Originally posted by botrytis

People who are saying servers cost money, yes they do. A.Net owns their own severs. For the 1st 6 months of WoW - the servers were rented because they didn't expect the mass influx they had.  GW1 servers were also owned by A.Net and they also had a CS (for extra slots, etc) and it was not such a big deal.

Unless they own their own data center as well, they are paying for colocation rack space, power, redundant power, bandwidth, IP space and any hardware that needs to be replaced (which WILL happen with servers).  While this will be less than renting a server from a hosting provider, it is certainly not insignificant.

Edit:  This doesn't even begin to look at the real cost of operation, which is all of the people at Anet's salaries.  This is a recurring cost that never ends unless you start letting people go.  Box sales should have covered the years of salaries for the development of the game and potentially a signifcant period of time beyond that.  However, coupled with server costs, you have to wonder how much profit there is without gem sales to increase the revenue.

Originally posted by The_Korrigan

What exodus?

Both Lion's Arch and the new island have overflows even at early morning hours.

There's still a huge difference between what the negative people wish (I hated this game, so I want it to fail and I call doom on it, because if I hate something, it can only be bad) and reality.

Indeed. I logged on early this monday morning in Europe (I usually work but have the day off today) and there are people everywhere. Overflow in LA of course, even if that didn't last very long, it still means that on a quiet morning time there are lots and lots op people playing.....

Originally posted by The_Korrigan

What exodus?

Both Lion's Arch and the new island have overflows even at early morning hours.

There's still a huge difference between what the negative people wish (I hated this game, so I want it to fail and I call doom on it, because if I hate something, it can only be bad) and reality.

Mass exodus, maybe a strong word. But measuring the population by saying you have overflow in the zone that literally *everyone* logs into and out of, and travels too, would be like measuring the success of SWTOR by the space station population. 

The population of this game is declining, at least so says the friend's list and guild rosters of most people I know who play the game, but as I said, mass exodus, probably too strong a word.

WHere the game ends up, who knows? Unless Anet releases hard numbers, which I doubt they will, then it is all speculation anyway, regardless of personal perceptions.

amazing how many people are playing ths crap game. Just logged in at 9 am on a Monday morning and instigated a lvl 10 dynamic event. before the event was over there were 4 of us and the event scaled up nicely as people joined. Why not just start a thread here titled , please please come bnack to WoW.

BTW this was the first time I have played in a couple of weeks, tired of MMOs at the moment and doing Halo 4 with most of my gaming time. Nice to have a MMO I can log into that does not require me to pay 15 a month though and does not limit me in any way for not paying.....like star wars is doing

Originally posted by tokini

Originally posted by Nailzzz

     I'm with the OP on this. It isnt that im against gear grinds. It is the dishonesty that is making me back away from the game. I still play it, but now i see my time there as rather temporary. Im only there till i find something else that shows promise. While i may continue to play that game, i will no longer support it with my money.

     I purchased GW2 based on the game i played and the direction the dev's informed us it was going when it released. It is no longer that kind of game now. We were told we could play it however we wanted and reguardless of what we prefer to do, we could get max stat end game gear by doing open world pve, dungeons(any), crafting, or pvp. Now we can only get max stat gear from a single dungeon (making all the other dungeons a waste of time now for those who dont care about aesthetics and making it harder to get groups for those that do).

     They say that legendaries will be equal to the new tier but since legendaries do not have the new resistance, they are actually inferiour since they are the same stats but without resistance. Which means that even if you have a legendary you will still need to obtain one of the new tier weapons anyway to be able to get into the higher lvl dungeon content.

     The new gear tier is unnecessary. It creates more problems and destroys thier credibility. It is also being used as a content gate with the varying resistance upgrades that will be put into it, making it yet another artificial barrier to playing with others which is something else they claimed they would not do.

     So yeah, dont mind gear grinds. I mind being lied to. If they never made the kind of claims they did about what the game was supposed to be, i wouldnt care. But i feel betrayed and as much as i used to cheerlead for them before on these forums, i will no longer spend any more effort on singing praises that Arenanet clearly doesnt deserve.

as to your second paragraph, they have stated that ascended gear will eventually be available from pve, WvW, and 'already existing content'. we shall see.

 

as far as ascended gear having better stats, baseline, yes. but what about after gems, runes, etc.? as far as i know the ascended upgrade slot is only for a resist rating, so when its all said and done the stats may be much closer.

     Yes, they stated quite a few things. Some of which are now being brushed aside in favor for new things they are stating that are in complete opposition to the previous statements (horizontal vs. vertical progression. no gated content or forced gear checks). Now to me, that is enough for thier credibility to be wrecked. So anything they state from this point foward is not something i will continue to put faith into. To do anything else would be to reward them for being dishonest.

     And yes even after accounting for the highest possible upgrades in the game, unique gear is still well under the new gear in terms of stats. The fact that they started this off with rings is pretty telling since they have the lowest stats vs all other equipment slots which makes the increase in stats appear to be smaller than it will be on the other pieces of gear and since they never bothered releasing any exotic backpacks, they must have felt that that would be a safe choice too since it is harder to make a comparison with.

     The differences between the new tier and exotics will ultimately be alot more signifigant than just "a couple of points" that people keep saying. Especially the case when you consider what the difference will be when you take into account the total amount of stats that the new gear will bring as a full outfit instead of just a piece by piece comparison.

Originally posted by Toxia

Hell no the population for gw2 hasnt  slacked up at all.

I've been trying to get on Tarnished Coast for a fucking week to play with friends. FULL

Just charge for fucking transfers already so i can pay and move please.

We still dont know what ¨full¨ really mean for Anet, i mean, my server is full almost 24/7 but when i log on, i can found less than 10 players in the myst, and just a few 16/16 Spvp games running.  The population drop of active players in GW2 was and is huge. 

I will say for what I have seen that 90% of the players are in LA or the new island, exploring doing the puzzles, etc. I did the whole exploration in less than 1 hour, taking my sweet time and I was done. No interest in doing the puzzles there and no chest for completing the exploration. DONE.

With well over 400hours played I am taking now my sweet time focusing on finishing the exploration, I am at 86% and getting all my 80s to 400 on crafting. Other than that, it is hard to find people to do any event in other areas or dungeons in other areas.

With time I see myself playing less and less and waiting for another WoW "Killer" to pop out.

Originally posted by mayito7777

I will say for what I have seen that 90% of the players are in LA or the new island <snip>

This right here.  The big population increase the last few days were for the event.  If you weren't doing the event or in LA (or any other major town), there is a definite lack of players.

For me it has. I got myself banned from the forum by making a stink.

Who cares though, I'm not playing anyway with gear progression being introduced post launch and everything I typed on there got me infracted. It was bound to happen just being on their forum. I promise I was not being mean to anyone either or a smart alleck in my other posts. It was infractions for dumb stuff like someone posted a workaround for a forum bug, I bumped it - infraction. There is a forum bug where at post 49 the topic disappears, I posted 49th and wrote why I did it because of the bug - infraction.

If they can keep open the threads that praise this gear and not consolidate them like they do for the criticisms, I kept reposting what I thought twice until they banned me. For anyone though that WANTS to play, my suggestion is to shutup because they will ban for this topic. For me, the game is history, I don't give companies second chances once a lie is discovered.

Proof of ban. http://i48.tinypic.com/10hlw28.png

Originally posted by botrytis

Originally posted by RavingRabbid
I uninstalled GW2. The  shallow, repetitive, and the "de-leveling" left me not wanting to sign in anymore. I'm not quite sure if there is a mass exodus, but im sure alot of people have left already.

Opinion - would like fact. Every single time I go to LA, I end up in an overflow server, just not during the event either. This tells me: 1. People are NOT leaving the game. 2. I think the population is fairly stable.

 

People who say, 'I uninstalled and there are people that have left' are just wanting to have validation for their decision.

 

Truer words were never spoken.

Originally posted by botrytis

Originally posted by Praxus

[mod edit]

 

[mod edit]

True, but I still feel PS2 has more rewarding feeling pvp and more fun pvp than GW2. I guess individual mileage may vary, huh?

i care nothing about mass exodus, (although i doubt that will happen ) as long i and some friends are enjoying the game, got L80 last week, only 1 exotic, and still 40% of map to explore (some WxWxW, no sPvP and 1 dungeon), talking by myself and my friends we'll be playing the GW2 and will try to avoid the dungeons as more as possible (when i clear all that map and story , and jumping puzzles im moving to my engineer L78 and WxWxW till guild battles with ladder in sPvP as we got on GW1, so who cares about tiny extra points on gear when we need to GRIND 10000'S TIMES?
Everyone must play the game as we enjoys more, if not move to another game

Originally posted by Amjoco

I believe that if you don't like it, it doesn't mean there is a "mass exodus". This was designed to be a casual mmorpg allowing you to come and go as you please. 

I played about 400+ hours, took a break, and play when I feel like it now. It's not a game that if you leave you have trouble jumping right back into imho.

I'd like to believe that, but when you come back in a month or so and shout LFG Fractals level 1, I really wonder how much of a response you'll be getting. Ascended gear could be the threadmill that kills Anets credibility, it really changes the game when you come back on your promises like that.

Originally posted by Pilnkplonk

Originally posted by tryklon

I left long ago, when I realised dungeons were just stupid, with no startegy whatsoever, corpse running cr*p tht is... No loot, waste of time bullcrap.

As such, since im mainly a pve player, I left

Sir, l2p.

I'm not that interested in dungeons, unlocked most stories, done some explorables, but even i noticed that the difference between a good group and a bad group is like heaven and hell. If you're corpse running then either l2p or find a guild.

This x10.

I dislike grinding as well but if you think about it logically, how else are they suppose to give you new gear?

I was told to come to this topic since a discussion I was actually interested in was locked.  This discussion looks pretty bad so far though.  "Mass Exodus"??  

IT'S FREE TO PLAY ONCE YOU BUY THE BOX...anyone can go back and play the dang game anytime they want....there is no such thing as a Mass Exodus when this is considered.

The Mass Exodus IS occuring in the MMORPG world as a whole though and GW2 is one of the reasons why.

I'm not leaving...yet. That's all I care about.

In my guild we've lost a few but more people joined in so it's equal thing. 

Originally posted by Aeolron
Well the wife and I haven't played GW2 in months , seems almost my entire guild is gone last time I went to check it out.

My whole guild quit as well.