Guild Wars 2 - Apathy Sets In

SBFord

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Doomsaying in MMOs is almost as old as MMOs themselves. When researching an article about “WoW killers” a couple years back, I found a forum post from someone claiming Dungeons & Dragons Online could be the game that does the deed – from a month before WoW launched. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if we one day found a new translation of the Book of Revelation that recasts them as the Four Horsemen of the WoW-pocalypse “and you shall know them as Guild Wars 2, Age of Conan, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and 'Filthy Casuals.'”

Elvoc

Sadly I think we have become the poison to these types of games. There are still a large amount of us that play WOW even though we complain about how angry we are because it takes years for content, we run to our nearest ATM as soon as Blizzard announces an expansion, sadly I am not sure games like GW2 will ever have real WOW status, the pay models have changed the dynamics way too much. My personal opinion is if WOW would have started as FTP then we wouldn't even be talking about it, to many of this generation gamers that expect to get content released ASAP while contributing almost nothing to financially to the game and its progress. Is it fair to ask developers to continually pump out content when only half of the community is really helping support the game financially. I think a lot of times we forget that developers are just ordinary people with jobs and how excited would you be to work on a job that may or may not help you pay the bills...

psiic

+1 Just don't care anymore

alkarionlog

blame the devs for changing the whole stats we had since launch for a more "simple" version, after they did this I stoped caring had no reason to try and maximize my skills and what I want to use, also blame players from crying and asking for a expansion, pretty much that just put the nail on it, you had players not happy with the way the game was going then they launch a expansion who will divide the player base, and simple force the still willing to play even after all the damage the own devs did to give up

Volgore

Comment timed out.

FelixMajor

Same. Meh. Reformatted a little while ago and never actually reinstalled. Nearly 2000 hours on that game. They were fun times.

Still haven't touched the raids or any of the new stuff, no idea why..there is no interest left.

Righteous_Rock

I make time for things I like, nothing mmo is worth making time for. Gw2 had its chance, just as ArcheAge, two games could have been great but....

cronius77

this game was never great to begin with. It was mediocre at best and once you hit 80 it was make a alt or grind grind grind for gold for ascended and legendary skins. Whats the fun in that seriously? World vs World was probably the worst of any realm vs realm game with no tanks and no healers to use any real strategy but follow the zerge dps herd around or run small man and hope you could avoid the zerge. Im honestly surprised this game did as well as it did with all its shortcomings.

mithoss

I honestly tought gw2 is adding new weapon sets called "apathy"...

meonthissite

We're definitely not the poison as the original poster stated. The poison is the shareholders who've been active in spending larges amounts of marketing money not just hyping the games that have severe holes in their content and features but also who have spent that money on reviewers and posters in forums to accelerate the hype.

The problem with this is simple. If people get all hyped up (even to the point of ignoring the basic truths of the game's flaws) they completely forget that this is a product. They think about it as a movement or something they can stand behind even politicize it. When that happens there are a few in number who realize what's happening and try to point it out, but because the rest are politicized about it they don't see it and will attack those who are pointing out the truth about the product.

So what happens next is that the angry few who know what's going on with the product will either leave the product entirely never buying from that same developer ever again, but still others will actively angrily post about that product for years to come hoping beyond hope that someone will finally come out of their stupor and realize that they shouldn't be supporting such a shell of a product because of it's flaws and the broken promises on the part of the developers.

Eventually people will finally realize "hey this isn't fun because it's got these flaws in the design and it's become a chore" when in reality it's been a chore all this time and they were just too hyped to realize it in the first place.

I would also like to point out that this wasn't the first apex of the apathy situation. The first one occurred right around the time when they decided to announce the expansion. People were coming out of their lull to finally realize just how boring it really had become and then BAM they announced the expansion and suddenly those same people were caught up in the stupor all over again attacking people because we knew that it wasn't going to get better and because we knew that they would put out as little an improvement to the games core mechanics as they possibly could just to get by while their leader stood on stage and told lies about their success and how they delivered on all of their promises over the first few years of launch.

They even went so far as to get a video launched of people saying they are part of a movement of gamers who are tired of the same old (which is the most ironic piece of gamer history in the books) because they played this game. It was a piece directly designed to hype the game and make other players think they should join because look at what this player is saying about this title whether these statements were true or not it didn't matter just so they could get the hype train going again.

It's sad really.

onelesslight

Less that I don't care and more that I'm older, don't have as much time, and I'm extremely fickle with many MMOs competing for my attention. Just don't have the time, or interest, to invest in grinds or limited time content (e.g., WoW). I just want to jump in and have the occasional fun without much overhead.

rojoArcueid

Torval said:

I think a reasonably sized core group of GW2 players were also GW1 fans. They want to see Tyria, Cantha, and Elona fleshed out.

A potential problem I see in the game is that they've strayed away from what interested their core players and delved into other things. What they need to do is get back to their roots.

I still love GW2 and i love GW1, but i totally agree with you here. It would be nice if GW2 gets closer to what GW1 was.

observer

People are just getting tired of Anet abandoning their projects, such as: mini games, dungeons, jumping puzzles, crafting, etc. And then there was a weird transition of the living world to living story. The expansion was another factor. It felt overpriced for the amount of content that was delivered. The game is approaching 4 years old already. Most have moved on by now, and the only ones remaining are loyalists or recently new players.

Purutzil

I have to come from it from the angle of someone who thought the original product was mediocre at best (I could see some of the good people talked about buy I just found the game extremely weak and disliked it a lot) but seeing a lot of what they are doing change wise it seems like they don't know what to do.

Dungeons were a massive mess I would admit, but rather then remove them I don't see why they didn't try and rework them and make it work with their "we are against the trinity" model. They got hit hard when it came to realizing it was a bad idea, but they could of just designed them to be easier content meant more to put 'glory' to your character over some crazy difficult challenge. Instead they gave up on it completely.

They WvWvW was a big draw for some people, yet it looked like they didn't know how to keep it a thing and just ended up drowning it out instead of improviing upon it. They were desperately fishing for new ideas realizing how their model failed and would slowly drain away interest, instead of taking elements and improving them to work with their model.

GW2 just sadly always felt to me like a hastily thrown together product that people for some reason just ended up getting attached to. Sure I don't understand it and I will swear until something comes out worst that it is the absolute worst AAA combat system in an MMo I ever played (to be fair, I'm sure there are others I've missed playing) but they don't NEED to get me to play, they need to please the people who played it. They just don't seem to be doing much to please those dedicated players and are trying to fish for more people that likely don't have any intention to play the game to begin with.

Distopia

Purutzil said:

I have to come from it from the angle of someone who thought the original product was mediocre at best (I could see some of the good people talked about buy I just found the game extremely weak and disliked it a lot) but seeing a lot of what they are doing change wise it seems like they don't know what to do.

Dungeons were a massive mess I would admit, but rather then remove them I don't see why they didn't try and rework them and make it work with their "we are against the trinity" model. They got hit hard when it came to realizing it was a bad idea, but they could of just designed them to be easier content meant more to put 'glory' to your character over some crazy difficult challenge. Instead they gave up on it completely.

They WvWvW was a big draw for some people, yet it looked like they didn't know how to keep it a thing and just ended up drowning it out instead of improviing upon it. They were desperately fishing for new ideas realizing how their model failed and would slowly drain away interest, instead of taking elements and improving them to work with their model.

GW2 just sadly always felt to me like a hastily thrown together product that people for some reason just ended up getting attached to. Sure I don't understand it and I will swear until something comes out worst that it is the absolute worst AAA combat system in an MMo I ever played (to be fair, I'm sure there are others I've missed playing) but they don't NEED to get me to play, they need to please the people who played it. They just don't seem to be doing much to please those dedicated players and are trying to fish for more people that likely don't have any intention to play the game to begin with.

I fully agree, I always found this game to be very mediocre. I just feel the devs spent so much time trying not to be something, they lost track of actually being something. It just feels like a hodgepodge of ideas with no real concise focus. 

cheyane

City of Villains/Heroes did well with allowing groups to manage without the trinity but they did not do away with it and that was how they made it both interesting and challenging while being wholly a workable option. GW2's fault was doing away with it and then realising they had a mess .

Katriz

Agreed. I was just playing for WvW and was waiting for their big WvW overhaul, but it was just overhyped lies to keep players. The world linking system didnt fix anything, there weren't any big changes. Lost any hope in Anet fixing/improving WvW. Waiting till CU or Crowfall.

NomadMorlock

I read the article, and was going to read the comments. Then apathy set in.

Amathe

What I liked about GW2 was that it wasn't grindy. You didn't have to labor to catch up. And then they cashed in on a grindy expansion.

Kyleran

Don't worry, I've been apathetic to GW2 since it launched so nothing much has changed here.

Stay the course...  

fatears

Loved GW1, barely lasted a month in GW2- it just instantly evoked a sense of meh in me.

Octagon7711

That's the thing.  Any MMO is only going to be liked by a section of gamers.  WoW which is the most successful MMO of all time is disliked by a section of gamers.  Name the game and it's the same.  Find something you like and enjoy it.  If you can't find something you like then look outside of MMO's.  I like GW2 and play it everyday, but that's me.  

GeezerGamer

Torval said:

I think a reasonably sized core group of GW2 players were also GW1 fans. They want to see Tyria, Cantha, and Elona fleshed out.

A potential problem I see in the game is that they've strayed away from what interested their core players and delved into other things. What they need to do is get back to their roots.

I've been saying that about WoW for years.......well, since Wrath anyway. There's an old saying...." Dance with the one that brung ya."

d_20

1 Don't give a FF about raiding
2 Exploring the new zones is more irritating than fun
3 My rather large and long-time guild left to play BDO (I didn't follow them) -- Obviously, they didn't find HOT that riveting either

Gaia_Hunter

I think that opinion made more sense 3-6 months ago than now.
With WvW receiving a boost of interest and changes that made HoT easier to navigate.




I doubt that the revenue picture will change much in the next quarter.
I have been logging an average of 5 hours per day (grabbing ascended boxes from daily fractals and working on legendaries/precursors) and I work full time.

TheGoblinKing

This is the problem with this game. ANET is the problem.

I really like the game, but their content droughts make blizzards look good in comparison. Anet is killing their own game.

At least they finally showed Colin Blowhanson the door. To little to late though.