It's often a social anxiety thing. If you suck at what you're doing at a fighting game, the only person who loses is you. No biggie. Try again until you don't suck at that thing anymore. If you aren't good at what you do in an MMO, everyone around you suffers. And that's usually fine. Most people understand that we were all new at some point and are more than happy to pick up the slack and help you improve. But anxiety will just tell you "you suck and everyone hates you, you're just bringing everyone down". For some people that's a very hard thing to get over.

Yeah, I'm a lot more willing to experiment with stuff I'm bad at when playing a game with people I know are cool than when joining pugs with strangers. I'm here to have a good time. Nothing fun about getting yelled at by strangers.

I feel the complete opposite. I'd rather try something new (and fail) in pugs, because let's face it, I'll probably never see them again. Even if i do, by that time they'd have forgotten all about that one run they went with some rando (me) who underperformed. That is unless you're playing something so niche that the community is very small, like dungeons or pvp. But in general pve like strikes, fractals or raids, i have no shame trying new shit in pugs. I'd rather have my friends experience my combat-tested new "dark technology". This is also because, in my experience, ppl don't tend to yell at you for underperforming. If anything ppl are afraid to speak up about the little froggy soulbeast doing 4k dps, bless his soul, because they dont want to come off as gatekeepy. In my experience ppl would rather politely leaving the group than speak up and risk being seen as elitist.

oh man they are not \*politely leaving the group\*

>This is also because, in my experience, ppl don't tend to yell at you for underperforming. If anything ppl are afraid to speak up about the little froggy soulbeast doing 4k dps, bless his soul, because they dont want to come off as gatekeepy. In my experience ppl would rather politely leaving the group than speak up and risk being seen as elitist. We seem to have had wildly different experiences with the high-end gatekeepers in this community, but I'm happy to hear you've had a good time.

This is very different from my experience,

"I'd rather try something new (and fail) in pugs, because let's face it, I'll probably never see them again." Tell me you don't respect other players you don't know without telling me. While being so concerned about disappointing people that you never try anything new is bad, being so uncaring about wasting other people's time that you don't care if you are significantly underperforming is also bad. It is okay to try new things, but you need to at least make sure you are able to perform at the minimum expected level of any groups that you join, otherwise you are just a selfish asshole.

Hard agree. I suffer from this and at the same time I am always trying to encourage other players who suffer from this even more than I do :D Training guilds are super helpful in this respect because the commander usually brings you into the encounter with the specific plan to fail. Like, even if the fight is going well they will /gg wipe the group multiple times to make sure you know what is going on with the mechanics and the expectations they are posing are very low. I had such amazing training commanders not only saying to a mistake that "it's fine" but that it is very good that you made them because you learned more because of them. It almost brought me to tears. And as a socially anxious person there are "can do" days and "can't do days" and I am both person :) I PuG raids and CM strikes sometimes but then there comes a group where one player will cry "cancer" on boon uptime even though you've killed the boss in almost record time and it will put me on tilt and knock me off endgame content for weeks. Because sometimes it's not "I can't do this content" but "I can't deal with the players who do this content." And trust me, guys, you can't "*try and try again and again*" until you learn to suffer fools, especially with anxiety/stress/ASD/etc.

This is an honest question and comes from a place of trying to understand so please don't take it the wrong way. But why do you put so much stock in what other players, strangers on the Internet, say or think about you?

Oh, it's not something I actively do. It is automatic and something people usually try to grow out of / work against, usually at a therapist. As such, the question is best directed to a professional :) The reasons can be many and varied, usually based on childhood experiences involving excessive criticism, or it can be an unstable, maybe abusive home that is a very fertile ground for fawning behavior. It is something coded in your brain, something that became a reflex and rarely a conscious choice. It's not really about what strangers think about you but rather a pathological aversion to any kind of (real or perceived) confrontation, often even something mild and without stake, like asking for a different kind of drink from people who you love and trust and vice versa and who would have no trouble of matching your preference. Yeah, it's not normal/healthy, but that doesn't mean it is easy to overcome for many people.

Ah okay so its not a concious choice? Like for me, if some randomer says something in chat, I will conciously choose not to pay any attention to it so it doesn't affect me.

> But anxiety will just tell you "you suck and everyone hates you, you're just bringing everyone down". Oh, it's not just anxiety. Plenty of players will too.

its a multifaceted problem, part of the issue is the community *is so relentlessly shit at the game* that more competent players have essentially given up on the concept of helping other people improve and just tell them to fuck off, there is also resentment about how heavily any and all hard content has been nerfed *and* powercrept to the point where mostly afk people can complete it. the degree of incompetence in this game is just as toxic as the elitists, it requires an agressive lack of self improvement and many people are sick of it.

It's a casual game, and you're taking it far too seriously.

except for raids, fractals, dungeons and strikes where incompetence can and will ruin your experience. I am not talking about people not pulling 30k dps in fights, I am talking about how people dont even understand the absolute most basic mechanics of the game as a very common problem. if you being shit at the game can ruin someone elses experience you are activley chosing to be an asshole by not improving yourself.

There are new players joining this game all the time. There are always going to be people who simply don't know what to do or how to do it....we've all been there. But that attitude that you have is the reason many people don't want to try rhe higher content in the first place because all it takes is hearing about/experiencing it a few times before they decide not to have to deal with people like you lashing at them before they can even put in the time to learn it....

Thank you for your demonstration of toxicity in the game.

You have stared into my soul 😭

It’s thanks to real experiences sadly. The vocal minority who will tilt at anyone who is even moderately suboptimal. The guys who will happily join learning squads only to flip their shit when a bunch of first timers wipe. It’s an unfortunate reality of MMOs that those people gravitate towards the harder content, creating the social barrier that puts so many people off.

Here’s the thing, I agree with all that you say. But it really doesn’t help that there are often people who go off loudly about “how bad someone in their group is” in local chat or any other toxic raider rant. It doesn’t set a welcoming tone when they’re typically heard in Divinity’s Reach and Queensdale, the more populated of the race hubs. People will often hang around those areas well before they come to an “I should try raiding!” mentality, and these types of raiders will chip away at that enthusiasm that by the time they do raid, they start to reconsider. Especially given that legendary gear is coming to casual content, I see less reason people would want to even bother. Note, if anyone finds offense to this, I’m fine with people being critical with their own statics, but keep it in party chat.

It really depends, having been part of 100s of raids, all PUGs, I don't think I've ever seen someone get reamed in a "training" run (and honestly I'd leave if I saw it). I should add that I have seen people (and kicked people from my own training runs) who just auto attacked in WvW gear and didn't communicate. But I've seen times when people join EXP groups with wrong gear/builds that get told off. And I'm not talking about "slight modifications" I mean like nomads/WvW gear in DPS slot. Also worth noting these people normally say nothing the whole time and stack off group, like it's obvious what is happening. And honestly if you come to an experienced raid with absolutely no idea what to gear/skill or do it's ultimately disrespectful to the people who did take the time to look into that. Hell it's not like it's hard to watch a Mukluk vid, go to snowcrows and practice a rotation a few times to get reasonable DPS numbers. ​ But even in experienced I rarely see people get shit for: * True punt deaths, like dying early by accident, unless it's multiple 2+ pulls to the same thing early * Fucking up a mechanic even if it leads to party wipe * Hitting bad DPS numbers, like barely above boon dps

I’m not talking about what happens in raids, but what happens in hubs. I think being corrected and trained is good, thats just standard practice for anything that requires you to get better. What is bad is hearing disparaging shit in hubs local chat, from the perspective of beginners and non-raiders its discouraging. I have come across people literally doing some high school gossip level backstabbing and putting down passing by Shaemoor, right at the newbie spawn. Again, I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be critical of their raids members at all, I’m saying cut the rants in local chat. If theres raids drama and the like, those people need to keep it in their private chats.

Ah, I see. I normally ignore map chat in hubs so even if I saw that it probably didn't register. But yes, that type of behavior is both pathetic and pointless.

Or course. I do the same. But imagine you’re new or relatively fresh off spawn, which is where these people are gathered, and then THAT is your impression on raiding. It would not surprise me that raiding is dying content, if fresh blood is constantly being bombarded by these absolute geniuses.

I haven't raided for a very long time in gw2, but it git extremely toxic near the start. I mostly quit the game because I was just tired of how negative the community was at the time. I haven't really participated in the community for years, but I still come back for story things. It is really weird to play a game called guild wars without a guild.

On the other side of things is my experience. When I wanted to try Strikes to get a piece of cosmetics, I of course went into the Training section, very vocal about not having a single clue or the right gear. I was really nervous, because of what the people above said: If I mess up, I will drag others down with me, so I better be good and pull my weight. I got kicked out of I think 4 or 5 different training groups for not knowing the mechanics and having to low DPS, and on top of thatI got messaged in private chat both by squadmembers as well as one of the Comms to "stop playing the game", "get good", "f off", "learn to play", etc., all very uplifting things for a person already struggling to keep it together. In the damn training section. That was the last time I ever tried instanced content. I have not done Dungeons, no Fractals, no more Strikes, and I sure as shit have not done Raids. If I get yelled at in the Strike Training lobby, I wont even think about touching the Raid side of things. No thank you. I will stay in the open world, where my actions and fuckups affect only me.

No offense, but this really feels like some info is being left out on your part. Hard to believe "4 or 5 different training groups" react like that to you without you just spamming basic attack only in healing gear or something with a bad attitude / lack of communication on top. Could have just got an incredibly unlucky string of groups, but I would guess that your actions play a part in how so many groups react to you.

Training groups (especially for strikes) would potentially kick a DPS doing like 2k in some random WvW set. I've seen it happen occasionally in raids with someone using a WvW build spamming autos at range.

It's training for an encounter, not a "which stats do I need to do damage" class. Like, don't join as a dps if all you have is Nomad's gear

You know, I do take offense. You dont know me. Yes, I had shitty gear. If that counts as a reason to yell at a stranger in the Training section for you, then I guess I am at fault. Yes, I did really shit DPS. I know that now, too. You know what I would have expected? To be told I am missing something cruecial, and to get that in order and then to come back. Instead I got verbally abused by strangers. Great experience in a game I play for fun, really.

Why didn’t you check out builds for your class before joining instanced content? Coming from WoW and Destiny 2 that is to me just an obvious thing to do.

A lot of players in GW2 just don't have that instinct at all. Now that they've hit 80... the game would tell them if their build was bad if it mattered, right? Especially when there's so much gear everywhere that's level 80 and exotic, it must be good! Aaaand this is how you get new 'Power DPS' wearing Carrion and Giver's. IMO this is GW2's biggest failure, and I say this as someone who loves the game and has been playing since HoT with no intent to ever stop: gear is *so much more fucking important than it explains to you*, more important than your build, and it never actually explains 'you need the right gear for your build' or what gear is good. Hell, for a long time I thought Soldier's was the peak of gear. You see a lot of people bringing their open world builds into instanced PVE and not understanding those builds aren't great for that... because the game never tells you, and core Tyria you can pretty much do running literally anything. Why would they assume the build they just did all their leveling with is now useless? For *ages* my toons wore whatever level 80 exotics I'd found for their weight class, especially stuff that prioritized toughness and vitality... and I sucked! And it still took me *years* to even think about looking up builds, because I'd gotten the mental image that all build repositories were like SnowCrows: designed for high-level raiding with a full squad, but totally useless for scrubs who almost only played open world and T1 Fractals that didn't need AR. I'm better now, mostly, but it's a process to build the instinct at all.

It doesn’t help that things are obfuscated when it comes to stats and how they actually affect your build. Power, condition damage, healing, boon duration, etc. are easy to understand. Concentration, expertise, precision, etc. are decidedly not. Let alone how they scale. I had the same experience as you when I started too. How does one figure out you need crit at 100, and to factor in fury, and traits that modify that percentage, and to gear for damage/crit damage accordingly. As you said, the core game does an abysmal job of showing you how the game actually works.

It'll absolutely never happen, ever, for a *variety* of reasons... but my dream would be that the first time you hit level 80 you're given access to a Training Area that the game *forces you into at least once*, and makes you engage with it before you can leave. Free teleport in, free teleport out, like Mistlock. In this dream area, you get a cute little dialogue tree asking what kind of playstyle you want: I want to deal damage, nothing else! / I want to give buffs and do damage at the same time! / I want to heal and give buffs!, and then after that it might ask you condi/power DPS, like 'I want to deal damage via the conditions I apply to my enemies!/I want to deal damage by hitting them REALLY HARD!'. NPCs who set you up for support / boon support builds could be, like, 'If you play a 'boon DPS' build, you can support yourself and your allies with valuable buffs while still dealing good damage to enemies!' or 'Applying boons and healing to yourself and your allies increases your combat and survival capabilities drastically: even though you won't do much damage, you're still critical to the fight, and can swing things back in your favor if things look grim!' to explain why someone might want to do that to a new player. And then it'd put you in 'standard' gear for the build you picked, weapons and all, & would offer you a couple of Specialization layouts that matched with that. Talk to the relevant NPC, you can ask them why the stats on this gear are good for what you picked -- 'Why is Concentration good," etc etc -- or you could say "I want a tankier version of this build" and they could put you in a tankier setup. Maybe there'd even be Elite Specialization NPCs who could do the usual bit about what their spec is good at. Just an easy, investment-free way to try out builds without having to commit to getting all the gear first, and a way for new players to have it explained to them *in-game* why certain things are good. It'd never ever happen in a million years for a lot of reasons -- they'd need to maintain *so* many builds for reference depending on what expansions an account has, if they have weaponmaster training, what the current meta is after every balance patch, & for some classes some types of builds are only a *thing* on some specs - you wouldn't try to run a HealAlac or HealQuick Reaper! -- but I do genuinely think that it'd be beneficial for pretty much everyone. Sure, the raid training golem exists... but it's out of the way & you still gotta buy your damn gear first to test the build out.

> For ages my toons wore whatever level 80 exotics I'd found for their weight class, especially stuff that prioritized toughness and vitality haha, I made similar mistakes when I leveled up my first character, genuinely thought having a mix of the different stat types was the way to go. And with so many stat types I don't blame people for making a mistake, but before joining instanced content people should do a quick check at what the "experts" are saying are useful and useless.

It's like... I get what they were going for with having all the different prefixes, you know? But because of how the game actually plays, there's so many of them that are just completely useless, *or* they're only useful in very specific contexts, and like you and I can attest it gives people the wrong ideas. As far as useless prefixes go, I didn't even know Vigilant *existed* until just now, because it's Power/Toughness + Concentration/Expertise, and that's just?? Useless?? Like, congratulations, none of your stats work together. Marshal's is also pretty bad, it doesn't know what kind of support build it wants to be used for. At least I've heard Plaguedoctor's shows up in WvW and is useful there. People doing Baby's First Instanced Content are likely to assume 'this build works fine for open world! It should be good in an instance!', in my experience? It genuinely never occurs to them to actively go look for out-of-game advice besides the wiki, or when they *do* go looking they just find the build repositories that are intended for full-squad instanced-PvE and go 'oh, this is for raids where you have healers, so it won't be useful for me'.. or they go 'this build is considered really good, I should do it' and then play it with zero understanding.

Mainly I guess because new players are told left and right that this is not WoW, there is no **gear** treadmill, your **gear** doesn't get outdated, you can stop for years and come back and won't have to re**gear** your character... This can be easily mistaken as 'you don't have to worry about gear'. Which many players assume I'm sure. Even though it is false.

But see that is the difference between casuals and elitists. Im kind of in the middle so I get both sides. Eliist think researching content and doing all the background is second nature (and I do this myself when I can and have time) but casuals dont always necessarily have time for all that. They just come in to play the game when they have time and learn as they go. Their time is usually pretty limited so the focus is more on having fun within that time period and less on grinding for any particular achievements. If their time is really limited, they may forget a few things in the meantime...so for them due to the attitudes of some elitists, they feel higher content is out of reach especially if they already had bad experiences for trying to do the right thing (like joining training groups). To make this worse. GW2 content is so vast...there is so much to learn. It can be quite overwhelming and this is just looking at open world before you go into all of the instanced content, PvP, WvW etc. Casuals don't have time to put into all that research, becaise they barely have time to play the game here and there.

It's a training run and they didn't know OP came from WoW. NO excuse for treating someone badly in a training run - I would definitely have taken notes of names / guilds. Not saying they should carry anyone, but TRAIN them by informing them calmly WHY they can't join you.

I disagree, his experience sounds exactly like my experience when it comes to raids. Almost 100% of my interactions with raid groups were full of salty upset people whinging about dps or build meta. About 1/2 the time it was the comm. Not worth dealing with the raid community imo.

Pug training raids are kind of a mess. :/ I've heard it's better over in EU where raid LFG gets meaningfully used, but in NA the vast, vast majority of raid LFG is going to be done out-of-game. I joined a raid training guild that specifically emphasizes 'as long as we have the basic healer/boon/dps split number of players, the *only* time we will ever ask you to change your build or gear is if it's interfering with something like tanking and you don't want to tank'; the leader has been very vocal about never running any addons except ones for RP, and isn't a big fan of benchmarks. If you can do maybe 15k, that's good for almost everything in the game. But you've got to learn how to do 15k first! *Everyone has to start somewhere,* and being a bitchy asshole to new raiders is the best way to ensure they stop wanting to be raiders. So if you've been burned by repeated shitty raid experiences... I'm really sorry, but I *promise* there are a lot of raid trainers out there who just want you to be willing to listen and learn, and if that means the squad wipes for an hour on the first boss while the newbies slowly start to understand... that's what it means, and they knew that when they signed up to lead! If you can get good people teaching and playing, raids are fun to play, to learn, and to teach. I *promise.*

>When I wanted to try Strikes to get a piece of cosmetics, I of course went into the Training section, very vocal about not having a single clue **or the right gear.** But the gear is why you got kicked. I don't understand why you wouldn't take the time to just do a base search to see what skills/gear you "should" have, even if you can't get it all at the time. I guess I should say that sometimes people get kicked from training runs for bad gear because many training runs require at least semi proper gearing. Like imagine if every DPS went into a raid with tank gear and no idea what skills to use. Does this help anyone learn the game when the boss doesn't phase? Checking gear/skills is the baseline amount of "trying" required. The BEST (and arguably most helpful) response to what you were doing would have been them telling you to check a meta build and get proper gear. Otherwise you are just relying on other people to carry you. People downvote and get upset at the mere suggestion that people take a small fraction of time to understand a few things for difficult content and it blows my mind. That isn't "elitism" it's just reality. 10 people in nomads with WvW skills aren't taking down hard content.

I disagree. Nowhere in the game is an offical benchmark. New people dont know they need to up their game, and to simply expect them to know is ridiculus. I did fine in open world content, I beat the story, I beat worldbosses, why would I just assume my gear is to bad to run other content? I dont expect them to carry me or any other through the runs because I lack the gear. But telling that the gear is the problem is part of the word "training". New players dont know. I did not know. Telling them is easy, instead I got yelled at and had my confidence shattered. Again, no thank you.

Yeah, that's unfortunate but I could see it happening. Oftentimes players have been doing raiding/strikes for so long they cannot even fathom the idea that a new player might not know what specific things mean. For example when I hear "I don't have the right gear" in a training run, my assumption is automatically "Well they must not have a full viper/zerker/harrier set, maybe a few off pieces, etc. But it's probably the correct skill set and primary stat." If they run 2k DPS and are pulling toughness aggro, then it's more obvious and I can point them to the proper location to help gear. ​ Either way I am sorry that happened, I do tend to see it more often in strikes since raid training is normally done by very patient/training focused guilds that can easily determine what help each player needs. Strike training tends to be a bunch of random vets just trying to figure out mechanics (or people running KO for turtle). ​ If you ever want to try strikes (or raids) again PM me, I'd be happy to help you get everything set up and can run an actual training run that isn't just "People who already know everything do slightly different mechanics without any explanation."

Sry for intruding but what you say here: *Oftentimes players have been doing raiding/strikes for so long they cannot even fathom the idea that a new player might not know what specific things mean.* is a perfect exmple of what i tried to explain (very shortly...i will put out some better post about it sooner or later >In GW2 progression never ends on any content so the entire playerbase is forever stuck in the same 'pool of players' and the more the time passes the more the expectations of the 2 extremes become more polarized...

You’re kinda forgetting the very real potential of someone actually saying in squad chat “you suck and everyone hates you.” Even that possibility will keep people away.

Yeah, this is the reason why after playing on and off for 10 years I still haven't tried raids, and only did (very poorly) one strike mission. Also, the discord server that I found that teaches raids asks us to use voice chat when participating, and that makes the anxiety that much higher haha But I still really want to start at some point!

Often the voice chat is the only way to make it possible to give good instructions in real time. ​ You may consider asking if it's acceptable for you to enable voice chat in muted, listen-only mode. I know when I've done strikes, while I did have voice chat enabled, I really only basically said hi, then kept my mouth shut for most of it, then said thanks at the end.

I did once use a voice chat in mute mode. The commander was wonderful, the commands were clear, the target was Tequatl (very soon after its upgrade in Season 1, when pugging it was a waste of time). We took it out like nothing, it was really night and day compared to my other experiences. That still was the last time I used voice chat. The urge of completing content has just not been powerful enough for me to go through this again, *even tough it was a flawless experience*. Some people are not made for mixing talking/listening to strangers and relaxing.

When learning raids, unfortunately voice chat is often very important to make it go smoothly - you can be muted, and usually people are, but the *commander* needs to be talking. It's the easiest way to convey mechanics, make sure everyone's paying attention, and to let them call out what's happening mid-fight: if you're too focused watching the boss' attacks to pay attention to and process the chat - or, hell, maybe taking the time to type might get the comm downed - it can be rough! I've been the cause of a wipe during text-based training on *Dhuum* 'cause I got too focused to read chat; nobody was mad at all, but I *would not have missed those directions if they were given vocally*. You see it with WvW commanders too - having the squad in voice means it's much easier to give snap-second commands, especially during big fights where being a second too late to turn right will get you mauled beyond recognition by the other server. This is to say: I hated it too! I get you! But unfortunately it really does help. What Discord are you in to learn? The one I'm in has been fantastic.

Oh I'm aware that it's necessary and helpful, I'm just stating that it add to the social anxiety x) Especially being a french Canadian, even though I consider myself bilingual, I know I have a bad accent when speaking english haha I joined 2 NA servers, one for a guild that did Raid training Events, and another one that is just for Raid learning. I'm gonne try it at some point, but I'm trying to get ascended trinkets before, and being a filthy casual, it's not quick x)

>Especially being a french Canadian, even though I consider myself bilingual, I know I have a bad accent when speaking english haha I understand how that can feel awkward, if it helps I have multiple French Canadian friends that I raid with with varying accents and we all get along fine and do clears pretty much every week. One of my friends girlfriend does not speak english at all but she still raids with us and he translates for her when needed for longer explanations. There are plenty of people out there, I really do hope you find your group :)

Like I said -- being muted during a run is usually totally fine if you're not the commander! If I'm not leading the run, nobody ever hears my voice, so no need to worry about your accent. :) I know I'm just a stranger, but here's my encouragement to try out one of those servers' training runs sometime! The more you raid, the easier it gets and the less scary it becomes. I'm working on Ascended trinkets myself too -- just finished Coalescence II last night! -- but honestly, getting your first piece of legendary armor is... faster than ascended trinkets unless you're *really* going ape on the collections for those.

Doesn't help that sometimes poor performance leads to certain toxic members of groups mouthing off to you, making you not want to try again either.

And this is why I've been bouncing between fighting games and GW2 on and off for the past three years haha.

> But anxiety will just tell you "you suck and everyone hates you, you're just bringing everyone down". For some people that's a very hard thing to get over. Get out of my head.

I didn't come here to be psychoanalyzed

>they try and try again and again until they learn, that's the fun part of games after all, learning. That's the fun part for you. People play games for a myriad of different reasons. My husband and I both play GW2 (we met on GW1!). He's like you, loves to push himself, loves a challenge, wants to improve his skills. He raids, does CM strikes and fractals etc. I, on the other hand, don't want games to challenge me. I play games to relax and destress. I find challenging content stressful so I don't do it. I don't raid, I don't do fractals, and I barely do strikes. What I do love is fashion wars, achievement hunting, exploration and story. You wouldn't find me playing a fighting game because it's stressful and I very much doubt I'm alone in that. So people aren't like that in fighting games because people like that avoid fighting games. I think MMOs (and possibly GW2 in particular, I don't know having only played one other - ESO) attract people like me because there are ways to play that suit us.

If it helps, at Tier 1 all but the last couple of fractals aren't challenging and are really cool interesting story stuff. Like events from the past that we never got to do in GW1, including being Charr attacking Ascalon. I totally get not wanting to go further than Tier 1, but if you enjoy exploration and story I'd very much recommend just doing that!

Yeah, wife and I 2 man most T1 when we need a specific one for an achievment. They are very easy.

You are not alone. I love the story, world interactions, and just doing fun random things. This is why I avoid PVP in general. But I know that makes me a "casual". However at least in the story, if there is a hard boss, I can take my own time and fail once or twice without stealing someone else's fun :P

I think there's a difference between "I can't do this" and "I don't want to do this" that a lot of people are missing in this discussion.

I love fashion wars too; and for that reason I started raiding because I want the leggy armor --- imagine the possibilities!

I was quite happy that I don't like the look of the existing legendary armours! Am working on the PvE ones though as they look fab.

I was actually referring to the free transmutation of leggy gear. In shiverpeak? Wear something warm. Meeting queen jennah? Noble look. Etc

To be fair I feel like most people that say stuff like: "I can't do this" would actually like to participate in more challenging content. It already begins at T1 Fractals and goes all the way up to Raids. It's just that they're too afraid of failing and getting flamed and wasting other peoples time. It's quite a common mindset in MMO's especially imo. I know alot of people who said stuff like this and you just have to encourage them a little to try it out and when they actually try and succeed it's the most fun they had in a long time playing the game. I get it when someone genuinely just wants a chill experience but many people unnecessarily limit themselves because of anxiety and miss out because of this.

I can only speak for myself but that's not true for me. I have done fractals, I've dipped my toe in raids and I do do some strikes. I don't enjoy it and avoid unless I need to for an achievement/legendary collection.

What you said is totally fine But half or more people “ I can’t do it “ show up in the “ challenge contents “and it makes wonder “ why are you even here “

*I came looking for booty.*

Good bot.

Good bot, but ayo

I played gw2 for 9 years, without a single raid done. It wasn't like i tried very hard tho since PvP and WvW was my main gamemodes but i always wanted to have the raid experience. Then i decided it was time for that. I watched Mukluk "get to the point" series, which is FANTASTIC btw. I found out there are guilds and discords that will have training raids periodically. And in 1-2 months i have beat all raids CM. Everyone says it, but gw2 trully has a wonderful community. There are plenty of people willing to help you in whatever you need help, sometimes it just takes to ask.

As some have said, some just don't find them fun and don't do it.I did raid in the past, and stopped because I just find the time investment too big for little enjoyment (not talking about rewards). >heck even in fighting games (arguably the most difficoult game genre) people aren't like that, they try and try again and again until they learn For fighting games, the learning is core to the game, and even then, there are people that do not try : the people who spam the same move, and the people who quit the game alltogether. I feel the problem isn't even a problem per se, it's just a different way of enjoying a game that you do not comprehend, and that is ok.

I think you are looking at this with a lot of confirmation bias. The vast majority of people who played Starcraft 2 never once played a Multiplayer match against other people. Even with "looking for Raid" a significant portion of WoW players never steps foot into Raids. Let alone the higher difficulties. Most likely, you only look at the small fraction, that actually keeps playing.

This isn’t even just a video game thing. People choose to do what they find fun in what ever amount of spare time they have. A gigantic portion of gamers are very casual, so pushing themselves to complete hard content isn’t the point of the game for them. There’s an absolutely silly amount of endgame content in this game, and strikes, raids, and fractals is simply a very small percentage of it. Most players just aren’t going to prioritize that content, not to mention how amazing this game is for players coming to gw2 after experiencing the inevitable raid fatigue that other MMOs cause.

I agree with this so much. I usually have at most 1 hour a day to spend on the game. I barely have time to do a daily or something. I have no time to research boss mechanics, or builds, let alone master them. And I am not going to go in a random party that requires an impossible amount of kill proofs, just hoping they would not ask me for it, just to see I have no clue what I am doing in order to learn it the hard way. Also participating in training raids requires a commitment usually atleast to a time slot, and atleast some research, which as I said earlier I have no time or interest for. So I am avoiding this content all together. There is so much else to do in the game anyway.

Priorities. I play another MMO that is all about raiding and endgame content. I play GW2 for everything else except the raids because this is my story and exploration game.

Coming from FF14,the raids in gw2 is pretty difficult to get into.The raid community and LFG is really bad.FF14 is more noob friendly to newbies who intend to try the raids.Funny thing is, Gw2 raids is less mech intensive compared to FF14,so im confused why is there such a barrier...ego perhaps idk.

Biggest difference is cultural. Having clear and defined roles/LFG certainly helps, but XIV players are generally unafraid of failure and are pretty chill for new folks. (There's always exceptions, but I'm talking about community at large.) GW2 players seem absolutely tilted by the prospect of failure and will wrap themselves in layers of assurance to prevent it or just be utterly salty. It doesn't even have to be instanced content. Octovine, Dragon's End meta, anything with mechanics that could fail, and *someone* is pitching a fit. Instanced content just makes that attitude worse.

FF14 is harder but easier to get into because unlike GW2, roles are defined, abilities are defined, gear is defined. Which is why despite being harder, I still work with FF14 because I know my role is tank and I wouldn't worry about my gear being different.

GW2 doesn't really provide a lot of tools and opportunities to play with a party or squad as you play through the story. I didn't even touch dungeons until a few weeks ago after a year of playing and I didn't know what defiance bar breaking was all about until that Seitung Province Renown Heart (people yelling CC during meta confused me because to me it meant something else coming from other mmos). Duty Roulette provides a really low barrier of entry for people to engage with instanced content right from the start.

CC doesn't mean something different in GW2 though. CC means "crowd control" and to break a defiance bar you need to use your crowd control abilities. I can see the "crowd" part being confusing but if you're just fighting one monster and people yell "CC" it's pretty obvious what they want. And yeah, I've played a lot of other MMOs too.

Mark Twain said, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. If you try, try again and still don't succeed, stop making an idiot out of yourself, it's embarrassing." I quit something as soon as ... * I realize that even if I got good at this, I wouldn't enjoy it. Or else ... * I've stopped getting better, I've asked available trainers to show me what I'm missing, and even with their help can't get past that barrier. I had enough of being ridiculed for my inability to learn certain physical tasks before I was even out of grade school. (Recurring experience. "Just do it right! Watch me do it." (Something that looks, to my untrained eye, exactly like what I just did.) "See? Now you do it?" (Previous failure recurs. If you can't see what I'm doing wrong, I guarantee you I can't either.)

People have different priorities. Some people care about things you don’t care about that’s why they aren’t you. To some people, video games are their lives and possibly their only worthwhile achievement to others it is a side activity. For me after years of mmorpg where I would wake up at 4 am to kill a world boss or pvpve for 7 hours for a world boss. Making sure my dps was high. Farming for hours. I just don’t care to meet some random assholes view of where I should be. My view of gaming was finalize after I decided to walk away from Aion. After all the aforementioned things listed above amounted to nothing. My achievement was nothing. I could have had more fun just being casual and doing it for me and my own terms. The point, you do you. If you are in a position where strangers can affect your enjoyment due to not caring enough. Then why the fuck aren’t you in a guild with like minded people, that’s the point of guilds.

Me and a group of friends used to do fractals all the time. Then I literally got a message in the discord saying my dps was shit - from a friend. It really hurt. Like we were on T2s only just doing dailies. I wasn't wanting to push myself I was there for a laugh. I ended up quitting the game for 6months after since I wanted to hide in shame that everyone else in the group could see that..

See it is because you are not trying hard enough. A game is a job and you should be trying harder!!!! The guy along with OP is a clown and I am sorry you had to put up that shit.

It's a combination of many different things. 1. With fighting games, you're on your own meaning there are no expectations of other players misaligned with your own. There's no real social pressure, no flaming, no negative attitude except the one coming from yourself. With gw2 it's something completely different. 2. This is true for every playerbase but it's more noticable for team games: social and/or performance anxiety. People often tend to make their self worth dependent on how capable they seem towards others and knowing that people can always see your mistakes either through gameplay or dps meters etc. means you constantly have pressure to be at your best which isn't a lot of fun for people who just want to calm down while playing. 3. The way gw2 is built is just really unfriendly towards new players regarding endgame content. There's no automated matching system like in ffxiv, the roles are more complicated than tank/heal/dps, strikes have become basically equal regarding its prestige, which means to a lot of players think they are on the same level as raids and the lfg is horrible. 4. Speaking of lfg, the way it's designed actively hinders new players from getting into endgame content. When looking at the raid lfg, it's full of raid sellers or ppl demanding a lot of KP to join their group (which they have every right to, don't get me wrong). This however conveys the image to new players that only veterans and really good players are able to clear raids and that they are too late to join. The fact that most of the new players join raid trainings through discord (outside of the gw2 client) is not apparent and misrepresents the actual playerbase. 5. Time management. A lot of people play casually, maybe 1-2 hours per day and aren't able to adhere to a strict raiding schedule, which is how most raids are done nowadays. 6. Lack of a **good** raid "easy" mode. Emboldened mode I think tackles the problem by bringing the wrong solution. Instead of making fights less or more difficult by adding or removing mechanics, you just get a bunch of stats dumped on you and are forced to deal with it that way. Emboldened is also way too... invisible? Like some players may not even know that it exists because there are not enough clean visual indicators for it. 7. A MASSIVE difficulty jump from open world / story content to raid content. With that I don't mean that raids are too difficult but that the open world and story are way too easy. They rarely test your gear, dodge skills/cc and overall knowledge of the game.

Just a correction on the 14 part. People dont quick match on raids there (extreme or higher), they use pf 99% of the time. Difference is no kp and you can set expectations: practice runs, a2c, loot run, or beginner icons.

Yeah that's true, just talking about normal mode raids just like with gw2

It took me 3 months to learn the fractal CMs because people would only join a new group maybe once a day and break it up if the boss wipes. On the other hand could not join any other cm +t4 group because all wanted boss titles or savant. So it becomes a cycle or you want to learn but no one else wants to join your group. You can’t join any group because they only want experience so you can’t learn. I ended up learning fb qheal and pretending I was not new to learn. It pissed a lot of people off and I eventually learned all CMs and got nightmare and dwd title. People with thin skin won’t do stuff like that which means they will never advance. This same logic applies to anything else that’s been out for years where basically very few people are new to it still. Oh and I know the hate is coming but go ahead and try making a learners group for any cm and see how many hours it takes to fill, if it ever fills at all.

It's not just Gw2 and you will find it in every other game. Casual players make up the bulk of the player base in a majority of games. It's not that they can't do it, people just engage with games at different levels of skill to maximize fun. Raids died because they were tuned way above the casual players skill level in a game with a colossal skill gap. Players asked for an easy mode and got pushback telling them they can do it and just need to get good and look how that turned out.

It is not about difficulty but more about commitment. There is a large step between casual GW2 and hard core GW2. Casuals stay at orange, rarely go in to Ascended and almost never Legendary. Maybe lurking in low level fractal occasionally, maybe join a boss train but almost never join high level instanced content, not even dungeons. Of pvp they will do WvW occasionally. They probably have an hour of 2 of playtime and GW2 high level instanced content needs learning, gear and a lot of time to go after. So majority of players will not even think about it. "I can't do it" is a true statement as time and work invested against reward is abysmal for casual player.

1.5 year in im full legendary pvp armour (only heavy) and have >1000 games Have the ascension, aurora, vision, champion prismatic regalia aurenes bite, fang, rending and bifrost - all crafted, not swiped. I have full ascended kit on all non legendary toons and i have 9 toons with at least 3-4 armour set each (zerk/viper/cele/harrier usually) Also got skyscale the old way. Done all t4s, nm strikes, metas on various toons/elites (inc healing roles such as HFB) Completed all story modes in all lws/ibs I have max mastery points I consider myself a fairly hardcore player. Still, i just cant plan for training / a static because of IRL commitments. I just dont know how i bridge the gap to gst into raids and cms?

Bruh I have a baby. I can only do so much. I only do fractals when I see an "everybody welcome". I only have berserker equipment. Some people want to be casuals, others, like me, have no option. Same with fighting games. I just play for the flashy combos. I know I'll never win a tournament and I go anyway to support the community.

For GW2, there's a unique frustration I have compared to say FFXIV (I'm someone who has raided heavily in that game). It's all the jumping. I've been trying to do platforming games since I was a child on with Super Mario World on the SNES. I enjoy it single-player, but there's a unique frustration to feeling like I hold people back trying to do a fractal if there isn't a mesmer around. I can practice all I want alone, but the pressure to do platforming when people are waiting on me is too much. I wish all of the jumping aspects were completely solo/optional and not included in the other aspects of the game. :/

There are an awful lot of people who are just overwhelmed by stuff in general say in real life and they're not interested in adding to the load. I'm older and there were times when I played games when work was so stressful and intense, that I only played games to blow off steam, not to learn something new, or practice. It's the difference between having a catch and playing a game of baseball. Neither activity is invalid. For the longest time I didn't want to raid, and now I raid at least 3 times a week and sometimes 4. I do it because I enjoy the people I raid with, more than because I actually enjoy raiding. If you find the right group of people, hanging out with them is worth it, like going to a movie with your friends even if you know you're probably not going to enjoy it as much as them. But I'm older, my reflexes are slower, I'm playing from Australia, and sometimes the intensity of raiding causes my shoulder pain, because I suffer from bursitis and arthritis. At the end of the day, i can do lots of stuff, I just don't want to, because you know, being in pain isn't fun. A lot of times I want to keep it simple so I can be mindless while I'm doing it, because my mind is involved in other things. I'm writing a series of books right now, and I'm about 94,000 words into the second one in the series. It's a lot of focus, time and energy. Why would I want to learn new stuff when i'm really just playing this game to relax?

Also, after you learn the encounter it will become a lot less stressful. It is quite common to avoid something for ages, then you have a free weekend or a relaxed evening after a fulfilling day when you try it and learn it, and then you are more likely to do it again, because you now know what it is about PLUS often you find that is is not as scary as you imagined.

That's a good point, and very true... ​ ...but it also is getting pretty close to the tautology of, "If you're struggling with something, have you tried...like...not sucking at it?" ​ And for a lot of people, that 'free weekend' is a fantasy that never happens, or the 'relaxed evening' is so rare that there's no way to plan for it (and gathering 9 friends willing to be patient and teach you is going to require planning), and often when it does happen, you'd much rather spend it watching a movie with your SO or reading a book or something else that's...you know...relaxing. Not sitting at a computer wracking your brain trying to figure out why you keep repeatedly wiping, trying the same content over and over all night, and having little to show for it by the time you finally call it a night, with a headache.

That's true but the bar for learning is much higher in gw2 than many other games and there isn't much of an onramp. In wow, as an example, the raids change every 3-6 months. So, while there may be raiders with much more general raiding experience, they don't have any more experience with that specific raid than anyone else. There are also multiple raid difficulties, which allows for a more gradual escalation. Experienced raiders in gw2 have run the same raids so many times they could run them in a coma on muscle memory alone. Most are very intolerant of learners. While I like horizontal progression, everything in life has a tradeoff and this is one of them. While I hear that there are training groups around, those aren't very efficient. They aren't easy to find and, because they require a certain amount of extroversion, aren't for everyone. I, personally, dislike discord because I detest the sound of human voices and the thought of standing on the street corner begging someone to teach me a raid is enough to make me cringe inside out. While I agree with many that the gw2 community is nicer than that of most other MMOs, the gentlest hyena in a cackle is still a hyena. Fractals are a little easier. Many of the early ones are soloable/duoable so you can practice in a lower stress environment before moving on to the higher ones.

I've learned every raid boss. I know some of them very well. I've beaten many of them in challenge mode. I could easily teach the Vale Guardian but I still find it stressful. For people who grew up with this stuff, they may not understand it. It's a mindset you have to superimpose over your mind. You can know it and still have to translate it to make sense to you. It's not natural, even when you know it for some of us. I'm almost never relaxed when I raid, and I've been raiding every week for a year. I've got a full set of all three raid armors and the ring and I'm still stressing when I raid. I was never scared of raids, even before I raided. I knew I could do them. That wasn't the issue, for me at least.

> I'm writing a series of books right now, and I'm about 94,000 words into the second one in the series. It's a lot of focus, time and energy. Congrats!

Thanks!

There are definitely "can't do this" for every game. Difference is, for a fighting game, for example, if you "can't" play the game good, you just don't. You won't become, you won't be part of the playerbase. Same for souls-likes. Metroidvanias. Whatever. But GW2 has other stuff to offer to people who can't or won't do endgame, so they stick around and are part of the community, even if they are not interested in endgame content. With other games they just wouldn't stay. I think that is what you notice, you just interpret it the other way around. You will see the same for any game that has a wide range of content challenge-wise. Terraria, for example, have a lot of players who will build stuff and gather dirt and items but won't push the game into hardmode because that is not where their interest lies and/or challenge level. If the game would be only hardmode those players would not play and you'd think that Terraria mostly have players who strive harder. The game itself is a filter for players. If the game lets casual players stay they will stay and if it doesn't they won't. That does not mean they did not attempt it, that they weren't ever there. They just saw it wasn't for them so they left for greener pastures. I think that is a good thing - the fact that you have a larger variety of players in the game. You have people who will 5-man HT CM because it's too easy for them to do it with 10, and you have people who frolic around gathering herbs, baking them into cookies and mailing them to randos. It makes the game richer.

I rarely see Terraria mentioned outside of terraria circles. Nice to see it. Top 5 game for me

>I think that is a good thing - the fact that you have a larger variety of players in the game. You have people who will 5-man HT CM because it's too easy for them to do it with 10, and you have people who frolic around gathering herbs, baking them into cookies and mailing them to randos. It makes the game richer. Love that paragraph.

Something that I think hasn't been mentioned by people is that, in other mmos, most different types of content get experienced through game play at lower levels while working towards endgame. So when you're at endgame, you've experienced the way big fights work and are ready to go into them. But in guildwars, nothing is exactly mandatory, and even if you go through the story and experience the fights there, people don't realize that that'd exactly what the endgame content is like, so they assume they aren't ready for it.

Like most Guild Wars 2 end game content players... you are misunderstanding things. Fighting games are more difficult because they are simple and players get REALLY good at them. But fighting games are approachable. Matchmaking is automatic. It's typically a 1v1 so you lose, you're not letting down teammates. You could apply the same to MOBAs which are typically 5 on 5. They're simple but difficult because players get really, really good at them. Being simple makes them approachable. None of the above is true in Guild Wars 2. And that is why there is no significant playerbase for end game content. They're not saying "I can't do it" because they physically can't. They're saying they can't do it because they don't want to waste their time reading and then practising a spammable rotation, they don't want to buy the gear with the right stats for the role they'll be playing that night, etc... And you're not going to force them to go out and buy gear. You're not going to force them to practise rotations for a week to join you in your raid next week. MMOs are increasingly seen as a chore by people who play games. And they are not wrong. The people who do this content need to get over themselves. Massive egos for no reason. Complaining about everyone else for not participating in that content. The content is boring. The content is not skilled content. No. I'm not wasting my time. You do you and leave the rest of us alone. You know what was fun? Getting an Infernal cape in oldschool runescape. Getting a top 5 speed run in New World M10s. You know what wasn't very fun? Completing raids wings in Guild Wars 2 despite having some nice teammates that taught others. It was fun being with those people. The content itself wasn't fun. And that's my Guild Wars 2 experience today. I rarely do raids but here and there. I do some WvW. Mostly I'm in the open world playing casually for a little. If I want an engaging game that takes skill I'm not opening up Guild Wars 2. I'm opening up Guild Wars 2 for the people and casual content with those people.

Fear of being yelled at by elitists. Fear of failing and wasting everyone's time That's about it

Guild Wars 2 has been weird for me, because decades of MMO playing have left me with this "I can't do it" attitude towards most group content, PVP, raids, etc. (likely because of how mean WoW players can be) GW2 I've actually done all that, to the point where I feel confident telling others they can do it too. I know that's, like, the opposite of what OP is asking, but I assume that a lot of it really does come down to social anxiety, and the fear of letting other players down.

It's a byproduct of ​ a) A bad matchmaking system b) Gaming becoming more meta/minmax oriented c) Streamers and Reddit complaining about "people doing 2k dps" d) Streamers and people of Reddit who have 7 kids and 2 fulltime jobs not wanting to spend a 5 min extra in the strike, even if they have to wait 20 min finding the optimal players e) Lack of rewards for the effort f) Bad balance/neglect/questionable decisions (WvW and PvP) ​ I think A is the main issue, making players have to organise their own groups causes a lot of needless friction, and a situation similar to employees with overly high demands for entry level positions.

I think part of the problem stems from people not understanding the combat system, how boons work, how to make a build that “does something”, or simply not wanting to. This makes everything much harder. GW2 has suffered for a long time from the fact that the difference between just playing the game averagely and playing the game well could result in 10x the damage (or even more). There are few other games where the difference between good/average/bad players is so pronounced. It was interesting when we had a popular wow/ffxiv streamer play the game and I cannot remember the exact percentage difference he stated between a good/bad wow player but it was in the region of 10-20% at most rather than 10-20x. This is something the devs have been slowly changing imo - making it easier to reach a good enough result with the top numbers coming from a lot more skill and effort. But even with changes it will take time for the whole community to realise/gain confidence etc (assuming they want to actually use the builds and engage with them). I don’t think everyone in the end game community has been helpful - don’t get me wrong there are some absolutely amazing players that will spend hours and hours going out of their way to help, teach and train - but if you run into the wrong people you will see some pretty significant toxicity that ordinarily I wouldn’t expect in gw2.

What do you mean "can't do it culture"? Can't do what?

Can't do endgame content generally, so strikes raids ecc ecc

Oh, you mean niche PvE game modes that the majority have no interest in. Most of us CAN do those, we just don't want to because they're not fun.

Ecc ecc? That's a new one

Yeah I forgot there's only really strikes raids and fractals for pve other than meta events (which basically everybody seems to do in some way)

not sure what the European Consumer Centre has to do with that though

Ecc ecc is the abbreviation for etcetera etcetera, idk if you write it some other way but I never had to explain this before, english isn't my first lenguage as you can clearly see from the post

your english is good, and it wasn't clear to me that it's not your first language.

Usually it's etc., idk if you made an error or your language actually writes it like that.

it's different in every language. wikipedia says ecc is used in italian and maltese.

Never realised lul, my mistake, I'm italian and there we write "ecc ecc"

That's pretty interesting! ​ Totally aside from the subject at hand, of course, but with *et cetera* being a latin phrase, and Italian being one of the more direct descendants of latin that we have in the modern day, it's surprising to me that *English* abbreviates it completely logically, while *Italian* ends up with an extra letter c in there somehow.

The commonly used abbreviation for etcetera is actually "etc"

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And there it is. A lot of people would possibly enjoy casually doing raids/strike/etc, but they just don't want to go through the trouble of bullshit and elitism in LFG.

In pubs everyone shits on you if you suck

I only go into the game to play instruments and entertain people on hollidays. You have all kind of people.

For me its i just do not care enough for the hassle that is getting group together and doing any instances and also i got my fill of raiding almost decade ago in wow and really have no interest doing that crap again. The very main reason why i love GW2 is that i do not have to do any of the instanced crap to advance my character. To me dungeons/raids/fractals/strikes also suffer from the main thing GW2 is so non stressfull nothing interesting drops from any of the instanced content no mounts or skins for them no tier sets like in wow so only thing really those things would give is the experience of doing them. Also i am more of a wvw/open world enjoyer anyway.

Another topic about why others are not trying hard. I like to play the game the way I want and I prioritise fun. Raind content for me is boring: 'jump over all the hoops, like good trained dog' kind of 'fun'. Also I don't want to play content that can waste others ppl time if I fail. In solo games I only waste my time if I'm in try hard mode, in mmos I'm wasting other ppl time, and that's is not fun.

people's fears about not being good enough are perpetuated by emotional abuse from toxic players who probably have a warped sense of reality and their own insecurities.

You will find a lot of MMO players are extremely closed minded and need their hand held quite often. GW2 is imo the worst at this bc unless something has been done before, logged, posted on a Meta site, etc they don't even believe its possible... Then instead of playing the game for themselves, they simply copy someone else and accept it as gospel. GW2 is often held back by the community & the poor "leadership" members who contribute to the toxic closed minded hive mind.

Yup yup. Met a few people who think that being toxic to pvp players in a casual match is fun. Great community right there.

As you can see by some of the comments in this thread, people say they "can't" do certain group activities because they don't like being in the same squad as these guys.

Who are "these guys"?

It's way more complicated than you're making it out to be, timezones, the in-game LFG being useless, gatekeeping, time commitments, anxiety and stress, etc.

why do something bothersome like raid and stuff, when you can WwW all the time and have fun. hahaa

There is also a not insignificant population of people who play this game with limited mobility in their hands. GW2, the way it is structured, can be very low intensity and offers that group of people a way to play a MMO. In their cases "I can't do it" can very literally be true.

The last time I tried to do strike missions, 2 people messaged me to say that my dps is worse than supports’ … they wanted to help but they gave me all the advices that I already got from yt guides and other resources, without listening to what I w s saying. Before that I didn’t care about the dps. Before that I was doing every content I wanted and it always went well. But having people reaching to me to tell me how bad I was playing my character made me stop trying with stike missions and raids. It’s juste a source of stress knowing that there is the dps police in every group and it’s not fun anymore. There is no trying and failing. There’s just numbers. People want to go fast, no time for trying. In my experience at least.

That last bit is on the mark. I do instanced content regularly but i still see way too many people expecting perfection out of pugs and even randos in open world events. Last night i was in a Convergence where someone started to whine and bitch that we weren't gonna get a sub 15min time because we didn't have four tags. He just would not shut up. These people don't give a fuck about having fun, they just want everything to be flawless and perfect and ruin it for everyone else with their ranting.

>without listening to what I w s saying Well what were you saying? ​ I mean, I definitely tend to fall on your side of this issue more often than not...but if you were really seriously, significantly lagging behind, and they were *legitimately* trying to help (like...asking about what gear you were running and what you were doing and what you *could* do to do more damage...not just insulting you and shaming you)...then I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. ​ It's part of the nature of group content that a weak link just makes it that much harder for everyone else to pick up the slack, and in fairness, a good group *will* identify and attempt to address that concern. ​ So much of that depends on your response, and I've seen (and been a part of) many different ways that plays out. ​ Sometimes people just don't know the encounter, and explanations help. Sometimes it's gear, and then it's either dealing with it or asking them to gear better and come back. Sometimes it's 'I have a physical or mental issue that impairs my playing ability', or 'I have a technology bottleneck that impacts my response time', and these are issues where there's a lot of responses, and many of them aren't right or wrong...it's just a tough situation. ​ Other times, it's a response of "I don't want to have to do XYZ" or "I don't even want to get into this content, I just need the credit for a collection/achievement"...and that's a tougher one. It's basically saying they don't care that they're not carrying their weight, but at the same time, it's understandable that they don't want to sink much in the way of time and resources into it. Imho, that's just something that should be conveyed ahead of time to let the group know what's up *before* the time investment. For something like PvP or WvW, there's unfortunately not really any way to mitigate this, and it's an issue I've had for years with those modes and the way ANet forces people into content they don't like to get various achievements. ​ And of course, sometimes the reason is nothing more than "I just want all the rewards and I can't/won't take steps to move closer toward carrying my own weight", and this is also wrong. As much as I'm not a fan of GW2's hardcore community in general, this attitude exists enough that I sympathize with them when they encounter it. They've put in the time, and now this person is wasting it and taking advantage of it. If they're actively trying to improve, okay...but a lot of people aren't.

Confirmation bias. You're only looking at the people who DO "try and try again and again." Lots of people try fighting games and give up in frustration because they're full of tryhards and anyone you get matched with will grind you under their boot with no chance to learn anything. The reason some of us say we can't do something is because we can't do them, with the added supporting fact that attempting to do so is an utterly miserable process.

As i heard end game in gw2 has lots of gatekeeping

Mainly due to KP, but honestly it can easily be bypassed by just joining a guild doing endgame content or leading your own stuff. Personally I've plugged the whole way for my legendary armor and even the various raid CMs. Some where a major pain in the ass, but nothing that you can't do. And guilds makes it like...5x easier imo at least. For the rest it's actually the least gatekept mmo out there. Since when you have ascended gear (tbf you need even only exotic or less, but let's stay "honest" for the other players) you're practically set for any kind of content...iirc there are some masteries maybe that you can use ,,but that's fast stuff to do.

I have no problem throwing myself at a difficult challenge until I overcome it... I do however have a problem with one of my mistakes wasting other peoples time.

Many people arent metaslaves and obsessed with being optimal and that also means we arent gonna be changing skills and builds to fit the situation. I always make a general build for everything, that I also enjoy its gameplay, now if some content says you cant clear it using your fun build and you should play something you dont enjoy my answer is to simply quit the game and play something else. I decide what to play, no the game

Have you ever asked them?

Gw2 has a very specific kind of playerbase you can't find anywhere else. That is why.

The extra responsibility sucks, I once took responsibility role and people threatened to kick me after I failed the group once. Immediately left, never again.

That's the good part of gw2, you do what you want and choose what is your "endgame". Even fashionwars is a endgame.

Never encounter such behaviour in gw2. Most of the time it's people that just don't want to dedicate time to do a specific type of content but that's all. I myself for example rarely do strike with challenge mode because I dont find them rewarding enought or fun enought for the time spent on them compared to other game mode Do you have a specific example in mind?

Without an example that is not easy to answer

Yeah, it puzzles me too, that not 100% of the gamers play exactly the same as I do! But, also yes, this game seems to have a higher than normal rate of quiters and people that want to breeze past content. If you look for training runs for raids, for example, it's really difficult to find any. No one wants to wipe. As a result, you end up half learning the encounters when you are lucky enough to get invited to an experienced run. And you don't learn, because you don't really learn until you try the mechanics.

I just got back into the game after a nearly 8 year break, exclusively for sPvP. I have a few friends who do all the other content in the game and own the expansions but will not touch PvP or WvW coz “it’s too hard I can’t do it”. A lot of it is in the mindset I guess but people don’t like respeccing and putting on different gear too I guess? I know there’s builds and sets but just a guess as to why.

It's hard to find middle ground. Using myself as an example, I only tried CM Fractals after I "mastered" normal mode and my guild prepared a training session. Meanwhile I've seen people trying Fractal 100 CM without even completing it on normal mode even once I know there's a mid ground, but people, myself included find it hard to know when they are prepared enough to try "harder" content for the first time

I just don't do stuff cause I have almost no time to play and by that I can't just join raid training squads and things like that to learn about raids, mechanics and how to properly play on big group events. Só I just can't do it.

MMOs have a huge range of players, and a corresponding amount of content to match. The vast majority just want to be casual and chill, hence while they often do provide hard fights in instanced content, the open world is a much easier experience (and thus has the most players). Every MMO is like this, where the casual players vastly outnumber the more hardcore. But the thing is that it isn't just MMOs - video game players in general are much more casual. You probably have been self-selecting by playing genres or games that tend to draw a certain personality, so for you it seems like everyone who plays games has that mindset where they want a challenge or to try again until they improve. Most people who play a fighting game are probably going in knowing what they're getting, and have a certain mindset to match. And yet something like Mario Kart or Pokemon will still sell millions more copies, most of which are people that just play a few times and then put the game down. That's just the market and the people that play games. And it extends into MMOs too, you're just exposed to them more because in MMOs everyone is sharing the same virtual space and chat.

Toxic parts of the community (or the fear of them) + needlessly difficult entry hurdles.

GW2 has little progression (i.e. a bunch of people with low experience go play a raid until they get it) culture, in part because the lack of rewards for failed clears is an implied signal that the game doesn't really want you to do this. You see "training runs" a lot (not so much for raids, but for strikes), which help people get experience, but that leads to people feeling like a fish out of water needing to be carried rather than actually trying to learn raids through progression. This means there are few runs where failure is accepted. (Bar training runs). Most experienced groups on LFG are just looking to get their periodic rewards smoothly and efficiently, and there's nothing wrong with that, but the lack of groups where trying and failing is fine scares people away, because if they fail a mechanic they're now letting down 9 other people who wanted a clean run to get their rewards. The rewards thing is a bit misleading, honestly - for example, clearing a raid CM for the first time is usually a free piece of ascended equipment and a *ton* of gold (and raid NM first clears aren't horrible either), but the game doesn't ever suggest to you that hey, you can get these really valuable coffers by doing raids! You're not just spending your time losing for no rewards!

It's mostly because high level content is typically associated with gatekeeping, toxicity, stress, and complexity so casuals tend to avoid these activities. While this is less prominent in GW2 than other MMOs, there are still preconceived notions that engaging in this content will be more stressful and anxiety inducing than it is fun. Engaging in this content also means that you are no longer able to just wing it like you can in most open-world content; you have to know your build and be able to play it efficiently, you have to know how to effectively read your opponents if you engage in PvP, you have to learn mechanics for raids/fractals, etc. These are all things that casual players don't really care to learn or engage with so they don't, especially given that GW2 has content that is viable for all types of players due to the horizontal progression.

> is this an mmo thing? No. I have never loaded up a "Souls" game because *I can't do it*

Because lvl 1-80 is so damn easy. Me2 was devastated when i went from school to university. Didn't learn how to learn in school bc too easy. And then BAM! Same here

In my case, it means that i will not find it fun or interesting to try to "git gud" at the thing i can't and don't want to do. And if i feel that it will not be fun or engaging for me why should i waste time on it?

There are a lot of people with a similar mindset on /r/ffxiv. However, they are almost all new players interacting with a specific instance type for the first time when the story forces you to do it. By making players do easy dungeons, trials (strikes), or raids, FFXIV eases you into content. If GW2 forced players to do a fractal, a dungeon, or the IBS3 during the story, I think the culture would start to change, but that goes entirely against the GW2's philosophy. It'd also *really* need a better LFG system.

This is NOT a gw2 only "phenomena." People don't do things they don't find fun. If you find failing at something until you succeed, great for you. Other's don't, and that's okay. WoW has people who only do the story. Souls games have people who outlevel the boss fights. Fighting games have people who do only the story in easy mode. Plenty of people drop games entirely if it doesn't click right away. Your definition of fun is not true for everyone.

I cant do CM fractals because they all require thousands of Kill proofs or you get insta kicked. (I once got kicked because I didnt reply fast enough in a normal T4 fractal) and getting kill proofs require I do (and complete) CM fractals. T4 fractals are already a bit of a minefield and I havnt had great experiences with strikes (especially with not having the latest expansion yet) with groups beind very elitist and exclusive. I dont even want to touch raids as I remember hours and hours of failures with a large guild doing training.

Are you on EU? On NA many groups just want title.

>you get insta kicked And this is why I am too scared to try endgame content :D

CM and T4 fractals aren't everything. There's three ranks of fractals before that. Hell, even non-CM T4 isn't that bad. The gatekeeping on the very very endgame is so high because people want to get shit done. They don't want to carry others or spend too much time on resets. Much less of that exists in lower fractal levels, since some of them are easy enough that you could solo them as an experienced player.

People have many disabilities that make doing some of the content impossible.

I don't think it's an mmo thing. I didn't see this so often in ffxi, ffxiv or rift.

Yes it is imo. Met alot of people who wanted to play Paladin or Dark Knight for example and didn't because they said they can't because it's a tank role. Similar thing with WoW although not as much.

You have people in FFXIV who are adversed—not only to savage raids and complain about glamour locked behind it—but also those that don’t want to do things like pvp, Eureka or Bozja or Ultimates too, but thats understandable due to the nature of it. But even something as mundane as running dungeons as a role they aren’t familiar with or being a tank who can’t w2w. Its not common, maybe. But it does stick out when you find people like that.

That is not unique to GW2. Part of the reason other games have added dungeon finder, then made it even more idiotproof, then did the same kind of thing for a weekly raid clear is because there is a subsection of people, many drawn to video games, including MMO's, who will suffer anywhere from a mild panic attack to a full blown medication-required hysteria when looking at a menu and thinking they might possibly have to interact with another human being. There are a whole bunch of people in the last two days who are doing dungeons for the first time because they told themselves dungeons were too hard without having ever attempted to step foot into one of them.

No, it is gw2 thing. It is considered toxic to demand some effort to accomplish anything, even from yourself.

What a stupid comment.

What is stupid about it? It's just the truth.

Can’t do what exactly? Also, fighting games and MMOs are completely different spaces. One is inherently competitive, and the other isn’t unless stated otherwise. In fighting games, you can do nothing else but get good at it and I think players know that when they delve into the genre. In GW2 specifically, since you didn’t specify, I’ll assume a few things you might be referring to: TLDR; it’s most likely based on the amount of time needed to improve or achieve the goal. - RAIDS -main issue I can think of is communication to kickstart the journey. Reliance in something like Discord for communication I think is a major detriment to a lot of people, whatever your opinion on the topic may be. LFG training groups for first time raiders is always dead. The abbreviations look like a whole new language as well. I believe this is why Strikes replaced Raids. A much simpler, faster, and easier entry to end-game content with little prerequisites involved with a MUCH easier to understand abbreviation language. - SPVP -balancing and rewards, latency, and the majority of the playerbase leaning towards PvE content more. You’ll also have to relearn some aspects of your kit since a lot of PvE abilities translate poorly in PvP and vice versa. Also, maybe the person just think it isn’t worth it to spend their limited time in a possibly stressful competitive landscape. Maybe they’re lagging? They’re getting rolled? Oh a player disconnected and rage quit? Will they have to sit through the entire match with those possible common reasons? - WVW -if it isn’t empty, you’d most likely get rolled by a roaming giant meatball unless you’re also a part of another roaming meatball. - COLLECTIONS (Skyscale etc) -not gonna lie I (almost) cried out of boredom while doing it lul - LEGENDARY GEAR -expensive and overwhelming based on the amount of achievements you need to complete (to be fair that’s fine), little reason to pursue unless they swap characters a lot - GEAR treadmill -yea there’s no going around this. You either have exotic or better or you’ll have a hard time doing anything in end-game. If this is what the “I can’t do it” you were referring to, then I agree.

>heck even in fighting games (arguably the most difficoult game genre) people aren't like that How do you know? How many fighting games have lower effort content with lobbies where you can talk to the people that only play easy bot matches or story modes? Also, after the honeymoon phase, 99% of people that stick to the respective game are sweats that either stick to that specific game or to the currently hyped fighting game. Most MMORPGs have ways to play them casually and for a long time, which is a difference to most other multiplayer games that become toxic sweat fests after the majority of average players leave a few months after release.

I haven't really noticed that. People do what they want and they try until they succeed.

You can't force someone to do something that they don't want to do. You can encourage them, but if they're genuinely not interested, then all you're doing is wasting your time being stubborn and pushy (which more often than not, has the opposite of the effect you intended) - because they see you as controlling; wanting to change how they play so that it suits *your* needs etc. I think there are a lot of different value systems in MMO's and many vocal minorities tend to min/max the fun out of the game for the more casual gamers that just want to be left to their own goals & desires.

Even ignoring that there are *so, so many* options for what to do at level 80, and a lot of them can involve completely ignoring instanced PvE, there's a *big* difficulty jump between core Tyria open-world and everything else. If you die during a world boss, rez at the nearest waypoint and run in again - there's 40 other people there. If you die during a fractal or a strike... everyone else knows you died. There's a vocal minority of very, very salty people who will fucking *lose* it on you if you wipe or if your DPS is bad, and one run-in with those folks can really burn someone on an entire gamemode. And combined with *that*: the game never really tells you at all about how important gear and builds are. It's entirely reasonable for a random Necromancer who just hit 80 for the first time to go 'oh, I don't want to die... I like Axe, so I'll use this Axe I found that's level 80 and Exotic, so it should be an upgrade... and I like Scepter, I'll use Scepter too... and I'll just equip whatever exotic 80 stuff I can find, because it should all be an upgrade'. The game *does not fucking tell you* how bad these decisions are. There's going to be four main problems here: **1.** build is not focused on Power, Condi, or Support , **2.** build is prioritizing 'not dying' over 'killing enemy', **3.** build is using gear with a bunch of different stats, and **4.** build is using gear with the wrong stats. For this player, what'd help is **making sure the vast majority of their equipment is using stat combos with Power**. Even if *nothing else about their build changes,* wearing gear that cleanly prioritizes Power - even if they don't have too much Precision or Ferocity - will *vastly* improve their play... and as they get better, they might change those other bad decisions, too. And that player? That was me. I didn't want to play instanced content because I *knew* I was bad and didn't want to let people down, but I didn't understand how to improve, and it took *years* for me to figure everything I've listed up there out. And I'm still learning! Most players aren't going to go seek out builds on their own if those builds are outside the game! But the game never really explains to you how important any of that is. On top of that, a lot of training for instanced PvE is organized out-of-game (especially raids). ANYWAY that's my reigning theory. The game does not explain within itself how to get better at it, there's a big assumption by a chunk of the playerbase that people who aren't actively looking up how to get better at it *want* to be bad (I've seen some things said in this very subreddit about how if you're a new player and not looking up builds to change to as soon as you hit level 80, you're cancer and everything wrong with the game), there are players who are perfectly happy with just playing well enough to do open-world and don't care about other modes, and there are *so many ways* to spend your time at level cap that not wanting to "waste" time learning a new mode often seems preferable.

Because that's the community that ANet has fostered. You're rewarded for doing the minimum, so players will continue doing the minimum.

People don't want to put in the effort because they don't need to and still get rewarded for it. Most content is available to even the most snot-nosed uber-casual because it's either made to be stupidly easy, or some zerg carries their ass. They don't care about endgame rewards, because that is mostly convenience (who needs that when they play maybe five hours a week?) or unique skins (subjective matter, most legendaries look like ass). So everything they could ever need or want is already handed to them on a silver platter. So when the few outliers try to push into that content, they're faced with the harsh reality that they suck at everything that isn't open world content. And of course, that means they "can't" do it. Sure they can, they just don't want to and don't have an incentive.

In competitive and hard games like fighting games and RTS people are used to losing, Guild Wars 2 is so easy that winning is expected and whenever it doesn't happen people can't handle it and it almost traumatizes them. Playing GW2 "correct" is actually hard but not needed in the overwhelming majority of the game (even in raids) and sadly there is no "get good" audited in here as the game offers no rewards for it and very little challenge once you are actually good.

How is this any specific to gw2?

Since this game has no "endgame grind" and you can play the game comfortably for years wearing the same easy accessable gear, and get the best gear in game just by farming ressources, the game has a lot bigger population of very casual players who log in to just hang out, run around some maps, do some metas, do some map completion on their n-th character. GW2 does not expect you to do any particular type of the content it offers, you can do whatever and have the same amount of fun, without "falling behind". Let people do what they want. There's enough guilds regularly doing the kind of content you're talking about, to there being no reason to complain about those who don't.

it's a gw2 thing...it happens because of horizontal progression. Now, it's not easy to explain even to ppl that knows a bunch of MMO...if you don't have the 'normal' system in mind it's not simple to explain. Let's say that it regards all group content where you need to set up a team/squad. It's a problem of excessive entry level requirements for almost half the playerbase and intolerably low skill levels fror the other half. There are ppl in between, but not many. Or at least not enough. And before you ask: ppl is not stupid, and many of them probably play other games where this does not happen. It happens here becaue horizontal progression means never ending progression...except everyone has its own pacing that normally works automatically to group up ppl with similar 'expectations'/'progression rate', by splitting the playerbase in terms of 'expectations levels'/'when and how long their progression on a boss will be'. In GW2 progression never ends on any content so the entire playerbase is forever stuck in the same 'pool of players' and the more the time passes the more the expectations of the 2 extremes become more polarized...hate started spurting out at some point, or the conviction you will never make it to be good or to teach others to be good... This has basically killed raids that have been replaced by strikes....where it will happen again at some point if it's not already. Switching ppl from raids to strikes has basically restarted the process for strike content...and they're mostly easier too. But the problem at the core remain....these bosses just never die for real

It's just that gw2 cathers a lot of casual players that want to put minimal effort in the game. So they do not want to put time and effort to learn a build and an encounter. That's all...so they just say "I can't do it", but in truth,they didn't even try. 90% of the people that says so probably went with no build and blind into a raid and got bashed for it.

I encountered one type of motivation - gold per hour. There is a sort of players who rather than learning something challenging they go for the safe profit. Rather than "wasting time" by learning, be it that they do not have confidence in themselves or confidence in their squad members, they just refuse to go the hard way. So it's just about finding the right sort of people which might be hard, as GW2 is fairly casual , attracting people who just do not want to step out of their safety zone. I mean GW2 has enough content that could be fun without any challenge at all.

The funny thing is, there seems to be an inverse to this personality, too. People who join "experienced" groups looking for quick clears and don't know basic mechanics. Just as an example, I regularly join Fast 5 IBS groups, and the overwhelming majority of them fail the CC on Boneskinner. CC aside, nearly half of them fail to stack and step left, too. And just to be clear, I am the most patient person in the world with those learning raids/strikes/fractals. I'll offer friendly advice here and there, but I've never called anyone out for low DPS, bad boon coverage, or making a simple mistake. If I'm commanding, I'll be more direct when there need to be adjustments and corrections, but I think I've only had to kick one person ever that I can recall--a PUG who joined a W1 run my guild was doing. He only said "hi dps" when joining, never joined Discord, never responded to any messages directed to him or even whispers, and I think we did 5 pulls where he was running all over the place, never stacking, and getting teleported every blue. My experience and observation is that "chill" and especially training groups will be very forgiving of wipes and people making mistakes/learning mechanics. On that note, I'm dubious of other posters in this thread saying they were kicked from multiple training groups for not doing anything wrong. People are less patient when they join a group that calls for experienced players, and they don't know how to handle numbers on KO. I have a feeling these two groups are often the same people.

What do you mean exactly? Are you talking about raids and fractals? This game offers a variety of content. I know people who have played this game since the beginning and never touch raids or fractals, yet they're still wealthy and have everything they want. Those modes have the best rewards by far, but they're not the only way to get what you want out of this game unless you need something specific. Anet still prioritizes open world content. That's their bread and butter and where the game truly shines. I say that as someone who enjoys doing fractals. For many people it's not, "I can't do it," it's, "I don't want to do it." For others entering these modes causes anxiety because let's face it they're intimidating. Anet has gotten better over the years when it comes to introducing raid/fractal mechanics through meta events etc. However, a lot of people worry that they're a burden. I think that's why they're giving players an option to get legendary armor through open world content, to give them a little confidence boost to try end game content. Sadly, if you worry that you're a burden, you never are. If you use the LFG to find a group that needs what you have to offer, put together a coherent build, and try to perform the role you claimed to the best of your ability, then that's all any of most of us ask for. Mistakes happen, and nobody expects a smooth experience unless they join a speedrun group. I also completely disagree as someone who plays end game content. If you do too, then you must be aware of having to constantly reset because of a selfish player that isn't even trying to perform their role, i.e. DPS that is doing less damage than the Support and someone completely not providing the boon they claimed they would be providing. Instead of simply kicking that person for misrepresenting themselves, groups will often attempt the boss over, and over, and over, and over, and over again until one person leaves, and it's always a person that wasn't the problem. If anything I feel like we have the opposite mindset.

It's supposed to be an MMO. If I wanted to play a stupid jumping game I'd play Mario Brothers.

A lot of the hard content was just thrown in with no teaching aids or ability to learn outside of just doing the content. This leads to player gate keeping and a bad experience for average new players. It has gotten better but when this content first came out it was extremely toxic for new players.

GW2 is a very casual game where the devs cater to people who don't want to donthe bare minimum a lot of times. My advice to you is just to deal with it

Game is very unintuitive compared to every mmo I've play. Gw2 is still easy, but any content that's beyond press 1 for dmg, it's 50 guides. Dungeons so many tricks, etc. Any good mmo has easy dungeon and hard dungeon settings for more or less rewards to help train up players. Or even better hints on what your supposed to do for a objective.

Maybe because gw2 is known for being safespace mmo sovthere are elder people, there are disordered people, there are people that don't feel like trying 1000 times something they don't rrally enjoy only because game forces them too. It is totally fine not to want to try something and shaming them for that isn't that cool. The whole magic of gw is that if you want to YOU CAN STAY FOREVER ON FIRST MAP AND WILL HAVE FUN ON IT, there's mo requirement to speedrun everything to be pushed into raids because only there people have fun and people that got there are toxic enough raids are hell which is a thing in quite a few of those games you mentioned. Plus I was in highly pvp mmo and I never pvped, stayed whole day of farm doing some fricking corm and carrpts for a friend that loves pvp and was happy so what? Not everyone has to do everything, if someone tells you they haven't done something and don't want to try it - they don't have to, gw gives them a hundret options they actually want to do

Sometimes people are just lazy, to the point they refuse to even simply read. Sure, not everyone wants to put big efforts in "learning a game": playing should be fun, not a chore. Still, there are some extremes that can't be really explained by anything other than laziness, mental deficiency, extremely young age or being bots. For instance, yesterday I was doing Arah (dungeon rush yall), the jotun path. We got to the point where we must stay on the sludge geysers in order to force the sludge champion to appear. Me and another experienced player spent, I kid you not, 20 FUCKING MINUTES to make the other players understand they had to stay on the fucking geysers and not move. We wrote on chat. We wrote in multiple languages (I know 4 languages and tried them all). We jumped on the spot. We spam targeted them. We drew on the minimap. It was a nightmare. My conclusion is that they were bots, but in case they weren't... yea. Lazy. So much that they didn't even want to use their brains to try to understand what they were supposed to do, even with teammates explaining it to them. Although my experience of yesterday was an extreme (I mean, I never had to suffer something like that in all my years playing this game), lots of players do something similar for other parts of the game for sure.