I have been playing Guild Wars 2 for 4 or 5 years, I honestly don't remember. I have to say that I feel as though it was a novel idea as far as MMO's are concerned but I believe it will have soon run its course because like most MMO's, the people in the game start to develop routines and any additional content that is designed to offer more variety actually ends up having a detrimental impact on the game.
You are allowed to be a member of multiple guilds in-game, I am a member of 3. 2 of them have such poor performance / participation by the members that I, like a vast majority of the other members, left them. The one guild i still remain a part of has a lot of members, but if you sort by "time last online" almost all of the 150 members haven't logged in for a week or more. This is not good.
I will briefly try to explain why i think the end is coming soon for the game as a whole:
1 Nearly everyone logs in, does the dailies, and logs out
I do this to. Each day we are given a set of objectives to accomplish in order to get some sort of reward. You are not required to do this and it is designed to keep users logging in every day. It accomplishes that for many people including me. However, once I have achieved these objectives, i generally log out and don't play futher.
Material collection has become the game
I had gotten so accustomed to the collection of various wood and ore (by chopping and mining them from various locations on the map) that I find myself running around doing only that. I only fight when something gets in the way of me collecting more wood. It was yesterday when i was collecting wood and ore that it suddenly occurred to me that I have no idea what I am collecting this for. I have nothing in mind that I am trying to craft. I have just gotten so used to running around doing this that it has become the game to me.
Dungeons and Fractals are no longer explored, but rather, completed as quickly as possible
These have (had) potential to be the best part of the game and there is a lot of story contained in the dungeons at least. However, if you DARE actually try to listen to the story, your group is going to boot you or at the minimum get upset with you. It seems no one actually wants to explore anything, they just want to finish it as fast as possible and if you are inexperienced and "get in the way" they get rid of you.
What is the point of playing this at all if the only reason why you are doing it is to get the goodies that come after defeating the dungeon / fractal? Is it really so bad to let people try to enjoy the story? I have even tried to start "NOOB ONLY" dungeon groups only to have them infiltrated by experts who get in there and berate us for not knowing the dungeon inside and out. He / She said we should watch Youtube videos about strategy before running dungeons.
That is dumb... and it was my group... so i booted him.
Mounts have kind of ruined the game-play
Mounts have made areas that were previously difficult to access and required some skill to access painfully easy to complete. There is very little reason to ever not be on the back of your mount and this discouraged team play even more because now you can just blaze through nearly any obstacle without ever needing to team up to get past it. Like everyone else, i was kind of excited to have a mount, but now that I have them, i can't stand to not be on one. It's funny that something that was introduced to lure in more players may have achieved that, but now it is kind of ruining the rest of the game.
TL; DR
This game is dying soon because no one is actually playing it for the content anymore. Everyone is playing it for the hopes of getting an exotic drop to kit out their toon more and I have to say, what is the point of that? I get it, you want better gear, so does everyone else but at least in my mind the entire reasoning behind MMO's is to want to be able to enjoy the story at least a bit right?
I think that people generally are not interested in the story anymore and people are just farming nodes like leather farms and speed running dungeons to save up tokens (For what, i can't say.)
Once your subscribers are no longer interested in team-play or the story that the game provides, it is only a matter of time before the players who are interested in that will simply bail. I know that I am very close to walking away forever. All that it would take for me to do this would be for a new MMO to be released.
@ gooddream I have Played Guild Wars 1 but do not know what is updated in Guild Wars 2 , how ever interesting games and challenging levels and missions I have enjoyed. Thanks for sharing
you are far more old school than me then :) I never played the first one.