GW2 Too
It has been about 2.5 years since I last touched Guild Wars 2 (GW2). At that time, I had been puttering around, completing daily quests to net the equivalent of $0.20/day, and basically stewing in my own cognitive dissonance. What broke me out of the cycle was the then-pending release of Secrets of the Obscure expansion. Even though GW2 is one of the few MMOs out there that doesn’t obsolete content once expansions come out, just knowing that everyone else would be doing all the cool stuff while you’re stuck gathering Flax or whatever sucks. On the other hand, I didn’t necessary want to pay $30 for more GW2, so I took that as a sign to uninstall and do something else.
And so I did. Another expansion came out called Janthir Wilds, and I let that one pass me by too. It even featured the ability to have a decorative house, introduced a spear weapon for every class, and so on. Neat. Have fun with that.
There is even yet another expansion coming out in October called Visions of Eternity. I think there are even new Elite specs this time around. Haven’t really looked into too far.
So why am I writing about GW2, and in fact have reinstalled the game? They finally introduced LFD.
It’s technically a beta feature, but it’s called Quickplay, and it’s the same automated group finder feature from WoW circa 16 years ago. Press button, get an instant 5-man squad and teleport right next to them. Right now, it is pointing towards even-easier versions of T1 Fractals, but presumably it will be expanded in the future to actual dungeons, perhaps Strikes, maybe raids? Moreover, ArenaNet has erected an extremely generous set of Achievements surrounding spam-queueing T1 Fractals for the next several weeks, resulting in extra bag slots, a Legendary glove (!!), and other such goodies.
As dumb as it sounds, yeah, reading about Quickplay (and the rewards, obviously) is what pushed me over the edge into downloading GW2 again.
…sorta. Honestly, I had also reached a point where I realized that I was logging into No Man’s Sky just because I couldn’t think of a better game to play for those “don’t want to commit to 1+ hour game sessions” moments. If I’m not committing to something, why not not commit to something that could possibly be relevant in the future? Then again, Guild Wars 3 is going to be a thing at some point, rendering everything moot. Also, heat death of the universe.
Anyway, bottom line, I’ve been playing GW2 a lot the past few days.
Posted on September 22, 2025, in Guild Wars 2 and tagged Bribe, Guild Wars 2, LFD, Quickplay, There And Back Again, What Am I Doing With My Life?. Bookmark the permalink. 3 Comments.
In An Age 
It’s going to be tricky to expand quickplay into higher stakes group content. That would get a subset of people salty very quickly, without role division or guarantee the group knows what it’s doing overall.
Dungeon content would be ok, if they actually manage to fuse it with the old dungeon tech. No roles needed there, easy enough, especially with power creep and could use more renewed player attention there.
By blending strikes and raids into one type of content like they say the plan is for the Visions of Eternity expansion, they might conceivably be able to use quickplay for the easier strikes. IBS3 is a no-brainer, not sure about Whisper or Boneskinner. Cold War ok; people might drop immediately at rolling Forging Steel.
(Personally I would really hesitate at attempting anything else without at least one healer and two boondps and someone sorting the squad beforehand.)
But how they’re going to resolve the need for various expansions for strikes/raids plus quickplay though, that might be a logistical spanner in the works too.
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It definitely will come down to have much ArenaNet wants to retrofit old content versus just tossing 20% damage buffs or whatever. These Quickplays already have a “mist stranger” that will rez you on occasion. Would probably cause a ruckus, but I could easily imagine some content just… you know, giving everyone perma-Quickness/Alacrity and thus just needing people to pew-pew.
The expansion limitation is also a great point.
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I think you can forget dungeons. They abandoned the whole concept of actual dungeons long, long ago and pretty much said they were done with development on them permanently. I suppose they could just add them to the finder so people could auto-group for them but I very much doubt they’d do any more than that and the dungeons are about a decade behind the rest of the game now.
I don’t play GW2 any more but the whole thing confuses me a little because I thought there had always been an automated system for getting groups in instanced content anyway. I’m sure I never set up or joined groups in chat or anything. I thought I just went to the entrance and clicked on something and it added me to a group. Maybe I’m misremembering.
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