On the official Guild Wars 2 forum and on the game's unofficial subreddit players have posted complaints about the lack of developer attention to the game's World versus World game mode.
In a recent post on the game's official forum players are complaining about a lack of communication, stating that developers rarely answer posts in the game mode's subforum, but do engage in conversation in other subforums.
Similar posts were submitted to the game's unofficial subreddit where one post titled "My favorite WvW improvement this year", featuring no text at all, quickly became the most upvoted post with 547 points in less than 12 hours.
The complaints from the game's community come as no surprise as players have long considered the World versus World game mode to be neglected by its developers, often citing developer resources spent on other content instead to be the main issue.
After the release of the game's first expansion Heart of Thorns over 12 months ago, ArenaNet president and co-founder Mike O'Brien stated that he "absolutely wants to bring more community representation to the World versus World team." adding to it that the company would "find the right people and fly them here."
Since that time World versus World has seen the introduction of several new features, including a reward track that works similarly to the one that was already available in the Player versus Player game mode, World Linking to address the issue of declining population, and a reworked scoring system dubbed Skirmishes to address the issue of nightcapping - a term used to define players capturing objectives when the majority of the server's population is asleep.
World versus World has also seen the introduction of several quality of life changes, including a new squad user interface, Skirmish score floaters and a compact name tag option to prevent screen clutter.
Despite these changes, the game's World versus World community believes the developer resources put into the game mode are not enough to keep it alive.
The new reward track, while a step in the right direction, still does not give the same rewards that players get from playing the game's Player versus Environment or Player versus Player game modes.
The World Linking system, while positively voted on by a majority, does not seem to fix the game mode's stagnating server population, but instead promotes players playing on host servers with already high population by transfering to smaller linked servers for a highly reduced price.
The new Skirmish scoring system also fails to address the game mode's nightcapping scoring issues, because players are still able to influence the outcome of a matchup by capturing objectives when most enemies are asleep.
As a result, many players have stated they have stopped playing the game altogether while they either await more significant changes or await the release of similar realm versus realm games, such as Crowfall or Camelot Unchained.
In conversation with Zero Lives, the author of the most upvoted subreddit post, who goes by the username Lksaar, explains that he submitted the post because, even though ArenaNet has introduced several new features, they "have not fixed the root problems of World versus World: skill balance, population imbalance and rewards."
According to Lksaar, communication between the game mode's community and the development team has always been poor, but was getting better when ArenaNet game designer Tyler Bearce took the lead.
Under Bearce's wings the World versus World team shipped some of the biggest new features since the game launched in 2012, including World Linking and Skirmishes.
Surprisingly, in August 2016, only a few months after Bearce took over the development team, he was reportedly pulled off the project again to work on content for Guild Wars 2's second upcoming expansion.
With new developers now working on the game mode, Lksaar feels that things are going down hill again because they "rarely communicate" with the playerbase.
The game mode unites a lot of different playstyles, including roaming, guild fights, zerg fights, capturing and defending. This can make developing and building upon the existing game mode challenging because changes may conflict with certain playstyles.
In response to the recent complaints about communication and attention to the World versus World game mode ArenaNet's Communications Manager Gaile Gray states that "the timing of these comments is particularly ironic," because "WvW has been given unprecedented levels of communication, interaction, and engagement in recent months."
Despite the response from Gray, players on Reddit consider the reply to be "damage control at its finest" because "there is no possible way this is true at all," with players stating that the game mode has seen little to no changes over the course of a 4 year period.
While ArenaNet is not seeming to acknowledge the lack of development resources being put into the game mode, players still hold hope that the game mode will see a bright future.
Amongst the playerbase there is a strong consensus that the development studio should spend additional resources on fixing rewards, population imbalance, scoring and skill balance.
Whether the sales of the game's upcoming second expansion will be negatively impacted by the supposed lack of developer attention for the game mode remains to be seen, because it is unknown what percentage of the game's 7 million players solely focus on the game mode.
If the number of points on the subreddit post is anything to go by, the impact on sales may be larger than expected.
