Rebooting Manylaughs: Why I left Guild Wars.

 

This blog was primarily a Guild Wars 2 blog. I started out with the idea it would be a general gaming blog, but mostly I wrote about Guild Wars. I loved that game. If you go back through the posts, here, you’ll see I wrote almost daily about the game, then more than two years ago, I just stopped.

This blog died with my interest in Guild Wars.

I still game. My interest in gaming hasn’t died, just my interest in Guild Wars. It’s just that nothing else has compelled me to write about gaming the way Guild Wars once did.

I’m rebooting manylaughs.com, now, though. More on that, later, but for now, I wanted to wrap up my Guild Wars 2 posts. The blog deserves a better end than that stupid magic find article that’s been sitting there for the last couple of years.

So why did I stop playing Guild Wars after I was such an ardent player for so long? In more or less the order of importance, here’s why I left:

Heart of Thorns

Did you expect that one to be first? It wasn’t really the main reason I left.

People have hashed HoT to death in the forums. Some people liked it, some people didn’t, and more than a few hated it. For me, it was the final straw, the moment I decided to leave. I felt ripped off, which I’ve never felt with Guild Wars before. HoT gave us some new maps, new content, gliding, and a bunch of other stuff, granted, but there just wasn’t enough of it. And most of HoT was just grind, stuff added to keep people busy.

HoT was overpriced and most of the interesting aspects of it were just a rehashing of the same formula we’d seen before – major events. Something new and inventive would have been nice.

Free to play

Yeah, I get that going free to play brings in cash, but it also changes the nature of the community, and it mostly changes it for the worse. There’s no doubt in my mind the community became more caustic and full of people who didn’t have an investment in Guild Wars.

I would have liked to see ArenaNet charge a nominal fee, say $4.99, for the game before they went free to play. Why not try that, first?

The game is old

Guild Wars 2 was visually beautiful when it was released. Now, it looks bland. The graphics engine is old. It’s not visually interesting. When compared to more modern games, it has all the visual appeal of a moldy dish towel.

The combat mechanics were never that good, but they were always good enough. That’s caught up with the game, now. If you’ve played almost any other game in the last couple of years, you know how exciting combat can be and should be.

Guild Wars 2 is a worn out game. It’s just tired. It looks like a creaky, old MMO that just wants to get into its comfortable arm chair and watch some TV.

I got bored

Why does anyone leave an MMO?

I left because I got bored. All my friends had left long ago. Nothing in the game excited me, anymore. I’d done most of what I wanted to do.

One day I sorta just woke up. I was spending more time playing the Black Lion exchange than playing the game. That’s just lame. Making gold is nice, but what the fuck?!

So I left.

Now, I mostly play Overwatch and single players. I’m looking forward to the supposed reinvention of WoW, and if there’s a Guild Wars 3, I’m sure I’ll play that.