Guild Wars 2

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Please do not assume that because a particular comment or post was not replied to that it was ignored. This is simply not true.

There is no bias toward any type of criticism/discussion as long as it is productive.

As i mentioned we need to have more focused topics and more time to be able to fully enter into the discussion. This is something we are actively working on.

Please do not try to derail a thread about how we can improve by building arguments around assumptions.

Finally this initiative is extremely important and should be treated with respect with the focus on evolving a great game. And the first round of CDI around Living World was extremely useful in this regard. Let’s make it better as we move forward.

Chris

Respect is somthing you normaly earn and not just get for free. As for me you earned my respect in starting this you really did. But now you lost the upcomming update doesn’t seem to respect my hard work reagarding FotM at all. Since it’s hard to respect sombody who doesn’t respect you and your hard work.

I think it will be treated with respect if it earns his respect. So I think you shoulnd’t ppl tell what they should respect or not.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Please do not try to derail a thread about how we can improve by building arguments around assumptions…

Hey Chris,

Just an observation -

If a thread about the progression/improvement of CDI in the future ends up being steered towards “You don’t seem to be responding to questions that supply negative feedback” and assumptions are spawned from the lack of information/communication, then isn’t labelling it as “derailing” doing more damage?

Surely, the first point of action is to realise the lines of communications are thin on ANet’s side? Look at how and why assumptions are made in the first place? Look at ways to counteract that or better yet to avoid it ever coming to that conclusion?

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Please do not assume that because a particular comment or post was not replied to that it was ignored. This is simply not true.

There is no bias toward any type of criticism/discussion as long as it is productive.

As i mentioned we need to have more focused topics and more time to be able to fully enter into the discussion. This is something we are actively working on.

Please do not try to derail a thread about how we can improve by building arguments around assumptions.

Finally this initiative is extremely important and should be treated with respect with the focus on evolving a great game. And the first round of CDI around Living World was extremely useful in this regard. Let’s make it better as we move forward.

Chris

I’m not sure how much is really assumption when it was explicitly stated in the Living World CDI thread that those with histories of posting negative content are given less consideration. And, surely if it is just assumption, then the process going forward should actually be designed around countering that assumption and being even more open to all sorts of feedback such that assumptions are not so easy to make.

Either way, assumption or not, I would say that it’s pretty clear at least at this early part of this thread what the basic direction is that the players would like to see the CDI take in the future. It’s not that the CDI isn’t appreciated, but it does need some adjustments.

We all need to be concise.

Brevity is the soul of wit. Many of the posters in the Living World thread, myself included, wanted to use it as a soapbox for their enormous essay about expanding the world. This produced pages and pages and pages of long text blocks, many of which said the same general things. This makes it very difficult to read, let alone form a discussion. It might help to enforce a simple standard. If your post is more than a midsized paragraph or two long, it needs to be a spoiler quote block OR a link to another thread that lays out your essay in full.

I’m equally guilty of contributing to the problem, but if we’re going to have a really good conversation, we can’t be giving speeches over one another’s heads.

Shriketalon.1937:

We all need to be concise.

Brevity is the soul of wit. Many of the posters in the Living World thread, myself included, wanted to use it as a soapbox for their enormous essay about expanding the world. This produced pages and pages and pages of long text blocks, many of which said the same general things. This makes it very difficult to read, let alone form a discussion. It might help to enforce a simple standard. If your post is more than a midsized paragraph or two long, it needs to be a spoiler quote block OR a link to another thread that lays out your essay in full.

I’m equally guilty of contributing to the problem, but if we’re going to have a really good conversation, we can’t be giving speeches over one another’s heads.

The real question is, even with more concise feedback, if we had 45 pages of that, but the same amount of red posts over the whole thread. Would we be any further than we are now?

(considering many posts were of this nature: “I expect Bobby will speak to this point in more detail.” and “Yep i think this point is valid.”)

Shriketalon.1937:

I’m equally guilty of contributing to the problem, but if we’re going to have a really good conversation, we can’t be giving speeches over one another’s heads.

Which is an interesting point – I tried to comment on other posters and give the occasional shout out to posts with ideas I found interesting. I certainly enjoyed the occasional nod from my peers (before the moderators butchered those posts into non sequiturs…). Still, I think there were a lot of layers that were strictly there to deliver their one post and leave. I’m not sure they even stuck around for the Dev-reply, if any. Its not necessarily a problem that that happens… more an element of the environment. If we’re going to see a lot of individuals on the soap box with little peer-to-peer discussion, then I’m very much in favor of tighter topics/themes and shorter windows of thread activity.

I’m still against hard limits on post length- I’d maybe shoot for a friendlier tone in the opening guidance instructing participants to try and “condense your thoughts and distil your essays to the extent that you are able”.

style.6173:

I think the whole CDI concept was great. The one for the living story and the one for PvP showed great interaction.

I do recommend getting more ANET presence in the WvW thread next time. That one felt more half hearted than the others. We didn’t really have any collaboration there. I don’t think the summary really captured a good part of the dialog either.

Exactly. The WvW “collaborative” thread was really weak with almost no dev interaction, and the posted summary fell way short of capturing the gist of the ideas raised in the thread … or even it’s intent. The thread was supposedly about dealing with population balance and the dev summary homed in on adjusting the scoring mechanism. Not cool at all …

So if you really want these CDIs to be useful, first and foremost please make sure that there is actually some collaboration involved.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

And the first round of CDI around Living World was extremely useful in this regard.

Yes, the LW one was good in some respects, devs actually acknowledged that they made several mistakes and would try to improve in their future story-telling, sometime in 2014. The PvP/WvW ones were trash.

How hard would it be to get some in game surveys? There are a lot of people that don’t visit the forum and don’t even know about CDI. Once you have some ideas from the forums to go with, why not run those ideas by the in game folks. You could even make it part of the game itself. Like a billboard in LA where Devs post questions and people walk up to it, read and pick from a series of answers or Devs post some ideas and people rate them on a 1-10 and get some cheap RNG item for participating like a bag of coins or something. I think it might be fun.

Nike.2631:

I’m still against hard limits on post length- I’d maybe shoot for a friendlier tone in the opening guidance instructing participants to try and “condense your thoughts and distil your essays to the extent that you are able”.

A very fair point. Hard limitations would be awkward to enforce and would present a rather negative tone from the getgo. Encouraging the use of spoiler text blocks and a TL:DR paragraph might be the best bet.

Hi Chris,

Don’t you think it’s a little early to be gathering feedback on this process? In retrospective of what has happened (using pve as the scope):

1) Thread made to gather topics which people felt was most appropriate for discussion with the developers.
2) Thread made by developer, with the intention of being open for a few days to gather feedback on single topic. Thread opened for far longer than anticipated, totally went on a tangent (often at developers discretion).
3) No thread created for next topic, or expansion on other topics raised in step 1. Instead gathering feedback on overall process.

I think this situation is a little shallow to gather feedback on at this time, as really… little has occurred which feedback could be gathered on, especially without bias as this is only focused on one topic. Why not go back to the threads people brought up topics, make some more feedback threads that are only open for a week, then gather feedback once this has been occurring for atleast a month.

This feels far too ‘meta’, which is going to drive people away who don’t like high level discussion. Bring back the project to it’s roots of gathering feedback on the actual game – not the process, then see how it goes from there.

More
shorter
compacter
clear boundery’s
pro-active.

Looking at the Living story thread, I see several issues.
The first is that it was too late. Too many people where too angry allready. This resulted in a lot off offtopic things pulled with it.

Also some elements went on for too long (e.g. the scarlet part off the discussion).
This can possibly be solved by making a subforum for each CD. Disallow for members to make topics there and start with a sticky to get the different elements together. Then for these a thread is being made (after a few days you should have an overall idea, but it can stay open for longer if people find hot elements nobody thought off). For those a new thread would be made (one each) After a short introduction people can start. Any dev-comments that are sumerizing, asking questions or answering the common fear will also be put in the opening post (besides in the separate comments).

Also it should be important to sumerize things more. Something like’
When reading through your posts I see that many people of you dislike Scarlet cause she is hard to identify with, slowly introduced and has not enough to do with the main story line off the elder dragons’ This helps a lot, cause the walls off text where massive, and many people just skipped to the red comments made by Anet. By using them to summerize the common things you are distracting you save us a lot off time reading through all.

As for the subelements to be discussed. Within the living story it could be
- Scarlet and how to tell a story
- Rewards and release pace of the chapters
- temporary vs permanent content
- etc (just wanted to give some very common examples)

Also it should be important to give more direct guidelines of the borders off the discussion. In the living story thread it happened that many things that are just slightly connected to the living story where discussed. Off course in making such a thing as a game, all is related to each others. So all things have in some way to do with the living story. But you should make the boundery’s clear. An example would be the RNG-skins. Yes the skins are often released to match the living story chapter. But the tickets and the actually issue is with the RNG-factor. Those tickets drop from BL-chests and drop all year long. So this subject does not belong in a Living story discussion, but in a Black lion trading post discussions.

I also think that it dragged too long. The general view was visable after a few days and after that a lot of repeating went on.

The last recommendation I have is to do this earlier. Two examples why are the:
- coming skill/traits update: people receive this very well. Although not all changes are welcomed by all, it is very welcomed to be be involved in the discussion early.
- Bringing people with a 30+ factal level down to level 30. I think this is another example. I know you have your reasons to do this, and I know you feel you had no other choice. But announcing it a week! ahead of time is experienced as a slap in the face. Better would have been to discuss this early on with the community. Explain what the issue is your running into and what your idea’s of solving it are. Explaining you don’t see other options, but are open for suggestions or idea’s.

1. +1 forum feature
Is this reviewed? I used this on a few posts in the CDI thread, but wasn’t sure if it was used when posts were read. It could be a helpful feature for future discussions as a way to determine popular ideas.

2. Anet posts
More of them would be nice, even if just getting summaries indicating what has been taken away up to that point. However, it would be very helpful to include a follow-up as to what has been well received and what isn’t possible within that summary later. I’m sure that not everything can be delivered as feedback due to specific restrictions on communicating, but even saying that you can’t comment is better than not knowing anything.
I don’t know that I agree with the idea that negative posts should be responded to with the same frequency as positive ones because depending on the response it could foster more negativity and it might not be constructive to the thread. However, if several posters have the same criticism, maybe a question or comment on that critique could be used to make sure that the understanding of why it is generating negative feelings is a take away.

3. CDI sub-forum
If this is an ongoing project, it would make sense to have it more organized than it is currently. Even with one topic every two weeks, it will have about 26 topics per year for PvE, not including the additional threads like this one. Add in WvW and PvP and there are a lot of threads specific to CDI.

4. Additional topic threads
If the CDI is in its own sub-forum, it would be a good way to organize topics that come up for further discussion in new threads. A good example for this was the question on favorite/least favorite living world releases. It was jumbled in the main thread and made both difficult to follow by being lumped together.
New topics can be created and locked until the end of the original topic or left open. However, if left open, it will create more threads to follow and possibly fewer posts by Anet since there will most likely be more to read. These new posts would be linked to by Anet with information regarding the commenting period, i.e. over the next three days the post will be open or until the end of the original topic, etc.

5. Clarity of the topic
I believe that the LW was a good discussion, but lacked an overall point to the discussion. I realize that we gave the topics and it was generally what everyone wanted to discuss, but it seems that there were different reasons why it should be discussed. If you use the previous thread to get the second most popular topic or create a new thread for the next topic, it would be helpful to have the top 5 (or less) reasons for discussion.
For example, using the LW, discussion should revolve around: a. Scarlet as a villain, b. Story pacing, c. Future story lines, d. Temporary versus Permanent content, and e. Revisiting past releases. Thread posts should use those as the heading of the post and then the ideas to follow. This would help keep posts more clearly relating to one thing for the discussion, rather than everything in one (or five) jumbled posts. It would help with shorter posts, although not less frequent.

6. Shorter commenting period
Since the first discussion has been done and ended, it is easy to see why it was extended, but also that is was probably unnecessary. The main post should clearly define the end date and time for the thread and stick to it. If further discussion on something needs/wants to happen, then a new thread can be opened and linked to in the original thread. My suggestion is eight to ten days depending on when it started to encompass at least one full weekend.

7. Surveys
In game surveys would be helpful to get more players aware of the CDI and interactive with the topic at hand. A before survey and an after survey for the current CDI would be nice. This could provide information on where people stood before the discussion and afterwards if anything changed their perspective. Also, a survey on the takeaways to get a larger picture of what ideas were actually thought of as good by the players.

mercury ranique.2170:

More
shorter
compacter
clear boundery’s
pro-active.

I wish I had waited to post since we had a lot of the same recommendations. I could have had a much shorter post.

Maybe the summaries you do should be sent out in an internal email to the Devs, or the Devs that contribute to whatever the topic at-hand is (or all Devs). Considering how long the threads can be, or even individual posts, they may be discouraged from participation in the threads just as many of us players are. Perhaps, more Devs might want to post in the threads, unless it is something mandatory, which I can’t imagine it is, as that would be taking time away from development. I can see finding half an hour or so to contribute on the forums, but not the hours and hours it takes to keep up with the threads as they turned out in these first excursions.

I’m sure it’s been mentioned a billion times already, but I’d like to reinforce the idea that ArenaNet should actually listen to the people with the angry stacks instead of the other people. More than likely, they have good reason for it.

1 the thread becomes a whirlwind of discussion. Dev posts fuel it, while comments and general questions are good to keep the thread on course. But when a topic comes up p the devs would like to dive into further they should be allowed to start a CDI sub thread for that specific topic. The sub threads could have a dedicated 48 hour life and then closed. This way major discussions don’t get lost in the posts of those just posting in response to the original post and not the current discussion.

2 when moving to the next call for topics make it a blitz. Have it open for a weekend 72 hours. Tell us the 2nd place topic from the previous topic call. Make it a single topic request you either vote for the previous runnerup or submit a new choice. This would lead to fast set up for the next round of cdi

3 reserve a post or two after the initial. Edit and update with links to posts within the thread that you feel should drive the discussion (short summary would be nice) this idea if you feel my first idea would get out of hand to easily with to many places for you all to keep up on.

Not really CDI-related, but it would be great to be able to view only ANet responses in a particular thread. This enables us to quickly look up dev responses and summaries, which I think is an excellent way of keeping us informed of feedback and discussion.

Stooperdale.3560:

Is this a CDI about how to do CDI?

So meta.

Zaxares.5419:

Not really CDI-related, but it would be great to be able to view only ANet responses in a particular thread. This enables us to quickly look up dev responses and summaries, which I think is an excellent way of keeping us informed of feedback and discussion.

Once you find the first Dev post (or any Dev post in a thread) you can jump to the next (or previous) Dev post only. So, they do have this already, sort of. The problem happens when it isn’t the first post of the thread, or on the first page, at least. I wish there was a way to jump to the first Dev post in any thread. If there is such a function, already, I haven’t discovered it.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Zaxares.5419:

Not really CDI-related, but it would be great to be able to view only ANet responses in a particular thread. This enables us to quickly look up dev responses and summaries, which I think is an excellent way of keeping us informed of feedback and discussion.

Once you find the first Dev post (or any Dev post in a thread) you can jump to the next (or previous) Dev post only. So, they do have this already, sort of. The problem happens when it isn’t the first post of the thread, or on the first page, at least. I wish there was a way to jump to the first Dev post in any thread. If there is such a function, already, I haven’t discovered it.

To be clearer this is the arrows above and below the dev name

I’ll just post my two cents to agree with minbariguy. I’m in customer service myself, and I know that the tone of the message has little enough to do with the content – and you really have to be willing to address the subjects people are passionately upset about by speaking to the content of what they’re unhappy about – and believe me I know that the actual subject of discontent can be difficult to decipher because people suck at communicating – professionally and politely, doing your best to set the tone in turn. Little ‘thank you’ notes for positive feedback are nice, but not the meat and potatoes.

So allow me to decipher my own discontent here. My feedback would be that we haven’t seen enough ‘result’; we simply don’t know what the developers are really thinking about what we’re saying, aside of some rather hinting ’That’s interesting!’ types of posts. I would ask for more communication in future, like bluntly honest summaries of developer discussion regarding our feedback.

To make that maximally effective I would also agree that topics need to be tighter on topic, shorter, and more frequent. But then again, the forum is awash with potential topics of discussion. It ought to be easy to grab a hatful of topics; you hardly even need to ask us. It’s already there.

Half of me thinks the topic would be moot if there were more ‘red’ posts anywhere on the forum and if they were easier to see. Like on Blizzard’s forum, for instance, you can hop right to any developer post by clicking on the dev post icon.. here, our dev tracker is awash with support tickets.

I really appreciate the CDI plan. Especially as my first ’real’ MMO (no not that one) had zero interaction from the devs for the first 2 years. Towards the end of it’s life, dev communication was vastly improved, but the thing that shocked me was a dev saying ’we had no idea you guys played the game like this’!

This was after one of their fan cons, about 5 years into the game, when someone logged into his account at the show, with a dev, and took him on a tour of what the players were actually doing. Several issues where fixed after that and several systems were improved or added.

Hopefully, Arenanet will have a better idea of how we play the game and how we use the world given to us, as a result of the CDI . There are so many different playstyles: PvE, PvP, Crafting, Roleplaying and they all want different things, (as well as many of the same, of course).

I hope this initiative will sieve those things out and add things that all playstyles enjoy, as well as fixing issues that affect all those playstyles.

GW2 is a beautiful game, with a largely open world and it could be even better with just a few things added/improved.

I have a feeling that the format/structure of this forum gets in the way of what CDI threads could be. Something more like Reddit has some advantages there – you can turn major points into top-level “roots” of discussion trees, and that way players have a better shot at following and contributing to conversation topics they’re interested in without having to trawl the entire thread. Only works if the people posting are co-operating, of course.

Probably not feasible to modify the forum to do this in a hurry, though, and moving discussion to Reddit is unlikely to be on the agenda – but who knows, maybe there’s some way to get a little bit of that model going.

Guidance to keep posts concise would help in both scenarios, though. It’s not always an easy thing for me to do either, but after seeing the Great Wall of Text that the LW CDI thread became, I really don’t want to make the problem any worse.

I think probably something useful would be to set a format for posts, maybe even use tags. In the first CDI post there different kind of posts, replies to dev questions, suggestions and topic discussion. Suggestions specifically were huge topics sometimes spanning posts, it become hard to read it all and too time consuming. with a format such as first stating in point format the suggestions one after the other and then elaborating after that it would be easier for everyone. Tagging the posts could also be helpful as some people didnt seem to like the discussion on topics going on so if they were tagged people could just skip them if they dont want to read them (by tag i mean starting the post with [Suggestion], [Question Reply],[Topic Discussion] sort of thing.

As a post mortem maybe it would be good to have a summary of what you as Arenanet got out of it. Just a point format. That way people can know that some of their topics even though they might not have been given feedback in the post itself for whatever reason were still seen and considered.

TL;DR:
There needs to be a better way of focusing the discussion. The discussion topics being honed to specific points would be more helpful at getting concise and pinpointed feedback.

I personally think the problem with the first CDI was it was tackling a subject way too large for just one discussion.

Saying “Discuss your opinion on the Living World” is just asking for a multitude of categories to appear in a single strand of conversation:
-Story
-Pacing of both release cadence and story beats
-Characters – mainly Scarlett
-Loot gained from LW
-Living world dungeons
-What is considered as “challenging content”
-Temp vs Perm
-The impact of the story on the world on the whole.
-The impact of achievements on the story and playtime

I’m definitely missing out some key points but, I think taking this on-board as a large subject kind of bogged down the thread towards parts where people thought discussing stuff like Scarlett’s character arc/back-story/presence was not relevant, when it is, but there was just a lack of general direction.

(Thinking about it now, I can see just how “Living world” won overall on the topic to first discuss. Because people often posted “Temp vs Perm content”, “LW Story”, “Achievements from LW” and “Cadence of LW releases” which all fall under the umbrella of general LW discussion)

Though, the way it’s been done through weeks and weeks of polling to even get to the discussion, I feel if we started highlighting separate points of the LW to critique and give feedback on, we’d still be polling on whether we want to talk about Achievements or Cadence of releases and wouldn’t get anywhere. It’s all good and fair telling people to be concise in their responses during the discussion, but the question or thread should also reflect that.

If you were to ask us for opinions on the world IRL, and expect only a sentence, you need to really hone your question.

There was just way too much to read with little to no organization in my opinion. I think that all people really need to keep their word limit down and the dev OP could perhaps be updated with summaries or Q/A.

I also think that the last topic, “Living World” was somewhat vague as it basically encompasses all updates of this entire year. So what resulted was a massive influx of unorganized information.

How hard would it be to get some in game surveys?

This is so badly required. I have been disappointed that only a small % of people often look at the forums of the player base. We had these in-game surveys during bet and feedback on quests events and if we liked the changes.

I would like to see the results of the polls published to show how people have voted in the majority. I have been disappointed with many if the implemented suggestions, player rants (on the forum) leading to changes which I have not enjoyed at all:
1: bi-weekly updates/burnout comes to mind : It’s now impossible to take a 2 week holiday without possibly missing out on some exclusive content or item. (Not good)
2: FoTM reset to level 30 (Where was the CDI with this?)
3: Recipe patch notes mistakes and impact on haloween (Some people lost of lot of respect for anet after the 10x Price increase – saying we messed up with the patch notes is just bad and skewed the economy : this could have also been an insider setting themselves up for lots of gold e.g. ANET employee. I have a very cynical view of the world – I am not saying it was. It just could have been.)
4: Profession changes ??? I’m still confused how they will affect my builds – the forum is so difficult to use/scroll through stuff. (People will always complain about theifs being able to go invisible – but that’s what a rogue [other MMos] or wizards [spell of invisbility])
5: not answering questions/cancelling live streams or ignoring players.
6: Failed Teqflop update (Please don’t do this to all world bosses – the place will become empty)

This makes me angry and very disappointed. These are just a few points of many changes that many people have asked to change but yet without concerete numbers of people who want bi-weekly/perm content or something else.

There could even be a guy in LA (town-crier?) who you can give short feedback to with some predetermined questions and a change for an open text feedback.
Personally I don’t really like posting stuff on forums it takes too much time away in-game and feel my opinion is often either deleted (Mods deleting posts they don’t agree with) or becomes a “Who shouts the loudest on the forums” – which is often the hardcore crowd.

Far too often after a patch change hits people then “go-ape” when they realise the changes as they do not feel they have been involved in the process.

These are just my opinions but I feel greater involvement from the player base has to come from in-game. Many of the suggestions from people I have read on the forums and thought “please for the love of <insert word>” don’t do this – and then kaboom! The suggestion is made into reality without the majority of players involved in the discussion.

Things I appreciated about this process:

1. Drawing clear boundaries, even in the face of criticism. This may seem odd, but despite the fact that it went against the vocal majority in the thread, I felt it was important when you made it clear that the two-week cycle is not up for debate at this time. Likewise with the discussion on Scarlet (as it was never feasible/likely you would abandon her anyway).

2. Seeing developers get enthused about engaging with us. It has to be hard to face many combative opinions and seek out reasons to be inspired anyway. It was fun to see developers really sounding excited about what they were hearing.

3. I felt like this project really effected change in other aspects- like the preview of the December 10th patch notes, complete with interaction and feedback from the players taken into account.

What didn’t work:

1. Keeping up with the thread became really cumbersome. I fell so far behind that I felt like I couldn’t really contribute. However, I see no way to easily fix this.

2. There was a LOT of off-topic discussion. I think this is obvious and a rather easy fix.

3. I’d like to see a lot more developer interaction in the future, particularly to keep things on topic, and to translate how this collaboration will actually impact the game.

Additionally, I’d like to see you address the top 3 topics before moving on to a new call for topics. Otherwise, one majority set of players is constantly having their votes counted and re-counted, giving them more weight. I don’t think we need to discuss every topic that’s been mentioned, but I feel like we should at least give weight to the top 3 topics. (I’m not sure I’m explaining the voting thing right- if it isn’t clear, I’ll come back to it this afternoon/evening.)

Overall, a positive experience.

Hi, I’ve compiled my feedback below.

The good:
-A lot of good suggesitons, a lot of good positive and negative feedback. I hope you guys have a good reporting team to compile everything.

-Thread moderation was either non-existant or kept to a minimum. Maybe this is because we as players and posters stayed on topic and kept it civil(which is great) or the mods eased off the whips a bit.

-It is good to see that a lot of our feedback aligns with your perceptions and views (aside from the cadence!!!)

The Bad:
-Obviously, please make more time to interact with us. The ocassional post with a “what if” or “whats your favorite XYZ” was good, but more interaction with out individual ideas and feedback is needed.

-Please tell other posters to refrain from using formatted posts. It was completely obnoxious to see some people make font 50 titles, with huge underscores and uniquely formatted posts, just so their post stood out and took up the most room. I skipped right over most of those.

Room for Improvement:
-There were many, many posts that were wall of texts. Im sure you folks didnt have time to read through each post that was 2 or 3 posts long. Maybe come up with some sort of structure for us to get our ideas across. A bulleted list, a question and answer. While some people had some great suggestions, they had some long winded posts that probably could have been shortened(myself included).

Looking to the future:
-One thing I would like to know is when can we see some action, in game, that derives from the CDI? I know that each suggestion, fix, etc takes a while to talk about internally and develop, but as a broad timeline without committing yourself…do these things take 3-6 months, 6-9? A year? I mean, there are some great suggestions and I truly think that the Living Story can and NEEDS to benefit from these suggestions rapidly. The current iteration of LS is horrible by many standards, and there were many people in the thread that overall, were not pleased with LS for one reason or another. I think that after many months of the current LS, these people(myself included) are getting burned out on the current version of LS and we need to see some changes quickly in order to keep interest, so please move quickly with some true action. The open world of Tyria is dead to me, and the game development direction seems nothing more than funneling us like cattle to one or two zones for a grind. Its killing my desire to play the game, so I need to see some changes quickly. (sorry to be blunt).

Thanks for your time.

I recently participated in a WoW churned players focus group and it was a surprisingly good experience. I don’t think everything they did applies here (there were only 150 of us), but there might be a few things that work.

The basic process was that we had to complete structured activities within a certain time frame, and then there was a section of the forums where the researchers would post a specific topic to discuss (usually based on the results of the activities), and there was another section of the forums for group members to post topics that occurred to them in the course of the other discussions.

In my opinion, we should have a sub-forum only for the CDI. ANet might start a focused topic that gets closed after some period of time, take some time to digest the responses and post a follow-up that drills deeper into a particular theme that came up in the directed thread.

The focus group used surveys and little web apps like taking cards with features on them and sorting them into three groups – very interested and, somewhat interested in, not interested in. That might be overkill, but it was a quick way to get a structured response to a particular question.

I think that what made it successful is the iterative approach of sparking an open discussion, then posting more specific follow up topics based on different themes from that discussion, and the combination of structured responses (surveys) and open discussion.

I’d like to chime in with the people asking for a separate sub-forum where only ANet people can create new threads and smaller sections for discussion. It would help keep things on topic.

I think it’s also a good idea to have a time gap between posting a new topic and allowing user comments to start. 3 days is probably too long because, let’s face it, people’s attention tends to … Squirrel!

What happened 3 days ago is absolutely irrelevant. But maybe 24 hours would be good? that way, all interested people, regardless of time zone, will have had the opportunity to take a look and form an opinion without first reading through 2 pages of other user’s comments. Which can be useful, but sometimes it can distract us from our own thoughts.

Personally, I’d appreciate negative responses as well; something along the lines “We are aware of this request, it has been discussed but the decision for now is not to implement it” or even “This idea goes against the company policy, will not be discussed” or (what we all secretly hope for, hehe) “yeah, dude, I totally agree with you but the team decided not to on this one”. It’s ok if not everything people think of gets implemented, we’d just like to get feedback even if the answer is no.

I agree with Chris in that subjects of discussion should be narrower and more focused. Maybe then threads would go off topic much less.

Have a set posting limit for the thread that is adhered to so we can move to new topics of discussion.

When devs respond, I would like them to direct flow of discussion in several ways. Help to keep on-topic. Ask questions of posters that will further clarify topic items not being discussed that should be. Provide overall general feedback on previous posts so the same posts are not duplicated repeatedly.

I would also like to see the different world CDI discussions held in their proper forums. WvWvW, PvP, and PvE. This would also help to further direct topic flow and focus in a more concise way.

How specific are you permitting the topics to be? Does it need to apply to a general area of the game, a game-wide mechanic, or can it get down to specifics about a certain class, certain mechanics, certain races, areas, and even stories within the game?

Personally, I just want to see one on condition damage.

I’ve been running condi-damage since launch, because I think it’s fun. But that also means I’ve spent a solid year of being ostracized from anything bigger than a five man group (and even five-man groups a few times). I would very much appreciate if the issue was at least acknowledged, as it hasn’t been in now 11 months and counting.

My perception of the last thread was that the ‘tough’ questions were completely ignored while posters that praised or suggested something that Anet already though of were given ‘shout outs’.

Now, you can say that isn’t true and every post was read and considered, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way.

Just because some posters are not as eloquent or able to write their thoughts out in a more respectable format doesn’t mean they should be ignored. If you have time to research someones posting history to see if they have a tendancy to post negatively, you have time to respond to the criticism.

Again this is just my perception, but as they say “perception is reality”. If you have angry posters posting about a topic, instead of ingoring it because its not actionable, maybe, just maybe consider reviewing ‘why’ they are posting in the first place.

It seemed to me that those who posted the longest multi-post posts, and posted the most often were usually the ones responded to. This might not have been accurate, but that was the impression given.

The thread became much too long and windy, I feel. It was hard to keep up with it. Once you left the forum to sleep or anything else in life, it could feel like you missed out, and could never catch up….akin to criticisms of bi-weekly updates where people feel they can’t catch up. I know you could sit and read all the posts to ‘catch up’, but that was a daunting task, and used up all the time you might have alloted to time spend on the forum, instead of posting yourself.

I hope a way is found to make the CDI more concise and less time-consuming where more people feel comfortable expressing their opinions. Too many topics were all jumbled up together, and by the time you reached the current end of the thread, the topic you might have been interested in was long past being current.

As the ratio of Devs posting to players posting is so very wide, I feel the Devs must use more control to keep topics focused; there is just too much going on in a thread such as this and is too difficult for 2 or 3 Devs to keep up with. If I don’t have the time to read every post, I don’t see how the Devs can. It is practically a full-time job.

Hey Chris, I think that the things you posted are true and could be developed further. I myself had no problem with existing CDI thread, but thing like summary every now and then and more focused topics would do it a lot easier indeed.
I think however, that if it´d be possible, this whole initiative would deserve a whole forum cathegory to live on its own, rather than to be discussed in several different cathegories. This would also allow for you to have different, more specific threads on the same topic and would maybe save us from the 50ish page one thread…I think it would be more easy to read and follow.
This way, you could bring more people to it, as more people would notice it and if you plan to carry with this thing in near future (as I assume you do), it would make things more organized. (in current situation, I´d sticky each thread concerning CDI and in time, there would be a whole firs page of the forum category filled with stickied CDI threads).

To those saying they never answered the tough feedback/questions… what exactly do you mean?

The only one I recall from that monster thread was why they insisted on sticking with the bi-week cadence.

What did you want them to say?

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Please do not assume that because a particular comment or post was not replied to that it was ignored. This is simply not true.

There is no bias toward any type of criticism/discussion as long as it is productive.

As i mentioned we need to have more focused topics and more time to be able to fully enter into the discussion. This is something we are actively working on.

Please do not try to derail a thread about how we can improve by building arguments around assumptions.

Finally this initiative is extremely important and should be treated with respect with the focus on evolving a great game. And the first round of CDI around Living World was extremely useful in this regard. Let’s make it better as we move forward.

Chris

I call bs on that. You can’t prove that you read all suggestions by saying “we saw it, no need for comment.” You need to MARK suggestions you are actually reading. No more “we see everything” crap. We want HARD evidence.

You should hire some people to read the forum “live” and every hour they will come to you the respective designers, developers, etc and ask you the questions about the things in the forum.
They will take little notes of what you are saying and then come and reply to the specific posts.
You guys should be busy developing the game not answering the posts in the forum because writing takes time. let others write after you gave them the answers orally in any free time you have

EverythingXen.1835:

To those saying they never answered the tough feedback/questions… what exactly do you mean?

The only one I recall from that monster thread was why they insisted on sticking with the bi-week cadence.

What did you want them to say?

I think it’s more along the lines of:
They’re cool posting one-liners on feedback that seems to have been “always discussed with the team” at Anet. Akin to Colin’s “It’s something we’re looking at”, and Mike Z’s Recent “Nothing’s off the table”, so surely if they’ve been discussing it since the dawn of time….it’s nothing new hearing it from us. However, what they probably don’t get in their meetings are a real “fresh eyes” or “outside perspective” critique of their work.

Now if we give them that feedback that they ask for, no matter how bad it sounds, shouldn’t they be tackling some of the issues they’re not likely to have come across before?
Isn’t that how you improve? Not just building upon ideas that you have already come across.

And tbh, if they cant answer a question about why the cadence is sticking, then the only “assumption” i can make is that they’re not going to bother responding to questions of that nature and keep on keeping on with patting on the back for positive stuff.

Master Yi.6129:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Please do not assume that because a particular comment or post was not replied to that it was ignored. This is simply not true.

There is no bias toward any type of criticism/discussion as long as it is productive.

As i mentioned we need to have more focused topics and more time to be able to fully enter into the discussion. This is something we are actively working on.

Please do not try to derail a thread about how we can improve by building arguments around assumptions.

Finally this initiative is extremely important and should be treated with respect with the focus on evolving a great game. And the first round of CDI around Living World was extremely useful in this regard. Let’s make it better as we move forward.

Chris

I call bs on that. You can’t prove that you read all suggestions by saying “we saw it, no need for comment.” You need to MARK suggestions you are actually reading. No more “we see everything” crap. We want HARD evidence.

How would you suggest this be done? Short of quoting every post and replying read I don’t really see how this would be possible and all that would accomplish is double the length of the thread.

Oh and you may find better response by asking nicely vs demanding and demeaning. I know you may feel strongly about something but kind words and pleases or would you kindly put the reader in a far more receptive mood. Aggressive wording trends to put people on the defensive, and someone on the defensive is inferiority more against you and harder to get to seeing around to your way of thinking and grant your request/desire/point. Thanks!

There should be more discussion summaries, not only from the devs. Whenever a topic is discussed for a few pages, the guy who brought up the topic should post a summary. For example, someone suggested event failures should have consequences and we discussed that. Then after a few days / a few pages the person who brought up the idea should post a summary.

Ashen.2907:

1) A tangible indication that this process isn’t some form of placebo or sleight of hand.

This was my thought as well. I know you all at ArenaNet love iterative design. I would hate for something the community wants get designed and then get iterated on so much it isn’t really what the player base wants in the end. Let us know what is going on with it as it’s happening. I want to know this stuff is being implemented.

I kind of felt like this happened with the pre-cursor stuff. It was said in the state of the game that we were getting it this year. It was a HUGE one on the community’s list of what they wanted. Now it may get pushed back. I feel like other things should have gone on the back burner in favor of the pre-cursor stuff getting implemented. I don’t feel like that happened.

We as a community need to be respectful with our words. The devs should be respectful in that things they say are coming out in a broad time frame (Pre-cursor changes coming out this year was said months ago) should come out in that time frame. I feel like that is how the community gets disrespected. Just as we should respect you guys with our words, you guys should respect us with your actions in your designs and the time frames that are put on them by you. You said they were coming out this year, not us.

Teraphas.6210:

Master Yi.6129:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Please do not assume that because a particular comment or post was not replied to that it was ignored. This is simply not true.

There is no bias toward any type of criticism/discussion as long as it is productive.

As i mentioned we need to have more focused topics and more time to be able to fully enter into the discussion. This is something we are actively working on.

Please do not try to derail a thread about how we can improve by building arguments around assumptions.

Finally this initiative is extremely important and should be treated with respect with the focus on evolving a great game. And the first round of CDI around Living World was extremely useful in this regard. Let’s make it better as we move forward.

Chris

I call bs on that. You can’t prove that you read all suggestions by saying “we saw it, no need for comment.” You need to MARK suggestions you are actually reading. No more “we see everything” crap. We want HARD evidence.

How would you suggest this be done? Short of quoting every post and replying read I don’t really see how this would be possible and all that would accomplish is double the length of the thread.

Not to offend, but you are thinking of an overly complicated solution. There is a much better, and easier, solution: modify the “+1” system, so that ANet employees have an option to click a button to show that they have taken notice of the comment. Think of it as the opposite of the infraction system; if the comment is any good, it gets marked to show that an ANet employee likes the idea.

Why wasn’t there a CDI for the fractals update?

Resetting progression is ridiculous.

JMar.3254:

Why wasn’t there a CDI for the fractals update?

Resetting progression is ridiculous.

(incoming ANet impersonation)

Because nobody was interested about such a thing. Nobody brought up the fractals in any of the CDI’s.

(end of impersonation)

I think the whole point of this update is to get people to do the fractals again. They must be getting sick of the zerg trains at Queensdale and Frostgorge. But, its their fault: they introduced new rewards that were the same quality as the rewards in fractals, but made them far too easy to get.

EDIT: the champ boxes will still be better than the fractal rewards afterwards, unless they make it much more easier to get the unique drops from fractals and make them tradeable, which I’m willing to bet they won’t do that because of “elitists.”

Master Yi.6129:

(incoming ANet impersonation)

Because nobody was interested about such a thing. Nobody brought up the fractals in any of the CDI’s.

(end of impersonation)

I think the whole point of this update is to get people to do the fractals again. They must be getting sick of the zerg trains at Queensdale and Frostgorge. But, its their fault: they introduced new rewards that were the same quality as the rewards in fractals, but made them far too easy to get.

If people were interested in the idea of fractals, they would be at the cap waiting to continue. However the only people that would have been very interested in fractals (past the 2 weeks newness excitment) are those that are being damaged by having their levels reset.

Also, I know your first statement was just a joke, but there were a lot of comments I saw that said “dungeons”.

Why don’t the forums having polling options so things can be neat and we can see the overall results at the end.

“What do you guys think we should be focusing on”
“Now that we have topics lets do an a official poll w/ check boxes”
“Here are the results”

Quite honestly the whole start had a “uhhh, are you gonna write this down?” feel to it. No disrespect but how does the player base know things weren’t just decided and other regions used as an excuse?

Men lie, women lie statistics don’t.

JMar.3254:

Also, I know your first statement was just a joke, but there were a lot of comments I saw that said “dungeons”.

Funny that you say that, because I just realized that the game categorizes “dungeons” and “fractals” as two different things. Do the developers think the same way too….?