Guild Wars 2

Earlier today we had the first Guild Wars 2 Community Round Table, an open discussion by members of the community about the community.

The topic for this meeting was two-fold: What is the role of the Guild Wars 2 community, and how can ArenaNet support it?

What is the role of the Guild Wars 2 Community?
Individuals

• Doing something they enjoy
• Getting recognized for it
• Gaining skills they might use professionally (and a portfolio to prove it)

Art (in the form of drawings/sculptures/crafts)

• Similar to individuals’ goals, but specific expression

Game communities / server communities

• Everything’s tied into the game, brings more people into playing the game
• Recruiting (from other games, from real life friends) increases game’s popularity
• A good chance to bring people together for charity / big events
  Universal roles:
• To make friends, connections, networking, collaboration
• Talk about the game, see what can make it better, communicate that “better” to ArenaNet
• Inform the rest of the community (both within Guild Wars 2 and outside of it)
• Ultimately, to increase the popularity of Guild Wars 2
  • Thus making ArenaNet more money so they can keep updating the game

ASIDE: Megaservers have killed the server atmosphere due to dilution (hurts the community)
There’s a balance between “we can complete this content” and “maintaining the atmosphere”

• Servers were fully on “maintaining the atmosphere”
• Megaserver is fully on “we can complete this content”
• No choice of districts (see: Guild Wars 1)
  • Taxis, softcaps, and hardcaps are inefficient for bringing players together for big events
• Makes events harder to put on (can’t choose where to go in advance)

How can ArenaNet support the community?

• The company is hard-pressed to be fair and all-encompassing, community is too big
  • Need to look at investment potential (can we prove it’s worth the time investment?)

• YouTube has “Community Influencers”
  • Based on subscribers/views/uptake, get benefits to improve coverage
• Used to be a list of blogs that got to ask the devs specific questions
  • Didn’t bring people “in”, more serves to interest the community that already exists
  • YouTube/Twitch might bring in people from “outside” the Guild Wars 2 community
• Ten Ton Hammer, Massively OP, etc., are considered press, don’t focus on any one game
• Get information in advance as news outlets
• Fan blogs might be too “close” to the game, don’t bring people in from outside

There is a need to stand for ourselves, to “prove” the investment potential

• How? Collaborate together to meta-cover all the events, activities, etc.
  • Mass aggregator website?
• There’s a lack of central hub
• Cross-advertisement
  • Guest writers
  • Collaborations
  • Recommendations of Others
  • With more collaboration, the competition angle becomes less important
    • No reason to only promote a blog guide when a YouTube video shows it better

Next Steps

• Another meeting (later time to involve America better)
• No recording
• Just notes, as shown here
• Sunday, 5PM UTC+0

Meetings are held on a TeamSpeak server, for server information (and any questions about the Community Round Table), email communityroundtable[at]toughlovecritic[dot]com.

Our next topic: How can the community collaborate together?
Date and Time: Sunday, April 5th, 5PM UTC+0