Guild Wars 2

In the Beta we had these little surveys coming up all the time, please press 1-5 if you thought this was fun, please press 1-5 if you thought this was challenging, etc etc.

It was the perfect way to get feedback from all players without having to resort to reading the rabid thoughts of the “community” – which has led to “Ascended” gear.

It should be pretty clear to you by now that the majority in fact do not want “Ascended” gear, and the people asking for it were in fact the vocal minority.

To avoid making such mistakes in future, use the player surveys when considering a major change.

If your announcement was for a VOTE, then we could see some real democracy in action. Imagine you could wind back the clock, and instead of the blog post saying THIS IS ASCENDED GEAR, HERES HOW IT WILL WORK:

it said “Here’s what we’re thinking about doing, you will see a voting screen appear in-game over the next week or so, tell us what you think!”

And the voting options were something like:

Do you like the ascended gear concept overall (1-5)
Do you think ascended gear should have higher stats (1-5)
Do you think ascended gear should match exotic stats (1-5)

or something like this

You would have a much clearer picture of what the community ACTUALLY wanted, rather than guesswork based on the loudmouths on the forums and elsewhere.

You could even make it fun and lore-appropriate, voting boths set up in all the cities, and you’re only allowed to vote if you answer a few questions about what ascended gear is correctly (to make sure people aren’t just mashing numbers at random)…

Please realise that listening to opinions on forums is the quickest way to RUIN your game. Only entitled, spoiled, whining idiots really post here, the rest of us are far too busy being LOGGED IN TO THE GAME AND PLAYING IT.

Thanks, hope someone listens to this whining forum post (contradictory I know )

Gone are the days when developers design their games for their consumers. WoW, Diablo, farmville and the like proved you can entertain through addiction now everyone wants a piece of the pie.

Corporate greed at its best.

Pity their shortsighted approach to the future of this game will be the death of it.

I truly beleive that Arenanet is different from Activision, EA and Zynga. I think they really really wanted just to make the best game possible, and knew that money would flow from that automatically.

Sadly, they seem to have fallen foul of mistaking “listening to players” for “reading opinions on the forum”.

To my mind, “listening to players” requires actually asking them a question first, to be able to listen to the answer.

Since I logged in to the full game at pre-launch, I’ve never been asked anything in game, never seen a staff member in map chat (like we did in Beta), or anything like that. I’d love to be asked my opinion, but they seem to rely on people volunteering it without being asked.

In my experience, people that volunteer their opinion without being asked rarely have an opinion worth listening to.

Relying on the forums (even though they are official) simply means you will only get opinions from people who like to post on forums, aka “Trolls”.

These people are a very strange and disgusting type, and should generally be ignored.

Thank you OP this is a very good suggestion and I would welcome it

Great suggestion, great thread. Thanks, OP. Hope this one stays alive so that dev’s may pay mind to it.

I’m also much in favor of this (OP suggestion). I’d even keep the OP’s questions, since they pretty much capture what I am concerned about.

I miss the in games surveys, felt like you made a difference to the game, now idk /:

Though I wasn’t expecting to see it very often after beta, I do agree that the survey system would give better quality data to base design decisions on than forum posts. Still, I’m a pragmatist who was disappointed the first time I saw centaurs standing around in a field after hearing a manifesto professing that there would be no such thing.

I’ve met many GW2 players that didn’t play or didn’t like GW1 who are thrilled with the game. Most of them weren’t around during beta. A lot of them have asked me about features that are popular in other games. I think they would be shocked to be asked what they really liked.

I miss the surveys too. We were told we would be listened to and that our feedback was vital for shaping the game.

Well how are they getting this feedback? It can’t just be monitoring forums, can it?

“Well how are they getting this feedback? It can’t just be monitoring forums, can it?”

Considering the absurd lack of response, I would assume no.

They were everywhere in Beta. I actually talked in map chat in WvW to one of the WvW devs for a while. It was not uncommon to see the Arenanet logo floating above a player’s head…

We sometimes get devs replying on forums these days but no interaction in game… It’s almost as if they’re scared to go in there :/

“We sometimes get devs replying on forums these days but no interaction in game… It’s almost as if they’re scared to go in there :/”

This does seem to be ANet’s strange stance on things. I’m still 2.5 weeks and waiting for an ackowledgment (which i expect to be told “sorry for your bug but we have no way of tracking what you are doing” followed 4 seconds later by “do not break the rules we are tracking what you’re doing”) to a bug report I sent back on a missing gem store item.

Chamone.6890:

It should be pretty clear to you by now that the majority in fact do not want “Ascended” gear, and the people asking for it were in fact the vocal minority.

I’m not sure that’s true. People are vocal when they’re not getting something their way, all the players that were looking for more gear progression now have confirmation of it and aren’t likely to be posting about it much. From their point of view it’s now the vocal minority protesting against the changes.

Actually bramble, if you look at the split it seems to be “70% don’t care, 5% do want, 20% do not want”.

I go don’t care as “isn’t ready to quit over it”, and rounded (I’d say more 3~% vs 24%~). The amount of hate fuel this has made should prove it’s a bad move, but hey, ANet wants to duck it’s head low and bash something into the game that won’t work and will generally deter from how good it could be. . .Fine, let them.

Well without actually asking players if they like it or not, all you have to go on is guesswork based on forum posts. Which is kind of my point.

If you see 100 threads asking for gear grind to be put into the game, you might assume that is what the majority of players want.

If you put gear grind into the game, and see 1000 threads saying they absolutely hate the idea, then you might assume that 10x as many players don’t want it than do want it.

Of course, without actually asking at least a decent percentage of players whether they like the idea or not you will never know what the real picture is.

Guild Wars 2 has over 2 million players, and over a million regulars. There’s no way that a handful of forum posters accurately represents what the players want.

The only feedback they could have been “listening” to that led to the introduction of Ascended gear is forum posts, since we have certainly not been asked anything about what we think of the game since Beta, when we had the nice in-game surveys coming up.

Only a tiny minority of people post on the forums, therefore they can only be making bad decisions.

“Of course, without actually asking at least a decent percentage of players whether they like the idea or not you will never know what the real picture is.”

I’ll say this right now, from what I noticed the game is a lot more dead right now.

In JQ we normally have 15-20 people looking for AC, yesterday we had 3.

I also trade on the TP, up to 3~ days ago I had been trading mass volumes (3’000+ units daily) and they were selling out pretty fast. That lasted for about 3 weeks.

I have been trading the same items, yet while that i put 3’000 units up, in the same time they normally sold out I’ve only been seeling 1’000~ and restocking it. My buy orders have been coming in slower too. All this started about the time Ascended armour was announced (my buying declined much slower, peaking yesterday at about 40-50~% regular, my selling declined close to 20% daily over the last few days, arriving at today’s 30-40~% regular).

This is all anectodatol, but considering when I log on all I see is sad faces in chat over the new gear, the TP is dying and less people seem to be playing active dungeons – either one of two things is true – A: People are readying for the content patch (because NOT gaming is how people prepare for new content, right? . . . RIGHT?) B: Less people are playing and more people are upset over this.