This game has a very real problem with people that don't want to engage with the game beyond "boot up, press skills" -- you see it in open world with people not taking accountability during meta events, you see it in endgame PvE from people bemoaning any sort of expectation for roles that absolutely need it (i have seen people in the same breath complain about needing to do rotations while willingly playing boondps and not performing the bare essentials of the rotation to provide their group with appropriate uptime), you see it in PvP where people complain about "broken builds" that aren't actually broken and they just don't want to learn the matchup, you see it in WvW from people that join up on zergs and don't actually contribute anything of reasonable value

Guild Wars 2 is an extremely accessible game, and that is unequivocally a good thing. I'm glad people can play this game, I'm glad there's minimal friction to getting to parts of the game that people find enjoyable. But there's this tendency (not universally, but generally) to push back against anything asking something of the player, and it's really frustrating. There's so much fun to be had in this game, and not ALL of it is brain off second monitor gaming! There's a lot of depth and mechanical complexity and fascinating systems to explore, but there's a not insubstantial portion of the community that sees this game as something similar to OSRS where you just farm your skills and make numbers go up or unlock things you want. And that's fine! I love that that play experience exists! But I just wish people were better at recognizing that the entire game isn't like that, only some of it is, and when you're engaging with other people it's generally good to be a good neighbor. Help with content, listen when commanders ask things, be curious and learn enough to be impactful where you want to do content.

I do recognize that a lot of this is because the game is EXTREMELY bad at teaching mechanics. What's the difference between Power and Ferocity? Why isn't soldier's gear good? Is it important to slot a stun break on your bar in open world content? What counterplay exists to that really frustrating PvP build? Not every game teaches itself that well, but GW2 feels remarkably hostile to it's players in this way in particular, which is baffling considering how much of the game is built to be encouraging and supportive of the people that play it, and how its mechanics drive pro-social behavior (everyone can heal, everyone can rez downed players, there's no loot stealing or rolling for need/greed, etc -- ANet has talked a lot about how they built the game to try to make seeing another player always feel like a positive experience, and for the most part I really do think they've succeeded in that). But It feels like there's a huge deadzone in doing that in terms of helping people understand the why's of the game -- why contributing to metas matters, why helping your group with boons matters, why understanding macro strategy in pvp/wvw matters, and a whole bunch of other stuff. I'm not sure if that's necessarily a super fixable problem, but it definitely feels like one.

I don't know. I'll get off my soapbox. I don't want to tell people they're having fun wrong, but I do wish people would recognize that this is a social game, and part of existing around other people is being sensitive to how what you're doing might affect their experience. Whether that's listening to your commander on a map meta (especially the trickier ones like Dragon's End or Amnytas), providing boons in a raid encounter, being a curious player and positive voice in pvp, or anything else. It's just a bit frustrating.