Guild Wars 2

Speaking from personal experience – I can say with a fair amount of confidence that several of my own threads have been overlooked by Anet Officials which is why I have this suggestion.

Everyone likes knowing exactly how much their comments and suggestions are taken seriously when they are just trying to help or get help. It would be nice for the players to know with confidence that someone on the Anet team has at least cracked open the thread once to see how it’s going and/or what’s in it.

I’m not saying for devs to comment on everything.

Rather, I’m just suggesting having an indication of IF it has opened by a member of Anet (and maybe if they keep checking up on it – how many times an Official has opened it).

I realize we currently can know if a member of Anet has posted on it, but I think I can speak for the player base and say that we would like to know if you’ve at least read it too. I’m not saying to read all 40+ tabs on some topics, but rather – just showing some indication of concern towards the topic – at least at some point in its development.

Personally I’d appreciate such a mechanic in this forum, but i’m sure other people will have their complaints on this suggestion.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this

I personally believe that they read over a lot of stuff, especially suggestions. You can’t force someone to read your stuff and even if there were such a system in place it could easily be tricked by just opening every thread and closing it right after.

But I think that the forum itself needs an update.
>proper search function
>avatars? avatars based on achievements(points) ingame?
>a proper forum profile with stuff like bio/groups/interests/…

The main problem I can see with this is that crowd of the forum will go from ‘Anet doesn’t read our posts’ to ‘Anet is only opening them / don’t care what the players think because they don’t respond to the posts’ ect.

Unfortunately, the fact is we won’t be able to see how seriously our suggestions are being taken unless they give us a glimpse into their meetings and such, and I can imagine that happening on the eve of the Apocalypse.

Well – it would allow for more of a formal documentation for interviewing purposes later for those that do it. They could be like “were you aware of this issue?” and then Anet could say “no” and then they could respond back “well then why does your thread indicate that you opened it”? This would infer honesty between Anet being a true loyal provider and the players being honest loyal helpers.

That supposes that a particular Dev read a particular thread, rather than, say, the Community Coordinators reading and providing feedback to the pertinent Devs.

And, just like in the CDIs, I’m sure there will be many comments about favoritism, etc. Also, this presupposes the forum always indicates accurately when a thread has been ‘looked at’. Sadly, even the +1 doesn’t always work correctly.

It would be nice to be recognized, but it is probably not very feasible, if content development should be prioritized over forum interaction.

Like other people I think this would cause more problems than it solves.

Given how many people are convinced (or at least claim to be convinced) that their ideas are flawless, essential and should be added to the game at the earliest opportunity I think there would be too much expectation that someone from Anet reading a thread means it’s only a matter of time before it’s implemented. Which will result in a lot of hurt feelings and anger when it doesn’t happen.

At the very least there would be a lot of “Devs have read this thread X times, but no one has commented on it! Why are they ignoring us?!”

Only suggestion:

Fix the search function

https://www.google.com/cse/

About the mark for dev reading a topic, it would only create a new reason for people to whine, posts like “devs only read topic from some users”, “devs never read my topics” and so on, would flood the forums, and even when a topic get a dev read tag, some would complain that they don’t answer, believe me, not many posters are mature enough.

An Off Topic sub forum would be very welcome, many here would like to discuss outside game subjects with the community that plays the game.

I don’t really see the need for this.

In fact, if you want to google it, a suggestion much like this was proposed before (it might have been in the CDI), and you can find the Dev response(s) regarding said proposal/suggestion.

RE: Various requests for an off-topic section.

I can understand the appeal but having (voluntarily) moderated several different forums over the last 10 years I have to say they’re often more trouble than they’re worth because even if it’s against the rules you get all the usual trouble topics popping up on regular basis (politics, religion, religion in politics, mental health, “how do I get girls to like me without ever speaking to them?” etc.)

But it’s also much harder to define and control spam. When one forum got to the point where a small group was posting “the daily mash your head into the keyboard thread” (exactly what the title says – mash the keyboard with your face and post the result) it was pretty clear cut, but there’s a lot of grey area.

For a small forum that doesn’t get massive amounts of posts, and where the moderators are members of the community doing it for free in their own time (which means more can be recruited as needed) it’s not too bad. But for a forum this active that would be a lot of spam to control and since all the mods are Anet staff any time they spend moderating the forum is time not spent on other work. Which means either they work longer hours (and get paid overtime) or Anet hires someone else to do the work they should be doing (and pays them for it), either way it costs them money that could be better spent on the game.

There are plenty of GW2 fan sites with forums that allow off-topic discussion if you want one.

I used to believe that they looked over a lot of the threads, maybe not replies but skimmed through. Until this past release where a MAJOR bug was posted well in advance describing exactly what the issue was and the thread was refreshed constantly.

Low and behold the patch hit and the bug was, as stated, game breaking. Only then was it addressed (took all of a few hours to fix). This exact thing also happen with slaying potions. Issues are well known and conveyed yet either fall on deaf ears or are ignored.

Examples like these make me question the use of these forums. Makes them feel much along the same lines of giving children movies to watch so as to keep them entertained and out of your hair.