kingwookie7210: as a newer player, it is incredibly hard to get into a raid group. i loved raiding in other mmo's would love to do these.
eon6274: Having only played the game for ~1 year or so, I'd consider myself a newish player. I'd tried nearly every bit of content I could get my hands on. The friend that got me into the game would help me find groups and show me mechanics. I never, ever had as much grief in the game with any other mode as I did with raiding, and I'm someone who did mythic raiding for years on WoW and 20-40man heroics before that - so I was no mere newbie.

The amount of angry people insulting me in chat during raids for messing up one or two things was astronomical. So high that I stopped raiding completely. I even got someone whispering me that I was bad and should drop group. MY group that my friend and I made to pug? We were still going through quite easily, and yet people felt it right to tell me to leave? It killed all the fun I'd get out of downing a new boss when people are asking if they're "running with bots". (Okay that was a funny one but I got it twice from two different people) I'm not sure if the community realizes just how bad they are to new players in that mode. It's so, SO much worse than WvW or fractals or anything else in the game. The players left me dreading raids.


I'd almost go so far as to say I was treated worse in Gw2 raids than in WoW raids. If there's such a small amount of the community doing them and if an even smaller, vocal amount of people are pushing out newbies from trying the mode, then it's almost certain to die.
dfg12382: The portion of players that experience raids don't mean anything as there's so much relevant endgame content in GW2. In WoW, the current raid is like 90% of what's relevant content at any point in time - ofc 90% of the playerbase will play it. In GW2, playing 2 hours of meta train can be your entire endgame if you choose so. Or doing WvW, PvP, Fractals, Fishing. You can't compare GW2 raid participation to any other MMO really.
thatguy3675: I’ve played GW2 since launch and have done every bit of content aside from Raids.
For some reason, my introvert self won’t join a discord to team up with people and learn how to do raids.
I think it’s more a result of the social requirements of raids.
I’d say the majority of GW2 players are introvert/solo type players. Not saying they aren’t in a Guild but I feel like most players do their own thing most times.
Doing raids requires you to interact with other humans which in today’s society can be a big roadblock for many players.
MrAddummm: i genuinely think if they clean up and remake the entire LFG system then it will vastly improve the amount of people that play group content such as raids, strikes, ect.
Dukaanis: What a shocker. The raid comunnity overestimate their value. The process of getting into raiding is highly annoying. I can do every content in the game, but I refuse to engage with raids. Strikes, fractals and even open world are just better.
Jmvars: If EoD and SotO strikes were actually rewarding, maybe more people would do it. If you look on fast farming, one ToF daily rewards you roughly 1g 37s. If you use even cheap food and utility you'll quickly get less than 1g. Even me, a filthy casual, can tell that it's very low rewards even when doing daily clears, the only thing carrying them is the weekly mystic coins and mystic clover.
youteubakount4449: I mean you can keep making super hard content. If you want numbers, it needs to be playable by the average, mediocre (as in "middle") player.
The more conditions you have to satisfy, the lower the number of players, that's it.
If you have to:
- sit 30m in a lobby looking for a group
- spend 2h trying to clear content
- have to repeat 7 times because you need to prepare like you're going on a job interview
- have to actually be decent
- have to tryhard, can't play a random build
- trade off some other content that is also rewarding
- have a lot of players involved, compounding the need for every single person to satisfy all the conditions

then you can't be surprised that the content remains unpopular.
Popular content will always:
- bz relatively short
- be accessible to bad players or bad builds
- involve fewer players
- have decent rewards for bad players, and improving rewards for players that perform better
eldrevo: First of all, even an old and dying game can always bounce back. It requires effort from the game's developers, marketing, and some community goodwill, but it is possible.

I've worked on one such old game, with decent core playerbase but slowly declining, and it was quite a journey trying to figure out its pain points and the way to fix them with what little resources our skeleton crew had -- but in the end, the numbers went up, user acquisition dept did its magic and the game had lived for a while longer than everyone had thought. Or look how wow bounced back from bleeding players to welcoming everyone home. Bold decisions and good marketing are the key here, which may be bad news for Anet on the other hand :D

Second of all, there are ways to keep the game as fun, to keep the power level comfortable, and to fix the boon issue at the same time. Long story short, buff player stats baseline, lower boons uptime / efficiency accordingly. Will make it easier for boonless open world peepos, maybe a bit harder for top players (not that they've been struggling with all the power creep), but will also make boons actually functional and interesting system to use once again. I'll probably write about it in more detail in a post elsewhere
sephirothdoug: Raid is for sure the worse content in gw2, it is difficult, ppl are toxic, it take so much time and effort for something not worth and irrelevant for the character progress, the problem in this kind of content is the rewards, like dungeon, nobody play because the rewards sucks
CrystronHalq: The reason why GW2 is not known for its endgame encounters, is because of the boon system. You can just tank a boss with full uptime of boons. I wouldnt say to remove quickness/alacrity or other boons for that matter...but SIGNIFICANTLY nerf/adjust most of them. Give them internal cooldown. Make their effect less potent. Alacrity from 25% to 15%. Quickness from 50% to 25%. Regeneration, Swiftness, Fury and Vigor (maybe reduce the Fury crit chance to 15%). are the only balanced ones imo. Everything else needs tweaking.
Hekk.: I wouldn't mind a complete removal of quickness and alac... but only if the base 'speed' was sped up a little. Some specs feel horrible to play without quickness.
Anaeijon: I personally basically don't play 10 player content. I don't know anyone in my friend group personally who does.
Compared to others, I have at least played it a bit to get some achievements or collections done. But not more than I had to.
Others avoid this completely.

Why? Because of players.
Raids are gatekept by those who know what they are doing. You can't just go into the LFG and queue up for a Raid. You decipher some cryptic group names in the LFG, change your build accordingly and join the group. For me, this usually worked out fine. I also have pretty thick skin when it comes to toxic comments and can actually be honest and ask questions without fear. But on average, Raids and Fractals are way more toxic than PvP.

GW2 is casual. Most people play it to relax for 1-2 hours after work or on the weekend. We don't have to stress out at that time, giving myself getting virtually jelled at and tackle some heavy learning curve against a gatekeeping toxic community of neckbeards. Better rewards wouldn't help that.

Strike Missions improved that situation briefly. I played them for quite some time. Then I had a 4 month off-time and when I came back, Strikes looked like Raids on the LFG to me, with absurd cryptic names and me not knowing what's up and where I need to go - and no way of getting into it.

If the raid/strike community wants to keep those game modes, they have to become more inclusive and have to make sure, beginner-freindly groups are accessible 90% of the time, not just occasionally every weekend if you are lucky.
tjduck85: I'm lucky when I see the open world "raid" in Janthir Wilds succeed. It's hard to imagine many open worlders wanting to jump into actual raid content when the open world version fails so often.
Kerbezena: "Secrets of the Obscure" = actually just Anet's marketing

Oct 11 2024

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