How Guild Wars 2 Fails to Teach its Players

In the MMORPG community, Guild Wars 2 is widely perceived as a casual game. There is some truth to this—the game goes to great lengths to be casual-friendly in a genre that often prides itself on being inaccessible, and it has much less "hardcore" content than most of its competitors.

You might expect a casual game would be very easy to play and understand, and that its endgame content would be very accessible. In GW2, however, the exact opposite is true; most players have a very limited understanding of the game, and only a small portion ever even touch difficult content, much less master it. Many players severely struggle when presented with a real challenge.

Some might conclude that the majority of players are simply "bad" at the game, but I don't believe the players themselves are at fault. Rather, I believe that several flaws in GW2's core design philosophy are the culprits. That is what I intend to discuss here today—how Guild Wars 2 fails to teach its players its mechanics, and why it is so bad at incentivizing players to learn and improve.

I believe there are three main issues at the core of this problem, all of which are interconnected. Before we can get into those points, however, there is one important truth we must establish:

Most Players Underperform

There's a lot to unpack here, so first, let's go over what exactly I mean by "underperforming". In most games—multiplayer games such as MMOs in particular—it is natural that there will be variance in how well some players play compared to others. This comes down to many factors: player skill, familiarity with the game's mechanics, a character's build and gear, etc. A convenient metric to gauge a player's skill, as well as the quality of their build, is their DPS, or damage-per-second; we will focus on that metric throughout the rest of this article. The issue we're analyzing is as such: in Guild Wars 2, the disparity in DPS between the average player and "top" players is significantly larger than in other MMORPGs.

With the help of some of the lovely folks in r/wow and r/ffxiv, I was able to able to determine that the "DPS gap"—that is, the difference in damage output between top players and average players playing the same build—in both games is quite low. In World of Warcraft, optimal gameplay & gear might net you roughly 1.5-2x the DPS of an average player of the same build and level; in Final Fantasy XIV, the gap was very similar. It should be noted that this was determined using a combination of community opinion and combat logs uploaded to 3rd-party sites; the gap might be slightly higher than this in both games. Even so, neither comes close to the gap seen in Guild Wars 2.

As it is the main game I play, I am much more experience with GW2 and its players. I have found that the vast majority of players, especially those found participating in open-world content and easier instanced content such as low-tier fractals, do anywhere from 2-10k DPS on average. One would expect a player with a good build and decent skill to do something in the ballpark of 20k, while top players are able to bench anywhere from 35-40k depending on the build, though these top numbers are rarely reflected in actual encounters. In any case, this paints a rather clear picture. The average GW2 player underperforms by a factor of 5-10 times. Why is this issue so much more pronounced in GW2 compared to other MMORPGs?

Why Players Underperform

I would like to stress that this issue generally isn't players' faults, and that there are many exceptions and caveats to the simple metric of "how much DPS you should do"—if you're a healer, you usually shouldn't expect to do much more than 5k.

One of the main reasons most players underperform by such a vast margin is that they're operating without proper information. The average player has no way of knowing:

• How to "correctly" gear their character
  
• How much damage they're doing
• How much damage they're supposed to be doing
• How to improve their damage output

While it may be easy to simply disparage these players as "unskilled", the truth is that actual mastery of a class is usually only needed to achieve the uppermost echelons of DPS benchmarks. The main factor that actually prevents most players from performing "well" is their gear and build.

How to "Correctly" Gear a Character

Whether they have the wrong stat prefix on their equipment, chose traits that don't synergize well, equipped the wrong runes, sigils, or relic (or none at all), are using a weapon that just straight-up sucks, or are trying to play power on a condi spec, players are prone to making mistakes when gearing up their character. This is to be expected; after all, the game never tells them the "correct" way to make their character. 

Systems like stat prefixes, equipment upgrades, and relics are overwhelming and convoluted to those not in the know. In each of these cases, there are generally only a small handful of "correct" options, with the remainder all being either practically unusable in actual builds or highly situational; how is a player meant to tell which is which if the game never tells them? This problem is further compounded by the fact that the game barely even informs players that these systems exist; there's probably a large number of players that have no idea what runes, sigils, or relics even are, or what they do.

Furthermore, the game also neglects to teach players about the more universal mechanics that these aspects of character-building are based on. A new player won't know about the power/condi split, or about what most of their stats actually do; even if they stop to seriously consider which stat prefix to use (which most players won't), how can they be expected to make the correct choice without that crucial information?

Thus, the vast majority of players either end up making vastly sub-optimal choices with regards to their build and gear. New players have no way of knowing how to "correctly" gear their character, and, by extension, will also have no way of knowing how to improve their damage output later if they realize they're underperforming. The vast majority of players won't realize they're underperforming, however.

How to Gauge Your DPS

GW2 somewhat infamously lacks common MMORPG utilities such as a DPS meter or a gear-check option. One could argue the benefits and detriments of these features; I have no intention of doing so here. However, we can clearly observe one of the consequences of the absence of these features: most players have no idea how much damage they're doing.

The game displays the damage numbers for each of your hits on screen, sure, but that isn't a useful method of determining your actual DPS. In some cases, it can even be actively misleading if a player is playing a spec that has huge bursts tied to singular skills, such as Bladesworn. The only way a player can see their actual DPS is to use the Special Forces Training Area—a zone hidden in the raid lobby—or by installing a 3rd-party DPS meter such as ArcDPS. The vast majority of players will never utilize either of these methods, often because they simply don't know about them; thus, the only way most players will ever figure out how much damage they're actually doing is if another player who does use ArcDPS points it out to them.

This is the second stage of the trap that most new players fall into. After making a sub-optimal build, they get comfortable with it. Because the game never challenges them—a point we'll get to later— they assume that their build actually works at least somewhat well, and they will almost certainly never happen upon the tools required to prove themself wrong. The only way they're likely to ever have their confidence challenged is if another player points it out, in which case they are likely to naturally assume that the offender is just a bully or "toxic elitist"—I mean, who does this random player think they are, insulting my skill when I've been able to get through the game just fine? This isn't an issue of character on the players' part; if the game gives you no reason to think you're doing poorly, and no way of measuring your performance, it's only natural to assume criticism is just elitism or bullying; it doesn't help that the type of person who tends to point out others' poor DPS usually doesn't do so kindly.

Just as most players have no way of knowing how much damage they're doing, they also have no way of knowing how much damage they're supposed to be doing. This is because this metric is wildly inconsistent, and in story and open-world content, the answer is often "zero". Difficult content could provide players with a natural goal—I failed this DPS check, so clearly the game expects me to be doing more DPS—but most players don't participate in the difficult content that could provide such an experience; we will dive deeper into this point later on.

The only way for the average player to learn how much damage they reasonably "should" be doing is to ask a more experienced player or to look it up on a 3rd party site. Even this is not a solution to the average player's plight, however. When they receive the answer and compare it to their current performance, many players will naturally conclude: "That's impossible. There's no way you can increase your damage by that much just by fixing a few parts of your build. Some other, ethereal thing must be the issue."

I can say this confidently because I can remember having this very experience myself when I first began my foray into difficult content. I remember barely being able to break 10k DPS when I played my absolute hardest, and yet I would see other players say things like "A good build can do 20k just by auto-attacking." At the time, those statements didn't seem logically possible to me. I assumed that they must be wrong, or that they were exaggerating, or that they were actually talking about something completely different than typical DPS and I was misunderstanding them. I remember remarking multiple times that they were "playing a different game than I am." That was an apt analysis on my part; they absolutely were.

How to Improve Your Build

Now, the third and final step in Guild Wars 2's insidious new player deathtrap. Let's assume the best possible scenario. You're a new player who carefully reads the descriptions of every skill, trait, and item in the game, who puts hours of effort into understanding your build and the gear system as best you can. When a more experienced player points out that you're underperforming, you take it to heart and decide to put a real effort into improving. You visit the Special Forces Training Area to track your DPS and experiment with different combinations of skills and whatever gear you have on hand.

If they're incredibly lucky, someone in this best possible scenario might happen upon a workable build if they happen to have the correct gear. If they're particularly dedicated, they may do the math themselves and search through the catalogues of runes, sigils, and relics to come up with a working build on their own; alternatively, they may just copy a workable build from a 3rd-party site like SnowCrows or Metabattle.

It must be stressed that this scenario is a minority of a minority of players. Most players won't pay special attention to their traits and stats unless the game forces them to—which, as we'll delve into soon, it won't. Most players won't even be cognizant of their DPS, much less seek to improve it. Most players will never visit the Lion's Arch Aerodrome, much less the Special Forces Training Area. Even if a player does actively seek to improve their build, most will not put in the effort to do hours of math or to compare the stats and effects of hundreds of items on their own. The game fails to provide players with the tools needed to improve. The minority of players that get to that point will likely be stopped because they have no way of knowing how to improve their damage output; as you may notice is a growing trend, the only way for most players to find out is from other players or a 3rd-party website.

As this is a relevant point, I would like to make it clear: most of these issues can be mitigated or solved by using resources such as the wiki, various 3rd-party guides and sites, or even the handful of incredibly helpful GW2 Discord communities. While this is true, the vast majority of players will not use these resources unprompted, and some may actively avoid them even after they're pointed out to them. Player-made resources are not an excuse for a game to lack proper in-game resources, nor are they a perfect solution to the issues presented here. A game should provide players with the tools to understand important mechanics and systems in-game, and Guild Wars 2 largely does not.

With the basis of this article's claim established, let's get into the meat of why GW2 fails to teach its players, starting with my first point:

Guild Wars 2 Severely Lacks Tutorialization

Breaking news: game struggles to teach players its mechanics because it doesn't have tutorials for those mechanics. Who could have seen this coming?

Sarcasm aside, this issue is widely understood in the community, and it seems self-explanatory. Even so, it's a very important one, so let's delve a little deeper. Guild Wars 2 completely lacks not only tutorials, but tutorialization as well for most of its core mechanics, and this is one of the primary reasons new players underperform by such a high margin—the only way to learn how to play "correctly" is often by asking other players, or dedicating many hours of effort to trial and error or theorycrafting.

Holding Hands

In MMORPGs in particular, many players complain about intrusive tutorials or about games "holding their hand"; even so, one would expect a game that advertises itself as casual-friendly to do a little more hand-holding than it actually does.

I don't particularly think GW2 needs a long, in-depth tutorial that teaches players about every single detail of combat and making a build. I do, however, think there should be optional in-game tutorials and resources for many of these concepts. The game already does this with some mechanics—the dodge tutorial comes to mind—but the same treatment is dearly needed for other mechanics. EoD introduced tutorials for crowd control and combo fields, but that's the game's third major expansion—that's just a tad too late to be introducing mechanics players should've been taught in the first few hours of gameplay.

In addition to tutorials for basic concepts like CC and the power/condi split, I believe the game would benefit significantly from in-game resources that provide the player with basic information about more complex mechanics. For example, the stat prefix system is shockingly convoluted: there are dozens of prefixes to choose from, some of which are locked behind certain expansions. It would be immensely helpful if players were presented with a convenient list of all the prefixes, which general build types each are geared towards—e.g power VS condi VS healing, etc—and which expansions each are locked behind. Similar ideas could be applied to runes, sigils, relics, and more.

Tutorials aren't the only way to teach players your game's mechanics, however. Instead, there's a much more subtle—and I'd argue more effective and important—method of doing so, and it is one that GW2 bizarrely lacks almost entirely: tutorialization.

Tutorialization: Tutorials, But Better

In short, tutorialization is a method of subtly teaching players a game's mechanics by forcing them to naturally engage with them. Rather than giving players a pop-up that explains what a mechanic is and how it works, it naturally builds understanding by making players actually interact with the mechanic, especially if they're placed in a situation where they can't progress without figuring out how the mechanic works. Essentially, it's a method of building tutorials that don't feel like tutorials, because they aren't—they're just regular gameplay that happens to teach you new mechanics through forced engagement.

One common form of tutorialization you may be familiar with is "priming". This is when a game introduces a new mechanic in a low-stakes environment, allowing you to gain an understanding of it before you're later forced to deal with it for real. This is largely the only form of tutorialization seen in GW2, and there are a number of examples of it. One is the Spider's Lair meta, where each of the lesser bosses use one or two of Eparch's mechanics, only for them all to be combined in the final fight; another is the first raid boss, Vale Guardian, which is preceded by three minibosses that use some of its mechanics.

While GW2 occasionally uses priming, particularly for the unique mechanics of its many bosses, other forms of tutorialization are bizarrely absent throughout the rest of the game. In particular, the core game does very little to naturally teach players about any of the game's core mechanics. I find this omission particularly bizarre because the entirety of Core Tyria is designed around two core systems which are the single most-suited systems to natural tutorialization I've seen in any videogame ever. These are, of course, dynamic events and renown hearts.

The Biggest Missed Opportunity Ever

Let's consider one of the aforementioned convoluted systems. A new player is making their way through Core Tyria for the first time and has no idea what stat prefixes are or how they work. Luckily for them, the game is about to teach them. They approach a new renown heart where they see a bunch of NPCs that are clearly meant to be stereotypes of typical RPG classes, and various bundles on the ground each labeled "Pile of <stat prefix> Gear".

In order to complete this heart, the player must go around and speak to each of the NPCs. Each one will describe the role they take on the battlefield (e.g there might be a roguish Thief who says something along the lines of "I'm a glass cannon that does tons of direct damage!"), and the player is then tasked with retrieving the appropriate bundle and bringing it to the NPC (in this case, it would be a Pile of Berserker's Gear). Perhaps the heart vendor could also have some optional dialogue where they explain what combat style each type of bundle is tailored toward.

I believe you can already see the point illustrated here. By setting up a situation where the player is forced to interact—in this case indirectly—with stat prefixes, the game naturally teaches them about the system without needing to stop and shove a tutorial in their face. When the player is tasked with choosing stat prefixes later on, they may remember this renown heart and use it as a basis to make the right decision.

The same ideas can be applied to dynamic events. The format of an event may be less suited to teaching more complex systems like stat prefixes, but what they'd be great at is teaching individual, simpler mechanics. Anyone who's spent a decent amount of time in the SotO maps can tell you how many players have no idea what to do when a Champion Kryptis applies a green AoE to them; this is natural, as most players will have never seen that mechanic before. Simply having a few event bosses strewn across Core Tyria that actually use that mechanic would be a perfect way to introduce it to more players. 

Beyond just introducing the mechanic early-on, you could go a step further and build an entire event around the intention to teach this mechanic to players. Perhaps there's a boss being ganged up on by a large crowd of NPCs, and it occasionally applies a green AoE to one of them or a nearby player. One of the NPCs might shout a voiceline like "Group up!", and then they'll all run into the green AoE. This would naturally illustrate to the player exactly how this mechanic works.

Alternatively, you could also imbue events with more subtle elements of tutorialization similar to our renown heart example. Consider an event with two bosses, one who resists power damage and one who resists condi damage. These facts could simply be listed in each enemy's skills, thus introducing players to the power/condi split and clearly illustrating why it matters. That's a rather functional method of direct tutorialization, but let's now inject something more subtle. Perhaps each boss is fighting an NPC—the power boss is fighting Guy the Berserker, and the condi boss is fighting Guy the Viper. Voila; we've introduced another bit of tutorialization that will help players to associate the word "berserker" with power damage and the word "viper" with condi damage.

There are innumerable ways you could implement these concepts, and a myriad of game mechanics and systems that could benefit from tutorialization. Renown hearts and dynamic events present perfect opportunities to do so, since they are optional and unobtrusive; the same idea could also be applied to the story. The one case where the game does actually do a decent job at tutorialization is in how expansion stories usually force you to use your newly-obtained Masteries in some way; sadly, other game mechanics do not receive the same treatment often.

As mentioned at the start of this article, the lack of proper tutorials is only one of the major issues GW2 faces. Let's move on to the next:

Players Are Never Challenged

This is a bit of a bold statement, so let's clarify. When I say this, I don't mean that players never do things that are difficult; instead, what I mean is that most players are never put into situations where their assumptions about or understanding of the game are challenged, or where they are forced to reckon with their own skill-level and seek to improve.

We touched on this point a bit in the first section about the trap of underperformance that most new players tend to fall into. That trap is reinforced by all three of the main points in this article: the lack of tutorials denies players the resources and knowledge they need to succeed; the lack of challenge builds a false sense of confidence and denies players opportunities to learn and improve; and, as we'll discuss later in the final section, the game also does a poor job of incentivizing players to try out the difficult content that actually would challenge them.

So, what exactly defines content that does or doesn't challenge players? It isn't necessarily the difficulty of an encounter, but rather whether or not it forces players to adapt or improve, or whether or not it sets strict requirements for the player. For our first example of non-challenging content, let's take a look at GW2's story.

First off, GW2's story is very easy. Its bosses are scaled on the assumption that you are underperforming just as most players do. As such, the story never incentivizes players to improve their DPS; in fact, it does the exact opposite, as it is designed to make players think they are performing at a reasonable level—in the context of the story, most are. This is only one part of the problem, however. The most detrimental aspect of GW2's story—at least in terms of its ability to help players grow and improve—is its incredibly forgiving checkpoint system.

Most story instances cannot be "failed", and the exceptions are few and far between. If you die in a story instance, you can just respawn nearby and try again. This in itself is fine, but the kicker is that many bosses and enemies in the story won't reset upon your death. This means that there's often zero punishment for dying, and it also means that you can cheese what might have otherwise been a difficult encounter by just throwing yourself at it over and over until you eventually whittle it down. If a player is presented with the option to either spend time and effort improving their build, or to just die 10 times while slowly chipping away at the boss, they'll almost always choose the latter. Furthermore, respawning isn't the only way story content can be cheesed. If you're really struggling, you can always just bring in a friend or two to carry you through the fight; yet again, this takes an opportunity for growth and introspection and provides players with an "easy way out".

This brings us to open-world content. While most of the open world is quite easy, with the vast majority of meta-events and world bosses almost never failing if they actually get ran, there are a small handful of events that actually do present players with some genuine difficulty—Triple Trouble, Dragon's End, Spider's Lair, The Oil Floes. Even so, all open-world content fails to challenge players. As mentioned earlier, "difficulty" isn't the key component to whether or not encounters can spark growth; in the case of open-world content, it is incapable of doing so due to its very nature as spontaneous co-op content.

"Spontaneous co-op" is the basis of GW2's open-world design. The game's zones are filled with encounters and events that are designed to require multiple players to work together to complete them. Whereas most other MMORPGs would require you to bring a party of friends to take on such content, the crux of GW2's design is that it instead expects you to tackle these events with random strangers who happen to meet up at the event area, and who split up again as soon as the event is over. This structure is revolutionary, and it is one of the main reasons GW2 is so unique and successful; it is also one of the main causes of the problem we're discussing. By its nature, spontaneous co-op takes the weight of failure and allows players to offload it onto the collective.

Let's consider: an average player is running the Dragon's End meta-event, and it fails partway through the final battle. What does this player think about the failure? Will they think "We failed because I wasn't playing well enough"? In the vast majority of cases, they won't; instead, the player might think "We failed because we didn't have enough people", or "We failed because there are leechers on this map", or "We failed because we got bad RNG".  It's natural that players will come to these conclusions, because they are often true; however, each of these conclusions also place the blame solely on the collective, and they blind players to the fact that individual performance is also a major factor to success. It might be true that a failed meta might have succeeded if there were 5 or so more players there; at the same time, it might also be true that the same meta would've succeeded if 1 or 2 of the players that were there played better.

To be very clear, I do not believe that players should feel personally responsible if a meta-event they participate in fails. Rather, I am simply pointing out that players won't undergo introspection after failing open-world content. By its very design, GW2's open world is inherently incapable of "challenging" players, as there are too many variables at play which prevent players from connecting success or failure to their own actions. Another way to illustrate this is by using other games as a comparison. If you died to a boss in, say, Dark Souls, you would naturally realize you either need to improve your gear or practice the fight to improve your skill; GW2's world bosses fail to provide players with similar moments of reflection.

Of course, this is not the case for all of Guild Wars 2's content. Let's now discuss the content that does challenge players, and why it hasn't solved this issue just by existing:

Most Players Don't Participate in Challenging Content

GW2 has no shortage of challenging content. Dungeons have been powercrept for years, but we have fractals, strikes, eight raid wings, and a selection of Challenge Modes across all three modes. These gamemodes provide excellent opportunities for players to be challenged; let's briefly go over why they succeed where the open-world fails.

Why Instanced Content is Challenging

First, instanced content is just generally more difficult than story and open-world content. As discussed in the previous section, difficulty itself is not the leading factor in whether or not an encounter can challenge players based on our definition, but higher difficulty does generally help. More importantly, most instanced encounters contain strict requirements of some sort, usually in the form of DPS checks. 

A DPS check—a mechanic that will force a failure if players are unable to meet a certain DPS threshold—is the quintessential method of challenging players. It is a very straightforward method—a group whose DPS is too low is guaranteed to fail, forcing players to either improve their damage output by altering their gear or build, or to improve their uptime by getting better at the fight's mechanics or optimizing their positioning and rotation. DPS checks do exist in open-world content as well, but they are usually so forgiving that it is practically impossible to ever fail them; there are only a very small handful of open-world encounters with DPS checks that actually matter.

The format of instanced encounters also allows players to form a clear connection between their performance and their successes and failures. I described at length how open-world content allows players to disconnect their performance from in-game consequences; a significant contributor to that is the sheer number of players often involved in world bosses and meta-events. If you're in a mob of 50 players, it's simply not possible to gauge your contribution; if you're in a squad of 10, or especially in a party of 5, it's much easier to connect your actions to their consequences. If you repeatedly fail instanced content, you may eventually realize you're the problem; conversely, repeated successes will inform you that you're playing well.

Unfortunately, Most Players Don't Participate

Now, let's get to the main claim of this section. Instanced content provides players with the challenge they need to grow and improve, but the majority of GW2 players don't participate in it. To back this claim with solid data, I conducted a survey of the GW2 community. It should be noted that this data is naturally skewed towards more invested players, as those are more likely to be on r/GuildWars2 and the Discord communities where I shared the survey; I did my best to target new players as well by posting in two communities aimed at them—specifically the official unofficial Guild Wars 2 server and Guild Wars 2 University—but that likely wasn't enough to offset this bias.

The results to this question are rather fascinating. Almost all responders have participated in fractals at some point—to be expected, as that content has been in the game almost since launch and over half of responders have played the game for 6 or more years—but participation quickly drops off for other content types. Over 20% of responders have never attempted an IBS strike—generally agreed to be the easiest instanced content in the game—and a third of responders have never stepped foot into a raid.

It should be noted that this was a very general question, and may include everything from weekly raiders to players who stepped into the Forsaken Thicket once. I believe the percentage of players that raid at least semi-frequently and/or actively participate in new instanced content is best represented by the third of responders who have participated in Wing 8. It should also be noted once more that this data is almost certainly skewed in favor of more experienced and higher-skilled players, as evidenced by over a third of responders having played the game for 12 years and over half stating they have raided in other MMOs.

Regardless of the exact numbers, this data shows that, even among more experienced players, a very significant portion of the playerbase has never so much as attempted most instanced content, much less cleared it. It goes without saying that this content cannot challenge players if they don't give it a try. But, why do so many players avoid it?

Why Players Avoid Instanced Content

1. Casual Culture

Guild Wars 2 markets itself as the "casual-friendly" MMO, and this is reflected in its game design. Very few things are locked behind difficult content, and the game naturally attracts many players that simply aren't interested in trying out raids or similar content. I must be very clear that this is in no way a bad thing; players are entitled to play whatever content they enjoy, and to avoid any content they aren't interested in.

To a degree, GW2's casual culture has also resulted in another interesting phenomenon: the birth of so-called "toxic casuals". This term refers to players who view the very concept of improving their skill or build as "elitist"; they refuse to entertain the idea that they should have to make any alterations to their gameplay in order to participate in endgame content. These types of players will often get into arguments with other players who ask them to alter their build or rotation, or even with those who attempt to offer them friendly advice; this naturally leads to them getting kicked from groups, which only fuels their perception that other endgame players are "toxic elitists".

2. Optional Encounters

In GW2, all instanced content is completely optional, by which I mean it isn't incorporated into the progression of the main story, which is the driving force that pushes most new players through the game. To provide an example, Final Fantasy XIV includes both dungeons and trials (encounters against a single boss, equivalent to GW2's strikes) as part of its main story, strictly forcing even casual players to participate in this content in order to progress.

Not only does including instanced content in the story bump up participation, ensuring that all players try it out at least once, it also creates opportunities for repeat customers. Upon completing an enforced dungeon or trial, FFXIV players that were originally on the fence about instanced content may realize they enjoy it and try that content out again. Additionally, simply having participate in instanced content with other players will build confidence; those players may be less intimidated by the prospect of attempting harder content later on, since they already have a foot in the door.

In contrast, Guild Wars 2 has absolutely zero enforced instanced content. The dungeon story modes and HoT raids are technically part of the overarching story, but actually participating in those instances is completely optional. You can progress through the entirety of GW2's story without completing a single dungeon, raid, fractal, or strike, and many players do exactly that.

3. The DPS Gap & Intimidation

As mentioned above, many players find instanced content intimidating. They may lack confidence in their skill, or they may be nervous about the prospect of having to work directly with other players; often, players may experience a bit of both. A significant contributor to these feelings is the very issue we've been discussing throughout this entire article: the DPS gap.

If a player is aware of the fact they're significantly underperforming compared to other players, they may end up feeling that instanced content is unapproachable. New players in particular have a tendency to underestimate their own abilities, and we already discussed at length how new players can get caught in a trap that makes improvement seem impossible. If a player deems that they simply aren't good enough to attempt instanced content, there's a good chance they never will.

Conclusions

As I mentioned earlier on, all of the main points of this article feed into each other. Because the game lacks tutorials, players get caught in the trap of underperformance. They remain in that trap because open-world content fails to challenge them, and because they are unlikely to attempt challenging content. If they somehow figure out that they are underperforming, they may feel too intimidated to attempt difficult content, and they will lack the resources needed to improve due to the lack of tutorials.

I must very strongly stress that players are not at fault for underperforming. I do not believe that players need to perform well to enjoy the game, nor do I believe that I, or anyone else, is entitled to the other players around us playing at a level we deem "acceptable". The purpose of this article is not to deride players who perform poorly, nor to claim that all players should strive to perform better. Furthermore, as I hope this article made very clear, flaws in the game's design are largely to blame for players' underperformance.

The fact that most GW2 players underperform—and the fact that they underperform by a much larger margin than players of other MMOs do—is an interesting phenomenon that I and many other veteran players have noticed throughout the years. The purpose of this article was to analyze Guild Wars 2's game design and systems to identify the causes behind that phenomenon. In summary, I believe the main causes are as follows:

1. The game lacks both tutorials and tutorialization for most of its core systems, and the process of building a character is very convoluted with a large number of "wrong" choices. Most players build their characters "incorrectly" because the game never informs them what the "correct" way to build a character is.
2. The game's primary content, and the content that most players participate in—story and open-world content—is inherently incapable of "challenging" players, by which I mean placing them in a situation where they are forced to reassess their understanding of the game and its mechanics and/or to improve either their build or gameplay in order to progress.
3. The game does a poor job at pulling players into its challenging content—namely raids, strikes, and fractals—and therefore fails to deliver them opportunities where they are challenged and forced to grow as a player.

I hope this analysis of Guild Wars 2's game design and the effects it has had on its playerbase were enlightening, or at least interesting. Thank you for reading.

Additionally, if you're interested in seeing some general info about the GW2 community and their thoughts on the game, you can view the results of this survey that I used to collect data for this article.