ArenaNet is walking on Blizzard's road
I swear I played a game months ago in a similar vein..
Gear-grinds, gold grinds with similar carrot on a stick approaches. The developers for some god-known reason had a penchant for blasting anything deemed “exploitable” by them (i.e., activities that bypassed EXTREME gearchecks and allowed certain classes or player-types like white-collared night-time gamers and parents to have their share of casual enjoyment) to hello-kitty land.
They also had this little habit of not giving players any warnings, flat-out castrating certain stats like Haste by less than nominal amounts and throwing extreme curveballs such as giving out patch notes 20 minutes before downtimes.
Suffice to say the playerbase, as fervent as it was(mostly due to brand recog), eventually nosedived. That game’s developers were INITIALLY pompous in their assertions and justifications of course, that “they know better”, that their idea of “fun”(as easily bandied about nowadays by the uninitiated) should be universal. That certain things like opening TREASURE chests for TREASURES, or penalizing players for suicide-rushing as a means to efficient speed-running is heretical according to their bible of game design.
Fast forward 6 weeks, playerbase took another nosedive. Sanctimonious dev-kitties panicking. Out came the most melodramatic 2500-word essay in blue-tracker history.
Changes were reversed, and ACTUAL content added, and not unpleasant diversions meant to emulate some pseudo game design theory. Devs pleaded players for chances, and a second look.
But by that time the entirety of my friendslist on that game was either back in Azeroth, or here in Tyria.
I’m seeing the pattern again, really. And I don’t like it at all.
I swear I played a game months ago in a similar vein..
Gear-grinds, gold grinds with similar carrot on a stick approaches. The developers for some god-known reason had a penchant for blasting anything deemed “exploitable” by them (i.e., activities that bypassed EXTREME gearchecks and allowed certain classes or player-types like white-collared night-time gamers and parents to have their share of casual enjoyment) to hello-kitty land.
They also had this little habit of not giving players any warnings, flat-out castrating certain stats like Haste by less than nominal amounts and throwing extreme curveballs such as giving out patch notes 20 minutes before downtimes.
Suffice to say the playerbase, as fervent as it was(mostly due to brand recog), eventually nosedived. That game’s developers were INITIALLY pompous in their assertions and justifications of course, that “they know better”, that their idea of “fun”(as easily bandied about nowadays by the uninitiated) should be universal. That certain things like opening TREASURE chests for TREASURES, or penalizing players for suicide-rushing as a means to efficient speed-running is heretical according to their bible of game design.
Fast forward 6 weeks, playerbase took another nosedive. Sanctimonious dev-kitties panicking. Out came the most melodramatic 2500-word essay in blue-tracker history.
Changes were reversed, and ACTUAL content added, and not unpleasant diversions meant to emulate some pseudo game design theory. Devs pleaded players for chances, and a second look.
But by that time the entirety of my friendslist on that game was either back in Azeroth, or here in Tyria.
I’m seeing the pattern again, really. And I don’t like it at all.
well said. My entire guild agrees, we came together from several games to play this one, and now people are starting to see resemblance of D3 all over again. Another week or two of this kind of behavior and i am sure I will be finding a new game a long with my guild mates. Cabal 2 is not to far off from launching in the u.s.
Yeah I was in D3, and what made me leave was just how bad the loot system was. I mean it was obvious Blizzard had bling bling $$ in their eyes with the AH. I was buying everything off the AH, I could barely find anything to use for myself. The loot was horrible.
And yeah they had the difficulty all tuned up crazy, they nerfed my main character hard……and just told me to eat it. Blizzard was dripping with arrogance from its history of past success….but that success was built by making fun games and respecting their playerbase.
I cant even tell you how arrogant and smug Bashiok came off as…why would you let THIS guy be the face for your gaming community? Boggles the mind. Anet is also doing a lot of the same thing. They had no general discussion forum setup…and that was intentional if you ask me.
They feel that its the general discussion posters that unfairly malign the game and make unfounded criticisms. So they figured they would just mute their voices for a period of time until they squeezed every last penny out of the game hype. Of course no matter how nasty some posters can be in general chat, they are still invaluable as sources of info.
Small starving indy companies have general forums up and running during development of the game. They listen to their players the whole time, heck they would love to have a bunch of people moaning and griping and making recomendations…that shows there is interest in the game…there are people invested and comitted to purchasing that game…else they would not waste their time.
The fact anet kinda looked down on the general community and just does its own “internal” testing because the “peasants” are too stupid to know what they want says all you need to about what is happening around here. God man give me 400K people discussing my game and complaining and making endless rants and suggestions about my game and I would be a very rich man. I would welcome that kind of a scenario….the fact anet (probably) sees this differently is a clue to why there is a huge disconnect right now with what the players want and what anet is delivering.