Yesterday, we covered the release of Guild Wars 2’s build template system, which had already come under fire from players grumpy over its complicated nature, the invalidation of hardcore players’ legendaries and inventory purchases, the deprecation of existing (and arguably better) player-made template tools, the unheeded feedback, and the studio’s bizarre brag about how many “clicks” the system would save players. With the launch, we could finally determine how expensive the whole system would be too; we pegged it at roughly $36 to max out a single character on build and equipment templates, plus another $37 to max out an account on build storage – it’d run you $360 to max everything on an account with one of every class.
As we noted, Reddit was already unimpressed with the prices, recommending people not buy them or buy new character slots instead. Plus, PvP and WvW players were mad because the update also removed their default templates.
But apparently, the furor was only getting started: As of this morning, players aren’t just mad about the perception that the template system was created as a monetization carrot – they’re also angry that template functionality is a bit of a mess. The game’s subreddit is currently on fire with angry memes, posts expressing frustration with the system, new proposals, bug reports and crash vids, even requests to just turn the whole thing off on a per-account basis. A lot of folks just want ArcDPS back.
Trying Templates Across Game Modes With Alts from Guildwars2
Over on the game’s official forums, which are traditionally more sedate given the company’s moderation, the posts currently up are pretty mad too, claiming ArenaNet’s charging for a lesser game experience, bemoaning the impact on legendary sigils, and asking for a single flat fee for the templates.
Even prominent content creators and community members have spoken out about the bugs and annoyances of the patch. “The build template update has made such a mess of the basic equipment functionally that it’s not even funny anymore,” @that_shaman tweeted this morning. “My elementalist uses legendary weapons for everything and even doing a basic weapon swap is giving me so many headaches. […] Things like: – Infusions and weapon sigils keep popping out randomly – I’ve already lost 2 infusions to the void so I’ve stopped swapping entirely because I’m afraid it hungers for more – No more auto swapping builds between PvE and WvW. […] At this point I don’t care about what kind of benefits the new system has to offer because it made basic functionality worse for me.”
ArenaNet is currently merging feedback posts on the template system into a single thread and requesting feedback, though given that it didn’t appear to do much with the feedback everyone gave beforehand, it’s unclear what effect this will have. It’s worth pointing out that many of the issues players are encountering right now would’ve been easily identified with a public test server. MMO players will recall that another game without a PTS, Elite Dangerous, recently saw a community uproar and petition for just such a test server after multiple buggy patches. Frontier acceded and is granting that demand.
Further reading:
Instead of a tell nothing meme, here’s some direct criticism, ANET from Guildwars2
