Since the quest for Skyscale (latest mount) released, I’ve been listening to people in game and on reddit complain about the timegate aspect.
They were complaining about something that took a week to complete. A week. Personally I appreciate the work Anet put into all of this free content they’ve been releasing, and I wish the quest took longer to complete (note, for some people it WILL take longer, it requires currencies from other maps) but the timegating aspect is nothing to be concerned over and certainly did not deserve the fuss that everyone made.
The primary complaint wasn’t that timegating meant it would take a week to get the Skyscale. The problem was that the way the timegating was originally designed around daily resets meant that players who can only play at certain times of day due to real-life circumstances were looking at weeks or months of timegating. For some people with particularly limited play-windows it would have been all but impossible.
For a game that sells itself on extreme user-friendliness and accessibility, this was a terrible faux pas. Unfortunately it’s just one in a seemingly endless series of tone-deaf design errors that have all but destroyed the original, inclusive ethos of the game and sent GW2 into a spiral of elitism and exclusion.
The changes ANet have made so far are admissions of error but they need to do a lot more to restore faith, something I don’t think they can or will do at this point.
That’s not the main complaint I saw in-game or on reddit, and since it changes the 28th, shortly after it released, I’m not sure how much “faith restoring” you expect them to do. Which people are also complaining about now. Either way they’re damned.