10 years and they still can't get it right.
After last week's (4th?) alliance beta event, I am still astonished that there are still bugs, and am still not sure what the entire point of alliances is.
Mostly throw away clips this time, saving my better clips for some type of end of the year or maybe end of the summer video if I get 3-5 really amazing clips before end of august or something like that.
Steam players:
TLDR: The "competitive" PvP scene is absolute trash and PvE is eh.
The class balance developers are incompetent, and both fail to communicate with and more importantly listen to the community. The balance is so bad that the mentality of the community is something along the lines of "why learn and improve when I can just play the most aids builds possible and never have to understand even basic gameplay mechanics (particularly true to WvW)" which is probably the main contributor to long time players (that actually have put in the effort) becoming exceedingly toxic as skill is not rewarded as much as it should be. Even some anet partners (sponsored content creators), so-called pillars of the community, are not immune to the toxicity of the game. An example of this is Vallun who is basically an openly racist anet partner and seems to often tell players in private to kill themselves, calls them slurs, and acts with generally ill-mannered behavior in-game.
This toxicity is furthermore worsened as the game becomes more dumbed down nearly every quarterly balance patch. Complex and intricate class designs consistently are nerfed, entirely reworked, and then replaced by stronger simplified trait lines or elite specs to the extent that if you so chose, the game practically plays itself for you. There is an elite spec called Mechanist (which is extremely strong in WvW) that basically consists of an AI-controlled robot that consistently barrages the enemy with ranged attacks that add up very quickly even with very little to no input from the player. This spam of attacks is to the point that in WvW, it's probably possible for an average player to lose to an AFK Mechanist if the said player is full glass (that said, no average player runs anything remotely glassy in WvW). How this concept even found its way into a game that once prided itself on its combat system is beyond me. So in summary, the more difficult a build is to play, the worse it is, and the easier a build is to play the better it is.
In addition to the game itself becoming less competitive due to its balancing, in sPvP, widespread win trading significantly dents the competitive nature of the game even further. Moreover, on NA, a small select group of players practically hold a monopoly over the Monthly automated Tournament (which is the most competitive thing this game has to offer since esports is no longer part of Guild Wars 2).
It's crystal clear that the game is actively being oriented toward newer players which would be great if it did not alienate more veteran players in the process, which I believe to be the main cause of the dwindling number of PvP players and subsequent declining competitive scene.
Anet focuses almost all of its attention on PvE which should mean that it's a solid game mode especially compared to WvW and sPvP but as someone who doesn't play PvE often because I do not care for the uninteresting supposedly one-sided politically charged story (primarily in the end of dragons), the obnoxious unskippable dialogue, (which from my admittedly limited experience takes up a large amount of the time), escort missions, tedious grinding, brain-numbing rotations, unchallenging bosses, horrendously laggy world bosses (due poor game optimization), and lastly the cringe-worthy elitism over fighting NPCs in a dead game, I am unable to comment on the state of PvE.
If you are wondering why I play this game after such a scorching review, I wonder the same thing.
21 авг 2022
