Sales Q3 2023
GW2 sales appear to be almost unaffected by the SotO release (2023-08-22) . Not looking good.
Sales Q3 2022 for comparison
EoD release (2022-02-28) was in Q1 2022 and sales didn't significantly increase before Q2 2022. Similar to PoF (2017-09-22) where it also took until the next quarter (Q4 2017) for sales to really pick up (almost 35K million). So maybe there is hope, i. e. how many people did you tell that they should buy SotO after you have played it?
Source: https://kr.ncsoft.com/en/ir/irArchive/earningsRelease.do
Switching from big social open world bosses to strict coordinated instanced content. Drastic spike in difficulty in favour of a shift away from chill casual content. General WoWification like trinity and ~~quests~~ quest-like achievement-structure. Didn't go over well with the playerbase, and took them almost ten years to barely recover from it, if one is desperate enough to use the drought numbers as a bar instead of the pre-drought ones.
With the worst being task collections which have to be completed in order, e. g. Frode's Journal which even forces you to do/repeat the 3 SotO metas in a specific order or it doesn't count,
W T F !
I think that GW2 already lost it's way/innocence very early on when ArenaNet listened to a vocal minority of players who wanted WoW-like progression and instanced content ... which lead to Fractals and Ascended Gear with Agony Infusions and later with HoT even to Raids.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with people enjoying this type of content. I hear that WoW is very much alive and -- according to MightyTeapot -- Mythic+ is even better than Fractals. Funny enough, he also says that he is playing WoW as an Instance Simulator (and not as an MMO).
What I fiind kinda sad is that ArenaNet didn't have the balls (or chance?) to stick with their original vision of what an MMO should be like and instead tried to be more like WoW.
➡️ The miller, his son and the donky
Hear, hear. I'm pretty sure there are like five OG fans left that actually enjoyed the concept of a casual open world MMO. The most bizarre thing is that Anet actually managed to take off by not competing with WoW and instead pandered to an entirely different consumer bracket.
s i g h
Yep, I'm probably one of those fans. Though I also very much like the team-play aspect that usually comes with (instanced) group content. What I would like are random encounters you'd find in open world (possibly instanced) which would ~~require~~ encourage people to spontaneously group up as a team of max. 5 to beat it.
Similar to Dungeoneering in RuneScape, but with occurances/entrances randomly spread out over the open world, using your current gear scaled to the level of the encounter, difficulty/rewards scaled to the number of people in the group and the overall theme based on the current zone.