Editing Guild Wars (section)

== Guild Wars 2 ==
As a video game, Guild Wars 2, despite having a great start and plenty of potential, has slowly devolved into a boring, dying husk of a game. There are a number of causes for this and it warrants an in-depth look at problem areas. It does not live up to the spirit of its precursor game, to say the least. However in October 23 2015, the expansion Hearth of the Thorns was released, which only further built on the problems currently present in the game and, arguably, made things significantly worse.

==="Living" World Content===
Its "Living World" content patches have delivered as little content as ever and offered little in the way of developing non-grindy and challenging content. While it had a strong start with the Halloween Event of 2012, the patches afterward began to add less and less meaningful content. Much of the events in the Living Story only lasted, at best, two weeks. While the intent is to make the world seem like it's "living" and dynamically changing, it means that resources were wasted on content which only a select group of players could enjoy in this limited timeframe, as opposed to continually building up a larger and larger amount of content for everyone to enjoy.

While some effort has been made to introduce a solution to these problems, there is also the issue of what permanent content they're adding. Much of what they've made is extremely repetitive and grindy, as opposed to creating something fun or interesting for the players. It's essentially the same content every time, just with a slightly different setting or flavour.

Compare this content with Guild Wars 1 and its expansion packs. Guild Wars 2, with its microtransactions, is taking in more money than Guild Wars 1 ever did, yet offering less content than ever before.

===The "Story"===
Its story has devolved into an SJW shitfest where the player is forced to follow a crippled Asura, a tsundre charr, two lesbians and a stupid Norn whose problem solving ability doesn't go beyond "If I hit it with my mace enough times, it'll go away!" All while the actual hero of the story, the player, is completely ignored in the narrative, doing little more than listening to this group of idiots prattle about their problems and obediently solving their problems for them.

Despite having an amazing setting to build off, much of the old lore has been squandered.

===Balancing and Diversity===
Balance patches are few and far between with the game now. As of September 2014, it took them a total of four months to introduce a balance patch. A third of a year had gone by without any kind of balancing despite the lack of build diversity present in the game. This lack of frequent patching and balancing has left much of the game stagnant and boring. 
More recently, ArenaNet took a stance to balance the game effectively and release balance patches more frequently (every 2 to 4 weeks). However, this only lasted a month or two and they returned to balancing every 3-4 months. And even then, they have been known to nerf under utilized abilities and buff meta builds on occassion. (Though there have been some good balance changes.)

Due to the way weapon skills work, builds are extremely limited in their nature. If you have a rifle, you only have five skills to use with said rifle. You can add some dumb utilities to it, but these will only slightly change your gameplay at best. <s>In addition, there has been a total of nine new skills added since the game's inception. All of them are healing skills.</s> Several skills (a new weapon and 5 utilities) have been added to each class with the expansion, though the balance of these skills is dubious.

The argument made against introducing new skills is so that the developers can balance what they already have. Alas, with the previously mentioned lack of balance patches, we can conclude that this argument is bullshit. They aren't already balancing what they already have.

Compare this lack of diversity and balancing with Guild Wars 1. Each profession had hundreds of skills to choose from and near infinite choice with their builds. In addition, balance patches came frequently with the game, helping to stem builds which were dominating the meta.

===Leveling===
While leveling is intially satsifying and generally a fun experience, there is no real sense of accomplishment to leveling in this game. This is primarily due to "downleveling," which makes it so that your character's level changes depending on which region you're in.

Arguably this "downleveling" makes the gameworld more credible (Bandit lvl 1 compared to Bandit lvl 80 should no be like a Child compared to a SUPERPOWERD TERMINATOR) It also helps the ingame economy as the stuff you get with lvl 1-60 is actually still worth something.

===The Defence Force===
[[Image:Definitely_not_a_marketer.png|thumb|right|A typical post on the Guild Wars 2 forums.]]
Probably what really cements this game being terrible as it is is the defence force it has somehow accumulated. Criticising the game in any fashion on any medium will unleash a floodgate of "U DUN LIEK DUN PALY" and other such witty responses. Due to the presence of a huge number of players who do not question the quality of the content in the least, the game will most likely continue down this path of stagnation.