It’s been about a week since I logged into Guild Wars 2. I’m a lot less enraged by it, now that I have the perspective of distance. I’m also pretty convinced I never liked it quite as much as I thought I did.

Don’t get me wrong. On many levels, Guild Wars 2 is an excellent game. There are some great characters and great writing, really well-done stories, and mechanics that are both simple and complex. Now that I’ve sort of admitted to at least a part of my brain that my best gaming years are behind me (well, as far as the hand-eye coordination bit goes), I don’t mind that the competitive portions of the game probably won’t ever see me as someone who achieves a level of greatness at PvP (or even half-assedness), I can filter out the portion of anger more rightfully self-directed at my inability to get good.

What remains is the disappointing feeling that team matches are so poorly balanced that an entire team if often left without the ability to really play at all.

Countless times over the course of several months, my team (outnumbered, according to ArenaNet’s WvW perks), was pressed into its own spawn area by one team while another team flipped the rest of our territories. Countless times, both teams attacked our keep in conjunction to push us off the map.

I can’t blame Arena for all of that. I can blame commanders and long-time players, even the nice ones, who refuse to run with “pugs”, hide their tags, insist all of us listen to their comms, and prevent the team from coming together effectively while simultaneously blaming everyone but themselves for that failure.

There are too many tags that just disappear off the map when they’ve failed to take Stonemist Castle with a 7-member squad, or storm a keep where they know a mob of 30 enemy players is absolutely ready to defend.

Other players might not mind it. In fact, a good number of them apparently don’t. I saw the same people on my team day after day, repeatedly getting our collective asses handed to us by massive zerges when we had none to speak of. They all seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Still, I find it very fishy when two enemy players can down 15 players without taking a hit point in damage, and maintain total invulnerability for a solid hour. Especially when so many classes have attacks or skills that make attacks “unblockable” for a short period of time. And I find it fishy when there is a coordinated effort between two teams (regardless of which two teams those are) to wipe the same team off the map day-after-day, week-after-week.

As someone who spent two consecutive links on the same server, I can tell you that is a reality.

The balance in WvW is idiotic. Aside from the mesmer/their combo mentioned above maintaining total invulnerability against 10 or more players for over an hour let’s me know that the classes are imbalanced. It’s not just a matter of getting good. I’m a noob, but many of the other plays on the team were not. No two players should be able to threaten an actual Keep with any serious chance of success. That’s… ridiculous. And against 10+ players and a keep full of siege?

No.

Clearly, there’s a “get good” component. Just as clearly, there’s a “unless you play exactly this way you are always going to lose” component. From the game that advertises “play your way.”

And that, unfortunately, also includes joining the right guilds.

For developers that are so obviously into the psychology of little gold stars, it’s strange to see Arena refusing to actually balance classes and servers in such a way that players are encouraged through achievement to continue playing. There are only so many reward tracks and collections. Once you have a page filled with gold stars, you’re not going to even notice the addition of one more.

It’s not about balancing the classes in such a way that all classes and specializations can use all weapons or have the exact same amount of hit points, dps, or cleanse. But if you’re going to give a specific Firebrand build the ability to one-shot pretty much anyone else, perhaps you build in the weakness that another class can exploit to one-shot the Firebrand.

It’s not about making all the classes equal to each other. It’s more about a rock-paper-scissors approach where a Thief might have an advantage over a Ranger 1:1, but a Mesmer has advantage over the Thief, and a Necromancer over the Mesmer, etc.

Right now, there are a small number of builds considered “meta”, and tags that aren’t pug armies often ask players to use one of them. That right there tells me that EVERY Guild Wars 2 player knows how imbalanced the game is, as there sure aren’t meta builds for all classes or specializations in competitive modes.

Aside from my aging gaming abilities, there’s no joy in logging into a game where the decks are stacked against playing the way I want. I don’t need to single-handed win the day, but I’d occasionally like being on the winning team. And I do believe that ArenaNet needs to do something about its “unstoppable force meets immovable object” problem. If my attack is guaranteed “unblockable” for 3 seconds, then why are all my attacks in that span of time doing 0 damage?

I don’t think that word means what ArenaNet thinks it means.

So I game up WvW, rather than deleting Guild Wars 2 off my laptop. After all, I rely on a mobile hotspot for internet, and downloading GW2 the next time I feel like wandering into MMO territory would take a long, long time.

I’m not really encouraged to continue with PvE. I get really tired of ArenaNet’s insistence on throwing ridiculous story mechanics at me, and then making me do them ad nauseam for the story to progress. The stories are no longer that interesting, and the mastery points one gets from new maps mostly just lead to masteries that only work on those maps.

What kept me motivated to explore maps was mostly my quest for legendary item prerequisites: mats and collection unlock. I like the flashy skins, but mostly I wanted legendary items so I could easy switch my build around and experiment with various combinations of weapons, skills, and specializations. Of course, the reason I did that was to get better at competitive play, which I don’t have an interest in continuing if I’m always going to be on the losing team.

There really isn’t anything new for me to explore in Guild Wars 2. Sure, they recently released the ending of their latest DLC which includes a new map. Without even looking at it, I can tell you it’s just a variation of the last three. All the stupid mechanics have robbed me of the joy I would normally feel exploring the story. I’m tired of weird little jumping puzzles, juicing frogs, feeding suddenly lovestruck cows, and dragging stone blocks around.

I’m surely tired of doing that with every single one of my characters in order to craft the items necessary for me to experiment with my build on the fly in order to play a competitive game my team just can’t ever win.

I’ll probably play through some of my favorite single-player games. MMOs can’t really offer a lot in the way of agency for the main characters. I understand the reasoning, but I’ve missed the “choose your own adventure” nature of single-player games. Might as well revel in it for a while.

There’s no doubt I will play Guild Wars 2 to some extent in the future. I just no longer see the point in pursuing objectives that are costly in terms of time (if not money) that will lead me nowhere. I’m not at all social, but I will miss the people, both those that frequent PvE maps, and those in WvW.