaders, which you would basically never port back into an old game, so maybe that's happening: https://boards.greenhouse.io/arenanet/jobs/587462

 

[Wulfram]

I quite liked it for a bit, but the writing seemed to get worse as the game went on. And I didn't enjoy the group content.

The expansion was the cue for me to drop it, because I didn't fancy spending more money on it or being stuck as a second class player.

edit: I did really like the event where you fought a giant marionette, that was pretty cool.

 

[Evil Monkey DTT]

This might have been fixed but when I tried it around launch I thought it was too hard for solo play, and for an mmo that's a game killer for me.

 

[th4tguy]

I really didn't like the lack of class roles and in general removal of the trinity.

 

[Twookie]

Now I haven't played the expansion yet but I did have 2.4k/2.7k hrs (one of those). Most of those hours were just standing in the main city talking in guildchat and map chat - not even joking or anything.

I remember getting my character to level 80 (max level) and getting the highest tier gear for my build and then suddenly I had nothing new to do. They didn't add fractals until a goooooood while later and that grind wasn't fun at aaaaall. The game didn't have a lot of endgame since there is no gear mill. They really wanted you to replay a lot of the old content since it also would scale to your level.

The map of GW2 is huge, yet they make it feel so small with the instant teleportation nodes. Most of the nodes are useless since they don't lead to any major map events so you end up just teleporting on the same nodes for the map events and ignoring all other nodes.

The combat was also not the best. I remember liking it at first, but the more I played the more boring and shallow it felt. In the end you ended spamming the same few spells over and over if even that to kill mobs as if it had no impact whatever you were doing. There ARE some sick combos you can do that is super flashy and cool looking, but mostly the combat feels un-impactful.

The biggest trap they fell into was removing the trinity IMO. The dungeons and content in general was basically hit target or dodge red zone areas and heavily telegraphed attacks.
It was cool that changing weapons changed your classes' skills though, but classes felt more similiar to me because of that since some of the weapon skills were almost the same as other classes with the same type of weapon equipped. I hated that I couldn't heal because the devs said that "watching hp bars move" was lame as if that all being a healer was or could be.

Every time I come back to this game I want to get into it again like I did when I first played the game, but it's just not fun to me. Which is a shame, I have a few friends I met there and I have spent too much time on it :/

I wouldn't be surprised if there were more people like me that tried the game but just cannot stand it anymore

 

[NormalFish]

I still put in 50 odd hours every content patch, but the game has major issues.

1. Messaging was royally fucked since the game had so many problems at the beginning of and prior to Heart of Thorns. Now we're going in to expac 2 and most of the people who might be interested in coming back have no idea how much the game has changed. This makes the player base kinda same-y and stratifies people in to the "hardcore" and the casual, without an influx of new players to mix things up.

2. Character progression, as this thread helps show, is garbage. Weapons tied to abilites is an awful mechanic that restricts classes far too much, and makes individual characters lack identity. Coming from the build wars of its predecessor, the game is a straight up failure in this regard.

3. ANet is incompetent. They regularly botch major updates (Legendary Armor still has people rolling their eyes), they don't seem to understand how to balance their game, their monetization seems to be more of a focus than the actual content updates*, and despite Living World Season 3 being the best content the game has ever had, the constant currency grinds aren't exactly novel or interesting. They're just woefully out of touch and uninspired outside of the story writers and raid team.

*Before someone comes at me with the bullshit "but it's cosmetic!" nonsense, fashion wars is the endgame. Getting cool and exclusive skins is a non trivial amount of endgame content. But instead we get 5 armor skins with the expansion, a drip feed of new ones (most of which were added previously and then removed for reasons unknown), and then tons coming to the gem store. It's fucked.

 

[Matrix XII]

Without the "trinity" MMO games just don't satisfy me. I played about 100+ hrs of GW2 and it does have some strong points. But without engaging combat for me, it was no good compared to FFXIV and WoW.

 

[Twookie]

also the stat archetypes for armors and weapons in GW2 is(or atleast were) actually awful.

It was supposed to allow for different builds but some of the archetypes were just straight up better than most of the other archetypes.

basically it was Berzerker's x for PvE and Soldier's for that WvWvW mode - rest was for the most part ignored.

I've heard it's better now than it was then but my god you had to vendor/salvage so much of the loot you got since it was so bad

 

[thefil]

I was super hyped for GW2 as a WoW successor. Unfortunately every feature that excited me turned out to be neutral to terrible:

+ action combat which didn't enhance the experience as much as I thought
+ dynamic events which were just zergs
+ no holy trinity which further promoted zerging
+ "heart" system for quests which turned out to make all questing/exploration feel like an empty meaningless flavourless grind
+ platforming didn't feel good

Worst of all for me, while I loved the concept art, the in-game aesthetic was extremely off putting to me. I didn't want to exist in that world.

Played probably 20-30 hours with my girlfriend and then gave up.

 

[Massicot]

I do feel that a lot of the "role" based criticisms have been slightly addressed with the raids added in Heart of Thorns and Season 3. You're not going to have a good time without a good Tank, Healer, or the proper support (PS Warrior or some sort of might-stacking, plus a good pair of Chronos usually).

It's really too bad they haven't really addressed this in the same way with Dungeons or Fractals.

*Before someone comes at me with the bullshit "but it's cosmetic!" nonsense, fashion wars is the endgame. Getting cool and exclusive skins is a non trivial amount of endgame content. But instead we get 5 armor skins with the expansion, a drip feed of new ones (most of which were added previously and then removed for reasons unknown), and then tons coming to the gem store. It's fucked.

I do have to say this annoys me. For every one weapon set released with the game proper (of which some are incredible gold sinks), you'll see 6 or 7 released to the gem store/loot chests. People will say it's no different because you can buy them off of the game's trading post anyway, at that point im the guy in that one comic going "...I guess!"

 

[Teknopathetic]

A busted launch, the combat wasn't satisfying for an MMO attempting to be more like an action game, WvW was halfbaked, and the PvE at launch was extremely poor even by ArenaNet standards. GW1 at least had cool character/party building mechanics which resulted in interesting PvP.

 

[LumpOfCole]

I've gotten all classes to level 80 and the only class I truly find enjoyable is the Mesmer (and only using certain weapons at that). All the other classes feel either too monotonous or too much like I'm putting too much work in for too little reward.