Guild Wars 2

Dear Arena Net devs and other people involved in making the game,

It’s been now over a month since the release of Guild Wars 2. A month I enjoyed myself a lot, but it’s hard to ignore the piling up issues that still reduce the fun-factor. I do understand that MMOs are complex animals, and, I fully accepted the possibility that for first months things may not work as intended here and there. While it is frustrating to run into yet another bugged skill point challenge or an event chain stuck midway through, without any way of resetting it, I still manage to find places to have fun in game.

The problem, however, lies in the fact we really lack communication from Your side. We haven’t seen a blog post detailing your road map for quite a while, and while the coding part of your team is probably busy with work, I am sure You have someone on board that could update us, regularly, on how things are going.

In many MMOs I played in recent years it was common for the studio to publish so called “State of the game” post around month post-release and I think GW2 could really use one now. Please tell us more about how You feel about things like current content availability and tuning, what is the deal with all the diminishing returns on drops and event rewards that people run into, how do you see overall drop distribution in its current state and finally, what are your future plans for both content and further improvements to the formula. I leave out PvP issues, since we already had a post on those promised a while ago and if I understand correctly it’s on its way.

Many of us feel a little left in the dark currently, and reading “fixed issues with skill points and dynamic events” each week only to run into same bugs again and again is not helping much.

All I have to do a month on is look at my guild list to see 14ish/115 of the same players on everyday to know how far this game has come.

But I agree with your point about ANET and their lack of communication anymore. Community dissonance could be cured with answers to the many issues that are plaguing the game and how players can play it at the moment.

We’ve reached a critical point with regards to the life blood of Guild Wars 2.

Upon hovering over world selection one quickly sees that all American servers except for two, are High/Full, and Europe, mostly High with a few more Medium servers. The population seems to be doing fairly well. Lower level zones experience dips, highs and lows with regards to how many people are leveling and doing events together.

End-game for me has more or less been tagging enemies and dealing with bugged events in Orr, but even aside from Orr, there’s a lot that I could be doing. I personally find that dungeons need a lot of work, and I’m curious what happened to the overflow mechanic. In Orr I desperately wish to cut down on the number of people lagging my computer and dominating the loot, but haven’t seen this option in sometime.

I would be down for seeing a blog from developers that was updated even once every two to three weeks. As I said at the beginning of my post, this is the critical part of the game where the player base needs to feel that the wheels are in motion and that things are being planned for the game to keep people enticed and content.

I’d at least love to hear what they’re working with right now- is it bugs, is it the camera, guilds or something else?

Also giving reasons as to why you did something would be a HUGE plus.. I hear that diminishing returns now affects karma more severely, and am wondering why.

Cezton.2415:

We’ve reached a critical point with regards to the life blood of Guild Wars 2.

Upon hovering over world selection one quickly sees that all American servers except for two, are High/Full, and Europe, mostly High with a few more Medium servers. The population seems to be doing fairly well. Lower level zones experience dips, highs and lows with regards to how many people are leveling and doing events together.

Gotta wonder how many bots make up the population of each world tho….

“Gotta wonder how many bots make up the population of each world tho….”

If our orr is any indication, 20 of around 200 (JQ) with the 20 affected maybe 6 maps out of the entire game with most of the game averaging 100.

I mostly look at the trade post for indication – if I put a decent buy order, I usually get what I want (even though it’s fairly rare) within a minute or such. That tells me a lot of people are playing since even rare stuff gets dumped on there frequently.