Guild Wars 2

Maybe I’m just spoiled since I’m coming from a 3 year binge of League of Legends, but one of the biggest things I really appreciated was how many devs took the time to join conversations, clue the community in to the thinking behind design choices, and even just joke around in some of the silly threads. It wasn’t just low level devs either; there was a broad spectrum of devs frequently posting in the forums, including lead designers and company founders.

Now that I’ve left LoL for Gw2, I’m really missing that kind of interaction. Not only does it make the community feel that we are being listened to, but it helps guide the discussions to a more productive place. Tell people when changes they are asking for are already in the works. Tell people when changes they are asking for would result in ridiculously OP builds. In these forums the only dev interaction I’ve seen has been related to disciplinary actions, and honestly thats really lame. Many people in these forums take a lot of time to give input and deserve to see at least, “Good post, we will consider this input.” But preferably, devs would join in to help explain their concerns.

The worst thing you can do is not respond at all. Thats when we, the community, start to feel that there is no hope our concerns will be addressed, and the pitchforks come out of the shed.

I never played LoL but I have played many other games including several other MMO’s and GW2 by far has the best community interaction by the devs that I’ve seen. That said it’s not perfect either or optimal but It’s a big improvement from what I’m used to and I would say above average.

I would say that the devs seem to respond better in certain areas of the forums like game bugs and dungeons section compared to a lot of the other forums (I don’t visit all of them just the ones of interest to me). While the Suggestions forums for example is largely left alone (Granted 70% of the topics have been suggested before so to reply to every tiny suggestion would be a bit much).

I don’t really mind if they don’t always reply as long as they read the topics.

It would be nice if the developers had more time and/or incentive to join conversations on the forums, but it shouldn’t be expected of them. It’s not their job, nor do they have to inform us of anything — they choose to, and we should be grateful for that.

Now, that’s not to say I wouldn’t like to see more communication, but at some point players started acting as if they were entitled to daily communication from the men and women behind the curtain. It’s unrealistic and completely unfair. Weekly updates to make the process a little more transparent are a much more realistic expectation and response.

Champions has periods of great dev communication, far better than GW has ever had. Though at some times they’re completely absent too. I can’t call GW anywhere near the best in terms of overall developer communication (developer =/= community-rep), but its better than nothing, I guess.

Are you kidding? Do you imagine how hard the devs must be working right now? Do you know Necromancers have over 100 documented bugs?

Really, if you see a dev around these parts just whip him back to programming. Let they come back once things are settled down.

Anyway, the forums have a Dev Tracker, check it out and you’ll see they’re quite active.

I agree with the OP. If you look at the Dev Tracker (2nd topic in the forum section) , the number of posts by actual Devs is far and few between. The majority of the posts are by CCs.

While I appreciate that Devs should mainly be working on development and fixes, timely and regular feedback (especially to a major issue caused by a badly implemented patch) would go a very long way to helping customer satisfaction.

For example one Dev post on an unintended nerf that says “I will look into it” with no update in more than 24 hrs on a thread which has 30K + views in 1.5 days isn’t really much in the way of helping customer satisfaction.

Fay.2735:

I never played LoL but I have played many other games including several other MMO’s and GW2 by far has the best community interaction by the devs that I’ve seen. That said it’s not perfect either or optimal but It’s a big improvement from what I’m used to and I would say above average.

I would say that the devs seem to respond better in certain areas of the forums like game bugs and dungeons section compared to a lot of the other forums (I don’t visit all of them just the ones of interest to me). While the Suggestions forums for example is largely left alone (Granted 70% of the topics have been suggested before so to reply to every tiny suggestion would be a bit much).

I don’t really mind if they don’t always reply as long as they read the topics.

I’m coming from the trenches of the engineer profession forums, and I have seen precisely one dev post ever, which was something like “Please keep the discussion on topic and avoid personal attacks.”

Meanwhile, on the LoL forums, Lead Champion Designer Morello posts daily, and there are threads where he has more than 50 posts. The effect of this is that the discussion stays on topic, the community knows what is reasonable to expect and what isn’t, and at the same time they know 100% that their concerns are being heard. If left unguided, the community ends up in the twilight zone, engaged in fruitless discussions about game improvements that will never happen because they are too ambitious. Game devs have a way of communicating what the big picture of the game is, where as players can get stuck in the view of the one class they play. Game devs have access to information like win loss ratios, build diversity, profession distribution and more. All this information can really help the community understand the state of the game.