Guild Wars 2

I think the most frustrating part about the game is the lack of direct communication between the company and the players.

Forum regulars and viewers are the highway that travels information from you guys to the larger player base in the game. There are handfuls of threads that articulately address problems and opinions, but I feel as though you guys rarely provide any input. The thread boils up to dozens of responses, and this contempt towards specific mechanics translates into the game. The people distributing their distaste through Guilds and parties are these forum regulars who cannot even get a simple yes / no / we’re working on it.

Hate to compare, but take a game like League of Legends. Look at their forum. The game is patched on a biweekly basis, which creates dozens of complaints and issues with the game. The reason why people can swallow these problems is because Riot is actively communicating with their playerbase. They acknowledge issues directly. In a sense, it provides hope to the players. Players do not spread distaste when the company directly gives their point of view on the topic. This basic level of communication is important for creating a satisfied player base.

This might fall under the “do not call out Arena Net” clause in the ToS, so I will try to articulate it respectfully. If there is a mutually shared concern among forum regulars, Arena Net only chimes in to facilitate a conversation rather than provide any input to organically facilitate itself. When two students are arguing over how useless algebra is in math class, the teacher doesn’t say, “you guys should be more respectful to each other.” The teacher says, “I feel that algebra is useful under these circumstances…” The conversation can then move forward instead of staying in the same place where contempt grows. Again, I believe that this contempt is plaguing the general satisfaction both in the forums and in the actual game. It is this backseat facilitation that does nothing for the community.

I highly encourage staff to reassess the general satisfaction the players have towards the game in the game, and try to determine where the root of these problems lie. In the end, a lot of this poor attitude appears to be easily mitigated by forum communication as seen in other successful intellectual properties.

Hmm, considering your analogy. Consider this:

There are not just two students are in the room. There are 1000s of students in the room. The teacher is trying to teach to the class to those who just want to listen and get on with it. At the same time, the teacher tries to make new learning material to make the lessons interesting. At the same time, there are students who have broken pens and missing pages from their books, in which the teacher needs to resupply if they can. At the same time, there are students questioning the teacher’s methods and demanding that their tuition gives them the right to choose the course subject. On the other hand, there are students who are questioning the teacher’s methods but are offering suggestions with constructive feedback on how to improve the course subject. Then there are the others who are generally blabbering about other stuff with each other, gossiping and speculating about everything and anything.

Imagine all this in the same room. Imagine the teacher stopping the lesson and stopping the creation of new material to actually listen to each and every students’ arguments or suggestions. Can he just say, “Yes that’s right” without the opposite student saying “Hold on, please explain!?”? He would need to go into detail. He would need time to construct a statement in which the students cannot misinterpret. More importantly it has to be on topic of the course subject. Also can you imagine that this teacher is actually a teacher assistant and is not allowed to make statements that could be picked up, chewed and recreated into any interpretation, but instead he needs to consult the headmaster and have team meetings with other teachers to confer. This also takes time.

What the teacher does:
a) teach the lesson continuously
b) create new learning material
c) ensure that the students have working pens and complete books.
d) listen to the many students, to consider and understand the students, to argue/agree about the students’ ideas(can be longer if no middle ground is found) , to confer with colleagues about the ideas, to agree what actions can be taken, to test new material, to convey appropriately to the students the new material, to teach the new material continuously.

TL:DR – Communicating back to the players is a variable task. Any response, big or small can cause further discussion needed to be made and even more speculation. We may have time to read/write through forum posts and speculate but they might not. They will be juggling many tasks and the most important, take priority. Not saying the customer is not important but to keep things going, they need to focus their time appropriately. Forum responding is time-consuming as well as the time needed to re-iterate the points due to the mass of people demanding an answer.

Consider the forums in a suggestion box style. They only read it when they can. They aren’t ignoring it. They note down the key points and try to include it as they keep the game going, but rarely do they have the time to reply.

I agree it’s a variable task. It causes further discussion, but it solves misdirection. You can say it might cause more speculation, but “we acknowledge that _ is _, we are doing __ to fix it / change it.” Or just explaining their philosophy so players know what’s going on in their head in regards to elements. Being left in the dark is infinitely worse than more questions.

Your problems seem to be solved by a lack of PR. Hire more staff, maybe? Not having enough time is not a valid excuse in my opinion, especially when they already claim to have made enough money via microtransactions to consider the possibility of never charging for expansion packs.

Customer satisfaction between patches that address these problems are very important. Maybe it’s just me that sees all this contempt in-game that can be mitigated by communication.