What's preventing you from coming back to/playing Guild Wars 2?

[TriHard]

I have to say the graphics, the engine didn't age very well so it looks super outdated now. Would've been an amazing looking game if they just remastered the graphics

[wilster]

I have to say the graphics, the engine didn't age very well so it looks super outdated now. Would've been an amazing looking game if they just remastered the graphics

I saw a video the other day, I think in GW2 forums otherwise on youtube, that showed an approved addon being used in addition to adjusting some of the in game settings that ended up showing a significantly improved look of the game. If the graphics are the only thing keeping you from playing then you should check it out, may actually change your mind.

Edit: found the video - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FbO-VMPxksA

[Advent]

When I stopped playing I realized something. I don't want to spend the time to learn the whole game on my own, and finding people to play with regularly means I would have to play, probably when I wouldn't really want to. Like-minded people who want you around are more rare than diamonds. Also, some of the weapons, skills and builds I use and enjoy the playstyle of don't fit in with the type of content that would engage me.

[Ergunk]

Progressing the new raid in WoW. I will most definitely get back to it when progression is over and the intensity of farming m+ for gear have slowed down. I love Warrior pvp in GW2.

[fatmanjumprope]

I do play the game but a few things that prevent me from playing as much as I used to play Guild Wars 1.

1: Lot to take in
I felt lost for the first 2 months I played the game. Crafting levels, mastery points, achievement points, titles. I did a lot of things early on I should not have and didn't do other things early on I should have. Lots of effects just randomly appear on me during boss battles or a boss will become invincible and little to no indication of what is needed to be done to stop it is given. I've had to die in boss battles and watch youtube videos before respawns just to figure out how to pass a certain phase of the battle.

2: Less satisfaction from achievements / pay to win
There's little to no satisfaction to looking good with a weapon or armor in the game anymore. It's mostly imo due to the pay to win aspect introduced in gw2. You can spend 3 months grinding for a legendary just to have someone who only plays 2 hours a month buy one with real life money. It really undervalues the effort you put into the game and really just drives me to want to just buy the stuff myself with irl money. I'll admit they tried to fix this in later expansions by making new legendaries non-sellable items but the damage is done for the most part.

3: Community got boring
What happened to large groups of people standing around in a city for hours at a time just "trolling" each other and having a good time? I never see that anymore in gw2. It's either role play sessions or people standing afk/sorting gear. I've tried numerous times to get involved with people just for them to turn away, tp out, or just plain out ignore you and talk to someone else. It seems the social friendly aspect of the game is almost completely dead.

4: Lack of friends still playing.
This is a completely personal one, but still. It's sometimes hard getting on and realizing I'm the only one of my ig and irl friends who still plays/cares at all about the game. Thinking back to all the good times we had doing dungeons and UWSC and now it's just me going it alone. It's almost too much to bare with all the other stated reasons.


Thank you for taking the time to read my nonsense
Happy gaming.

[slowside]

I played for about a year when it first came out, logged on a couple of times during Living World Season 1, but the fact that the story quests and stuff were temporary meant I was "behind" and would never be able to play that content which kinda bothered me.

A friend recommended I pick it up again since I left WoW a couple months into BfA. They have mentioned it a few times so I reinstalled it this past weekend and so much has changed that I felt completely lost. I spent a couple of hours looking through my characters, inventory, skills, new progression trees, etc, and trying to run around and do a couple of events to get back in the swing of things.

It's just changed so much that I don't even know where to begin to relearn the game, besides starting a new character. I kinda feel like good memories are better than fumbling through and seeing how much I missed and won't be able to do.

[PACOX]

If you haven't played since season 1 then it's basically a new game

[GreenJesus]

I don't have time to play ANOTHER MMO. I already mythic raid in WoW and have a full time job and like to dabble in ESO and FF14.

[Nehezbegar]

After 6 years game became boring. Perhaps will get back but i have no motivation to push forward in the game, there is no valuable goals to achieve and pursue atm imo.

[styopa]

I'd played after launch, got 3 toons to 8 (Necro, Thief, Eng) and one to 69 (War? Guardian?)...drifted away from it for a few reasons in no particular order:

- combat was absolutely frenetic. Honestly, I'm not sure how people can keep track of (or really care about) buffs / conds that last moments.
- the lack of the 'holy triad' didn't improve things, it just made it more chaotic and free for all. So I felt less connected to the other players in instances, more like a mob of murderhobos sweeping through some poor bastard's house/cave/whatever.
- I REALLY didn't like the inability to move abilities around on bars. I like the "you get some abilities with each weapon type" that's frankly a clever idea, but I like to develop a level of muscle memory that I can sort of forget I'm hitting keys, etc. When my gap-closer (& everything else) changes buttons every time I switch weapons (and that can be a lot, depending on your build) it just pissed me off.
- God I hated everything about their underwater crap. Unreasonably so, I admit. First, change all the abilities I've come to be used to...AGAIN. And then don't get near the surface, because then you don't have ANY abilities. Oh, meanwhile reset all the stacks of shit that I've built up, of course, because I've happened to touch water. Even just the rationalization: I'd have been bothered less by some magic fairy sprinking pixie dust (hand-wavy-story-reason we all have perma waterbreathing like FFXIV) than magic oxygen masks that everyone seems to have from birth.
- Couple that with the massive disappointment of the Charr (we're rough, we're tough, but the intrinsic SJWness of Arenanet prevents us from being ACTUALLY bad or mean to anyone, we care about FEELZ!) and pretty lackluster storytelling...


...there wasn't much reason to stay.

[BurningSkies2018]

A few things, I guess.

>Lack of a guild. And yeah I could just 'join' some random guild but most are pretty established with their own friends, yadda yadda. It's pretty difficult to break into established cliques.

>Loathing everything I try finding on resources about class taking nothing but ascendant gear into consideration. The whole bloody system is not new player friendly whatsoever.

>Bank space is kind of hot garbage unless you shell over money. I will admit the game is pretty fair with its microtransactions, but the bank space is pretty terrible.

>I do kind of dislike conditions, tracking them, etc when they don't last but a few seconds anyway so it feels just unrewarding? Granted my understanding of a lot is also not very good, either.

>WvW where I enjoyed spending most of my times is not very friendly to classes that aren't in the meta. Granted it's been a long while, but a ranger or engineer and such was super shunned back then. What made me super excited to play an engineer was the ability to drop turrets and things like that but it instead doesn't feel or play like anything I had in mind, I guess. But that's more of a personal thing.

At the end of the day, I do guess it's lack of knowing anyone that plays coupled with not really wanting to break through a huge time investment to make a little progress.

[Erous]

Time and the combat style. I think if they tweaked it a bit it would entice me to reinstall.

[Nato]

honestly, it was absolutely no knowledge of how to do fractals or get a group for them and i found it stupidly hard to make gold in the game. I really want to return though, I miss SWTOR but tried logging into that game only to find a lot of lag and really dated graphics...

[nexellent]

The fact that its not gw1

[Swnem]

The fact that its not gw1

I like this one. GW1 was awesome.


Anyways, about GW2.

1. The gearing
Main reason is how much of a pain it is to get ascended gear with the stats you need. There's a huge barrier towards simply trying different builds. Took me many weeks to get a full ascended set for condi damage+expertise. Now, i'm stuck with it. If i want to try a power build... too bad. If i want to try a healer build, too bad, if i want to try a tanking build, too bad. It's back to weeks of grinding.
It's more grindig than fun, so i cba anymore. You either have a guild to boost you or you are screwed.

2. It's unrewarding.
The gearing as i said is a pain. You spend your time farming mats or repeating meta's to exhaustion to farm mats/make gold. You get so little, it feels like you are just wasting your time. Factals only drop gear randomly, when you are that lucky, usually with the wrong stats.

3. Dead maps/metas
Especially annoying while going through them the first time. metas can't be solo'ed. Many events can't be solo'ed. You walk around a map you can't beat. It's a waste of resources.

4. The class design and combat
It's zerg the game and pile up for OP buffs. The gameplay itself gets boring fast. You use a couple of abilities in one weapon, swap, then a couple of skill, repeat. There may be some utility or so you can use, but theres no excitement. There's no procs, no unpredictability.
The dodge mechanic and the downed mechanic push a type of game balance ponctuated by one-shot mechanics. It's dumb. Many times you won't even know what killed you.

5. The complexity
It's a game littered by a huge variety of systems and items and NPC's you won't even know what for. You need to constantly be on the wiki to find out what all this crap you got is and what for and what those NPC's are for. Things are not convenient and the game doesn't guide you to what you need to know.

6. The obnoxious inventory system
Seriously the devs can go f themselves. Tiny inventory, tons of trash items and you got to pay if you want more space. Its annoying, it's frustrating to be constantly having to manage your inventory. I hate it with a passion. It's the cancer that slowly kills any fun you can have with the game.

7. The performance.
It's terribly optimised. FPS tanks way too much.

I like to call GW2 the fast food of mmo's. At first it looks tasty and yummy, but the more you eat/play the more you realise this isn't healthy or tasty. It's all plastic and no depth.
Where at first you are impressed at how many players are on screen and how alive the world is and how fun the exploration is, but when you look deeper, you just got an unrewarding, pointless game litered with annoying fetch quests/achievement tracks.
The single player story is it's saving grace, wich just leads me to the GW1 point from the previous poster. The SP with some multiplayer sprinkled is what they are good at. GW2 is a terrible mmo cause they try to do so much, but i doubt any of the devs play it for more than a few minutes at a time, due to how unfun and unrewarding the endgame and systems are.

Bring on GW3, make it like GW1 and leave this abortion behind.

- - - Updated - - -

honestly, it was absolutely no knowledge of how to do fractals or get a group for them and i found it stupidly hard to make gold in the game. I really want to return though, I miss SWTOR but tried logging into that game only to find a lot of lag and really dated graphics...

You need to log into the latest planets and increase your graphics settings (also get a more recent gear set, they are a lot more detailed. You can see fabric in them). Ioketh and Ossus look nice.
I don't have any lag issues, but there are still pesky engine bugs with determining player locations and making skills fail to work properly, but it's more of a PvP thing.
Some people have lag issues sporadicly, i don't know why. My MS is usually 30. I would give it another try. The story content is well worthwhile and the class design is way more fun than anything GW2 and WoW offer atm.

[Alex86el]

nothing.
i play it often, and its super fun.

it's pretty much the only AAA mmo that's left
that allows you the freedom to play as you like, whenever you like, for as long as you like,
without being punished for not following any incentivized-minimum or limited-maximum progressions
no daily/weekly/monthly/whatever chores or timegated progression.

the combat is tons of fun, as is the environment that urges you to explore and find things.
plus, any jumping puzzles are my favorite kind of content during leveling/exploring.

still hoping to get A LOT more Adventure Box content though.

i dont mind having to buy for expanding my storage and all that. it's a B2P MMO with no ads.

only thing missing is player collision in WvW. other than that, its near excellent.

personally, i'd like more clearly defined roles, but even like this, it's really good.

i do agree that farming for gear takes too long and you cant really try many specs...
but you dont need to have every spec of every class geared with ascended quality items.
it's only like a ~10% increase in stats from exotic anyway.

but even if you want that ascended.. you know what to expect. you know you will be rewarded for your effort.
no RNG involved. you put in the work, you get the token or currency or matterial. no slot machines.

[Cobaltius]

Time, had not played in around two years, that and the fact my password did not work and I could not find my serial number that was required to change it.

However I noticed that the game was half off this weekend for the base game plus both expansions so I bought the game again and started over from scratch, now I am testing classes to see which one I want to boost to 80 with the free boost.

I am really liking the dual wielding Revenant so far.

[Caparino]

I played alone and after a while with 3 friends. Solo the game was okay but in a group its horrible boring to level Open World.

[Cattleya]

At this point, the thing that mainly keeps me away is the structure of its content releases and the pricing for it all.

50 euros for Heart of Thorns + Path of Fire, fair enough. But on top of that it's what, 1000-ish gems per living story season, so 3k total for seasons 2-4 (and I can't even play 1 anymore) which is another 35-40 euros. That's a total of 90 euros to get back into it.

The heart of the problem is my incompatibility with the way they do the living story. I play all of the content an MMO has to offer me, then I leave until I feel there's enough new content to warrant me coming back (usually the next expansion). This means I'll always have to pay for future living story seasons too, as I'll be away from the game while they're ongoing.

[qwerty123456]

At this point, the thing that mainly keeps me away is the structure of its content releases and the pricing for it all.

50 euros for Heart of Thorns + Path of Fire, fair enough. But on top of that it's what, 1000-ish gems per living story season, so 3k total for seasons 2-4 (and I can't even play 1 anymore) which is another 35-40 euros. That's a total of 90 euros to get back into it.

The heart of the problem is my incompatibility with the way they do the living story. I play all of the content an MMO has to offer me, then I leave until I feel there's enough new content to warrant me coming back (usually the next expansion). This means I'll always have to pay for future living story seasons too, as I'll be away from the game while they're ongoing.

I don't even think you need to play the living season stuff when it comes out just log in when it comes out and its free. Sure it may not be the best for a new player but if you already got an account you might as well log in daily/weekly just for the daily login rewards alone.