Wintersday is live. The snow is on Divinity’s Reach. Tixx’s workshop is malfunctioning with exactly the seasonal reliability that makes this game feel like home in December. And somewhere in the Heart of Maguuma, the Mordrem are still out there, because we haven’t finished them yet, because that’s how expansions work and we are only two months in.
This was not a quiet year. It was, by some measure, the loudest year Guild Wars 2 has had since launch. Let’s go through it.
January: The End of the Update Cadence
Point of No Return dropped on January 13. Living World Season 2 ended with the Pact fleet launching toward Mordremoth, Trahearne giving a speech that hit better than it had any right to, and the entire community collectively sitting in a moment of “and now we wait.”
The wait lasted nine months.
That sounds damning. I want to make the case that it isn’t - or at least, that it’s more complicated than it sounds. The bi-weekly Living World cadence was a remarkable pace to maintain. Sixteen episodes of permanent, replayable story content across eighteen months. When it stopped, it stopped because something larger was being built. The drought was the cost of Heart of Thorns. In hindsight, I’d pay it again.
But January and February and March of 2015 were genuinely hard for a portion of the community. Players who had structured their engagement around the update cycle found themselves without that rhythm. The “is GW2 dying” threads started within weeks. ArenaNet’s relative silence during the development period amplified it.
What I’ve taken from the drought: the game’s population during that period was held up by the content that already existed. The Silverwastes stayed populated. Fractals kept running. WvW kept going. That tells you something important about what the Living World built - not just episodes that existed temporarily, but maps and systems and communities that had staying power. Season 2 held up.
June: The Community Found Its Voice
The Heart of Thorns pre-purchase pricing controversy is the moment I’ll point to when I’m trying to explain what a healthy developer-community relationship looks like, and why I think GW2’s community is worth being part of.
The problem was real: no expansion-only SKU, veterans paying the same as new players, the implicit message that loyalty to the game for three years didn’t translate into any pricing consideration. The community’s response - the most upvoted r/GuildWars2 post in the subreddit’s history, the forum threads, the broader discourse - was proportionate to the problem. Loud, specific, substantive.
And ArenaNet responded. Character slot compensation for veterans. Refund pathways. A formal commitment that future expansions would follow a cleaner bundling model that doesn’t create the same ambiguity. Not a perfect resolution - the cutoff dates were arbitrary, the character slot doesn’t equal the implied price gap - but a genuine one. The company heard the community and changed course.
That doesn’t happen automatically. It’s worth naming when it does.
August: The Business Model Changed
On August 29, Guild Wars 2 went free to play. The core game, the one players paid $40 to $60 for in 2012, became available at no cost.
The veteran reaction was complicated. Mine was complicated. There’s an honest version of the argument that says ArenaNet devalued three years of purchase history in a single day. I don’t think that argument is wrong. I think it’s incomplete.
The game is better when maps are full. This is structural - it’s baked into the design philosophy that made Dry Top and the Silverwastes work, that makes WvW function, that makes spontaneous world boss coordination possible. A population that’s been showing its age since early 2015 needed new players. The free-to-play transition delivered them. By the time Heart of Thorns launched in October, the game had crossed 7 million registered accounts.
Those accounts are in the maps now. The casual players who never pre-purchased and are running around core Tyria right now - they’re contributing to the Breach. They’re filling WvW queues. They’ll become the veterans of 2017, 2018, 2019. The game’s longevity is funded by their eventual decisions to invest more. That’s how the model works, and it works.
Beta Weekend 1 ran August 7 through 10 - also in August, which made it a genuinely dense month. The first hands-on impression of gliding. The first real look at the Revenant in motion. The first proof that the expansion’s scope was real.
October: The Jungle Opened
October 23. Heart of Thorns launched. Three years since the base game, and the game’s first expansion was here.
The launch was not smooth. Map queues, instance issues, Tangled Depths being genuinely disorienting in ways that generated their own meme culture within 48 hours. The Hero Point costs for elite specializations were set at 400, which was too high and the community said so, and ArenaNet reduced them to 250 in a post-launch patch. The Chak Gerent meta was failing on most map instances for the first two weeks because the coordination requirement was higher than the average map population could meet on first contact.
Also: gliding exists now. The Chronomancer exists and has reshaped how organized groups think about composition. The Reaper made Necromancer feel like a different game. Guild Halls - which every Exitializ reader has been asking for since at least 2013 - are real, and our hall is partially upgraded, and it genuinely feels like home. The story moved in ways I wasn’t expecting, and I’d rather not spoil them here.
The rough launch edges are already being sanded down. The Chak Gerent is firing consistently now on organized maps. Tangled Depths is becoming navigable to players who’ve spent time with it. The Mastery system, once you’re past the initial friction, rewards the investment in a way that’s started to feel right. Heart of Thorns at two months is noticeably better than Heart of Thorns at two weeks.
November: The Raid Argument Started
Spirit Vale launched November 17. Raids arrived. The community argument that followed is one I’ve written about at length already, and I don’t want to rehash it entirely here.
What I’ll say in year-in-review terms: the raid debate is not a crisis. It’s a conversation the game was always going to need to have as it matured and its player base diversified. The right answer isn’t “raids don’t belong here” or “casual players need to stop complaining about content they don’t have to do.” The right answer is something in the middle - content that challenges skilled players without structurally penalizing players who choose not to engage with it, with rewards that reflect investment without gatekeeping core progression.
ArenaNet have the framework right. The legendary rewards are cosmetic, not mechanically mandatory. The training guilds forming around raid access are some of the most genuinely helpful community structures GW2 has produced. Spirit Vale itself - the actual encounters - is well-designed in a way that makes the game’s combat system feel worth having developed.
The Kill Proof culture and the accessibility barriers are real problems. They’re 2016 problems to solve.
What 2015 Was, Honestly
This was the year Guild Wars 2 stopped being one thing. The buy-to-play game with horizontal progression and casual-accessible endgame is still here - it’s the foundation. But Heart of Thorns added vertical Mastery progression, hard-difficulty instanced content, and a new population of free-to-play players who arrived through a different door than the rest of us.
That’s a more complicated game than we had in 2014. It’s also a more interesting one.
The year’s arc, from the outside, looks like a series of controversies: the drought, the pricing disaster, the F2P backlash, the rough launch, the raid divide. From the inside - from the perspective of someone who played through all of it - it looks like a year the community spent discovering what it actually cared about, articulating that loudly, and watching ArenaNet respond with more genuine acknowledgment than most studios manage.
Looking Ahead to 2016
Living World Season 3 has been announced. No dates yet. The format is expected to evolve from Season 2 - bigger episodes, new maps with each release, more production value. Whatever the Mordremoth arc leaves as its aftermath, Season 3 will be the story that follows it.
More raid wings are coming. Wing 2 has not been dated. Wing 3 is presumably further out. The raid system as a content pillar is here to stay; the question is whether ArenaNet builds the accessibility tools to match the ambition.
The WvW revamp has been promised for longer than I can remember. 2016 might be the year. Or it might not be. The WvW community continues to exist in a state of patient, somewhat exasperated hope.
The game has 7 million registered accounts. The maps are fuller than they’ve been in two years. Heart of Thorns is still being explored. The Mastery system is still being unlocked. The raid community is growing.
Log in. Run the Winter Wonderland jumping puzzle even though it’s annoying. Help a new player who doesn’t know where the Silverwastes entrance is.
2015 was hard. It was also exactly what the game needed.
See you in Tyria.