GOTTA GO POSTING THIS HERE THEN AFTER A CORPORATE SHILL DELETED MY POST.

So what we can take away from this is...nothing. There's nothing new here being said. I'd say the team has been shrinking for quite some time, now these layoffs effected some people dealing with the GW2 game directly, but most were not.

It would seem that many of those laid off did actually work on the game at some time, and instead of having these people back, as some would have surely liked to work with those people again, they are finding that it's not the case and they have lost their jobs.

The second paragraph is a lot of separate facts and is really put together to make it seem as if stability is still on the table and the entire place doesn't have the remaining fortitude of jelly.

Let's break that down and cut out all the useless fatty bits that are just pandering to expectations when we read people giving news like this.

• The next episodes of Living World are already in development .

We know this already.

• Swiss tournament support is coming to PvP

Ok so maybe this is something the fringe Swiss community has been asking for, not quite sure why they can't organise their own tournaments like the rest of us. Seems a bit specifically selfish.

• more WvW events coming soon

WvW has been pretty stale and the format has mostly been the same. You go into WvW knowing what to expect. Are they trying to add PvE stuff into the WvW stuff to make it interesting? That's not going to work.

• return of the Super Adventure Festival

Proof that you can sack people and their work will live on, I suppose. All those people harping on about that one guy getting the boot meaning it will never return can eat their words.

Then you've got this part, and this is where I was talking about separate facts because this has nothing to do with what's happening right now.

• Our long-term plans for the game like World Restructuring and large-scale improvements to quality of life are still in the works.

Now I'm looking at these as dot points because that's what these are. These terms are all being spit balled around the studio I'm sure but no one actually knows what these things actually mean or look like yet. Sounds like the restructuring could be the reduction of servers. Hopefully it's that rather than a WoW style Tyria encasing Scarlet level fuck around with the world map. You've just sacked some people Anet, best not make the ones left do the jobs of several people. And QoL? That's insider speak, not to us players, they are talking about retention of players, that's it honestly.

But further down, we have this thing, just look at this.

• As the proverbial dust settles in the next few days we're going to re-evaluate our schedules to make sure that our releases are realistic and allow us the time to make sure they hit our internal quality bar. This means that some updates are going to see delays, like the recent Warclaw, as we regain our focus.

Now, I don't know what kind of people were required for this thing but I'm guessing that some of the people laid off were not the artists or designers but people needed to keep software and hardware running, and to keep the servers stable. The Warclaw WvW stuff was supposed to be this weekend I thought, so I'm calling BS on it not being ready, let's be real here. The warclaw was 100% ready to go, you just don't have the people at the back end anymore to make sure everything runs smoothly.

And if Anet are willing to risk this (and let's be honest the one's making the decisions here don't give a shit because from a manager hands off product standpoint it doesn't effect them), which was supposed to inject a bit of life back into the game, and have the whole thing fall apart so that's it is unplayable, the warclaw as unplayable, well what else are they going to do? Everything is going to crumble because these management people will see the product as untenable and they will keep cutting until no one is left, while wondering why they have not seen overwhelming improvement in studio moral.

Now as I broke down at the top, what we have coming are a few things with this massive pit in the center and those long term goals off in the future. Paragraphs one, three and five are useless, smoke and mirrors to try and get past us while in the others just telling us things we already came to expect. You can tell that effort was put into making the post look cohesive and thought out and directed towards us, but when you're aware that someone is saying things to get you to give them money, it becomes very easy to break down what is being said here.

We're not investors, we're not making money off this game. It's not even about spending time in the game. I enjoy GW2, when I play it. But trying to keep me on board with things that don't interest me, and this overly positive pushing this post has, while because we're smart enough, I'd hope, to know that everything is really behind a curtain and that there's very little actual transparency, it doesn't really bode well. That's because we are not the investors, we are the investment. The term player investment has been misconstrued all these years and that's really what's on show here.

We need to face the facts, the game is dying and it's not going to be your fault when people lose their jobs. That's the most important thing to take away here because there have been a lot of posts about people getting upset about particular individuals leaving. People are still going to lose their jobs, it's not up to you to pay their bills and make sure they remain in the job. Some of you might be thinking that if you don't support the game it will be your fault, well to that I say no. Don't feel bad for not spending your money and don't let this corporation guilt trip you into doing something you don't want to do.

So what do you think? I know what I think, but maybe you think differently.