Warning. The Legendary Start Kit - Set 2 is bugged at the moment. See my PSA post.
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I'm still wondering whether the male appearance is intentional or not.
We wanted to drive players to older content, as our game is heavily focused on horizontal progression, while ensuring players had reasons to go to the same places across the breadth of the game world and have other players to play with. This is all driven by a desire to increase player engagement through regular logins and longer play sessions through a system with a low barrier to entry. Increased engagement drives retention and MTX KPIs.
across the breadth of the game world or the same boring set of tasks over and over gain?
Also note the blatant use of the term drive players instead of something like encourage players, interest players or attract players.
🌕 That should give you something to think about. Right? PONDER! 🌕
I do not deny that there was a significant shift from player to shareholder focus over time. GW2 started out as a game for players to enjoy (or rather what the devs would enjoy playing. Who remembers the MMO Manifesto?) and largely turned into a revenue engine for shareholders to enjoy. At least they are not triple dipping (box + subscription + cash shop) like ActivisionBlizzard with WoW (or ZeniMax/Bethesda with ESO), and I believe that there are still (a few) people at ArenaNet who are fighting for the players and against 100% shareholder interest.
What I meant is that there is an inherent issue with every system that gets bigger and bigger over time and that is increasing complexity which makes changes/additions harder and harder. Pretty much the only way to battle this is to refactor and/or reimplement parts of the system (or the entire system) once in a while. To me it seems that this has been largely neglected over the past years, though there have been recent announcements that they are doing just that at the moment.
Anyway, how much resources you spend on things that do not immediatley create content/revenue is a management decision and this is where it comes full circle.
My theory is that ArenaNet was fully aware that GW2's complexity was getting out of hand and wanted the existing game to go into Maintenance Mode while creating a new game (GW3 or whatever) from scratch. A plan that was canceled by NCSoft. And now ArenaNet is forced to create as much content/revenue as possible for/from a system which is a royal pain in the ass to make changes to.
I hope that this does not come across as all negative. I still love this game. I'm just sad what it has become or rather where it appears to be heading to. If a Djinn would grant me a wish, it would be Please let GW2 (60/100 MMO Manifesto) go into Maintenance Mode and make GW3 (80/100 MMO Manifesto).
Do you think we would get more content, if we'd paid more? I even doubt that. They simply can't deliver more content and give us rewards instead.
And Amnytas isn't even a complete map. Mabye a quarter of a map cloned 4 times with rmostly recycled events which are disabled whenever the meta runs. The only unique feature of this map is its lag and FPS drop.
Bug Fix:
- Fixed an issue that would have caused the current Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure Wizard's Vault season to end earlier than intended.
... and ArcDPS has already been updated.
We probably should have known ... that Gyla Delve wasn't an exception but the new normal. I now wish GW2 could have gone gracefully into Maintenance Mode during Icebrood Saga instead of becoming a Walking Dead Parody.
Path of Fire (€29.99) which included Living World Season 4 and Icebrood Saga (if you logged in once in a while) was the last full expansion we got. Now compare this to Secrets of the Obscure (€24.99).
Though I don't think that greed is the main reason why we are getting a lot less bang (content) for the buck today compared to back then. My impression is that the code base has become so fragile that every little change has a high chance of breaking a thousand other things, which makes development (and the cleanup afterwards) very, very expensive.
Market Restoration 1 completed. Thanks for the Material Donations!
Rewards Temporarily Removed From Road to Heitor Meta Event
Does anybody know, why?
Edit: Apparently some people received loads (unintended amounts) of the new map currency from the meta.