Guild Wars 2

Hey everyone!

So, the forum specialist program applications came and went, and here I am, your forum specialist for dungeons and fractals! Hopefully you at least recognize my name if you frequent this forum a lot; I’m not in any of the speedrunning guilds, but I placed fourth in the first invitational tournament. Hopefully the speedrunning guilds will feel comfortable with me representing them to ANet like I now am, but hopefully also everyone else will feel confident in me as well. We haven’t seen much love in dungeons and fractals for a long time, but they definitely want to make sure our voice is heard for future content design in GW2.

My goal, and it aligns with ANet’s goal, is to make sure that the most important topics to the entire fractal and dungeon community are reported to them constantly so that they can make sure the developers and designers know what we’re thinking about. In that vein, the best way to ensure that I see what matters to you guys is to post in the topics that matter to you, and if there are no topics in that vein, then make a topic! Discussions on the forums are going to draw my attention, and I will read them all and chime in where appropriate. I can’t speak for the other specialists, but I certainly plan to be as active as possible, and to report the things that matter.

I’ll just briefly mention some topics I see a lot here, but feel free to post if you don’t see something super important in the list.

• Kicking System Abuse (Both for Dungeon Sellers and Pubs)
• Fractal Rewards (Including Weapon Skin Issues)
• Fractal Progression (New Levels / Instabilities / Etc)
• New Instanced, Challenging PvE Content
• Instanced PvE Profession Balance
• Dungeon Bugs

Remember that I will not only be communicating what is on everyone’s mind, but also what their solutions to the problems are. So if you have ideas, post them! I’ll be talking both about community consensus and also how divided everyone is on a solution. Some things everyone sort of agrees, but some not so much.

Anyway, I figured I’d at least break the ice. If you have any questions about the program, my role, what I report, or whatever let me know! I’m happy to chat about it. Looking forward to working with you more for the next six months!

Soo… which devs do they send your reports to?

Good Luck. Hope you enjoy it, I did something similar for an old game and have to say i learned a lot and met some cool people.

Ooh snazzy title and all that jazz. Good luck in your new duty. :)

Oh congratz!
I’m glad we got you!

Good luck! You will need some

Very nice! Congratulations and good luck!

By the way, do you think you still got time for approving stuff?

This would probably be listed under Fractal Rewards but in case you’re going a different direction with it. One question I would like to see added to the list is:
Will we ever be able to salvage for ecto (or vendor for a decent price) the large amounts of extra ascended rings from fractals?

I think you should be very specific when reporting about the desire for “new instanced, challenging PvE content,” that that means 5 man dungeon/fractal content and NOT Tequatl/SW/marionette content. I’m pretty sure when Anet speaks of challenging PvE content, they mean the latter and I think most people in this forum want more of the former.

Proper challenging instanced content = volcano fractal
Just so Anet gets a benchmark

Sins.4782:

Soo… which devs do they send your reports to?

I can’t actually share that information, but trust me when I say it’s people who will do something useful with it and not just the community team!

Wethospu.6437:

By the way, do you think you still got time for approving stuff?

Absolutely, although I won’t be able to approve every record that comes through, but I didn’t think that was required.

Lord Kuru.3685:

I think you should be very specific when reporting about the desire for “new instanced, challenging PvE content,” that that means 5 man dungeon/fractal content and NOT Tequatl/SW/marionette content. I’m pretty sure when Anet speaks of challenging PvE content, they mean the latter and I think most people in this forum want more of the former.

Maybe not identical to the current dungeons, but certainly instanced and dungeon-like. Also to Zelhyn, I was definitely thinking closer to the Grawl fractal’s difficulty in terms of its boss for things like current dungeons and fractals. I also recognize that a lot of players do not like dungeon events like what is seen in the Aetherpath that simply draw out time and don’t require combat presence of mind to a great extent.

One thing I’ve seen in discussions so far is that 5-player isn’t necessarily required. After the raiding CDI, the idea of higher group-size instances was also highly discussed and there was a lot of support for something like an 8-man or a 10-man, but nothing much higher than that. I will probably talk about all of those possible formats for the first report.

Thanks for the warm welcome to the position, all!

Rising Dusk.2408:

Sins.4782:

Soo… which devs do they send your reports to?

I can’t actually share that information

hehe you already talk like one of them!

Just kididng, congratulations man and I hope the dungeon community get’s to see the effect of your actions in the game as sooner as possible!

Im actually very surprised we got our own specialist. But im very happy its you Rising. Good luck!

Also theres an interesting thread going on in general. Its a bit one sided with a huge amount of anti instanced players and pro purely open world. But it might be worth looking at as it does concern us.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Would-You-Like-10-Man-Raids-Poll/first

Rising Dusk.2408:

Hey everyone! …

So basically what you’re saying is…
you’re a nice guy… so..
My tyrannical reign can continue on this subforum.

lov u bb thx <3

Congratulations (to you, but also to us for getting you)! It’s cool that we’ll be able to trust that our suggestions are getting through to Anet. (Whether they do anything with them is, of course, a separate thing, but that has nothing to do with this.)

Congrats, and good luck I hope this program can make a difference, and that we might start seeing some developers willing to discuss issues with the community now that HoT is out of the bag.

You’ve been active here for a while, and your list of topics certainly covers the frequent issues. From what I’ve read about the forum specialist program, it’s still a one-way street (e.g. information goes to the devs, but we won’t hear anything back), and from what Gaile / Regina / Danicia have said, these issues have been brought to the development/design teams’ attention already.

So my question to you, and please understand that this is genuine curiosity and not snark:

How do you see the specialist program benefiting either side (players and ANet)? These issues are not new, and have been “forwarded to the devs” on multiple occasions without tangible results. Should we hope to see in-game changes, or at least open discussion, related to these issues?

We’ve been waiting a while for these problems to be addressed directly or indirectly, and plenty of feedback has flowed into ArenaNet about them. I’m curious how (or if) the forum specialist program intends to improve this situation, as it certainly appears that all-things-dungeon-related are so low priority that maintaining the status quo of neglect is the best we can hope for.

I understand that your position may not entitle you to the answers I seek. But since you’re closest to the team and by far the most likely to answer honestly, I’d still love to hear your impressions of how this program will help the dungeon community, even in an “unofficial” statement.

dlonie.6547:

So my question to you, and please understand that this is genuine curiosity and not snark:

How do you see the specialist program benefiting either side (players and ANet)? (…)

First, I hope this program can make a difference as well. I wouldn’t have signed up for it in the first place if I felt like it was wasted effort. The problem in the past is that the community team would look at threads without intimate knowledge of the community, dungeons, or fractals, try and decide what was important, and then communicate that to the actual GW2 developers and designers. This resulted in a mish-mash of things getting to the developers, which resulted historically in things like Aetherpath. Aetherpath, for context, has been poorly received by the community on the whole because of time-gating and puzzles that rely minimally on combat expertise and just drag things out.

Flash forward to the fractal CDI, and with heavy involvement in the community they were able to distill some good changes for things like the Dredge fractal. That took a huge amount of actual developer time, though, and while the CDIs are very effective, they’re unsustainable as a constant feed into what matters. That’s where this program comes in. Take someone who already knows the community and already has his or her finger on the pulse of what people want, have them serve as the “collector and reporter of things”, and then have them report to the developers. This, in principle, will result in valuable, distilled input going to the developers to make informed decisions based on the exact specifics, resulting in quality changes to the content in ways we actually want them.

Shiren.9532:

While we are all free to play as we want (provided others will play with us) ArenaNet is somewhat responsible for the game’s meta and a casual glance through the dungeon forums shows this popping up a lot. Personally I believe there is a clear imbalance in the dungeon meta that favours certain professions over others. Maybe with you’re new position you could work towards bringing all professions in line (or at least closer).

This is a very good point, and I agree. Originally, I was planning on leaving ‘dungeon profession balance’ as a topic that the (eventual) profession specialists, but I think reporting to ANet the specific dungeon PvE balance situation would be helpful in them being able to effectively react to that and see the bigger picture of how classes interact, rather than only seeing classes in a vacuum. I will definitely ensure it is included in my reports.

Shiren.9532:

Another thing I’d like to suggest it to consider who exactly makes up the “dungeon” community (and just as importantly, who currently doesn’t but maybe one day could). The list in the OP seems to suggest a hardcore fractal runner, someone who is chasing rare skins, looking to push their experience to the limits and wants even greater challenges. Casually puging high end fractals should reveal the majority of players are not in this boat. Speed clearers, high end fractal players, strict meta followers all make a small subsection of the group of players that would engage in dungeons. I think it’s worth looking at what is turning new players away from dungeons and what interests casual players about dungeons.

I agree with this as well. A few things in the list at the top do apply to the average dungeon runner, such as being kicked from groups unfairly and so forth (those topics are endemic to this community), but I will make sure that I report the issues faced both by the high-end player and the average player, because both groups are important to the success of instanced PvE.

I really do hope you are able to bring necromancers back into GW2. We are all counting on you Dusk! Godspeed and congratulations!

Rising Dusk.2408:

dlonie.6547:

So my question to you, and please understand that this is genuine curiosity and not snark:

How do you see the specialist program benefiting either side (players and ANet)? (…)

First, I hope this program can make a difference as well. I wouldn’t have signed up for it in the first place if I felt like it was wasted effort. The problem in the past is that the community team would look at threads without intimate knowledge of the community, dungeons, or fractals, try and decide what was important, and then communicate that to the actual GW2 developers and designers. This resulted in a mish-mash of things getting to the developers, which resulted historically in things like Aetherpath. Aetherpath, for context, has been poorly received by the community on the whole because of time-gating and puzzles that rely minimally on combat expertise and just drag things out.

Flash forward to the fractal CDI, and with heavy involvement in the community they were able to distill some good changes for things like the Dredge fractal. That took a huge amount of actual developer time, though, and while the CDIs are very effective, they’re unsustainable as a constant feed into what matters. That’s where this program comes in. Take someone who already knows the community and already has his or her finger on the pulse of what people want, have them serve as the “collector and reporter of things”, and then have them report to the developers. This, in principle, will result in valuable, distilled input going to the developers to make informed decisions based on the exact specifics, resulting in quality changes to the content in ways we actually want them.

content

See, I like Aetherpath. Mechanic heavy content is what we need. Puzzles and fights would add challenge more than just new bosses. Add mechanics to bosses that HAD to occur or the boss would win. Stacking in a corner is not depth nor challenging.

Rising Dusk.2408:

dlonie.6547:

So my question to you, and please understand that this is genuine curiosity and not snark:

How do you see the specialist program benefiting either side (players and ANet)? (…)

First, I hope this program can make a difference as well. I wouldn’t have signed up for it in the first place if I felt like it was wasted effort. The problem in the past is that the community team would look at threads without intimate knowledge of the community, dungeons, or fractals, try and decide what was important, and then communicate that to the actual GW2 developers and designers. This resulted in a mish-mash of things getting to the developers, which resulted historically in things like Aetherpath. Aetherpath, for context, has been poorly received by the community on the whole because of time-gating and puzzles that rely minimally on combat expertise and just drag things out.

Flash forward to the fractal CDI, and with heavy involvement in the community they were able to distill some good changes for things like the Dredge fractal. That took a huge amount of actual developer time, though, and while the CDIs are very effective, they’re unsustainable as a constant feed into what matters. That’s where this program comes in. Take someone who already knows the community and already has his or her finger on the pulse of what people want, have them serve as the “collector and reporter of things”, and then have them report to the developers. This, in principle, will result in valuable, distilled input going to the developers to make informed decisions based on the exact specifics, resulting in quality changes to the content in ways we actually want them.

Makes sense. I hope that we can achieve these goals.

The only thing I have to add (and I know I harp on this topic a lot), is that the reason the CDIs were able to achieve any success is that there is actual discussion happening in them. A dev is actively listening, engaging the community, and letting us know what they do (or don’t) like, what is (or isn’t) feasible, and how suggestions can fit into the larger picture. The refinement that occurs during this back-and-forth makes it possible to arrive at a decision that will satisfy (most) players and be doable from ArenaNet’s end.

Contrast this with the “We’re listening! But can’t talk.” approach we’ve had outside of CDIs— our ideas are often infeasible given ArenaNet’s resources/technology, and their adjusted implementations often defeats the purpose of the change. Take the party ownership change for a perfect example — it introduced griefing opportunities that the community (especially sellers) would have pointed out quickly, had there been any sort of discussion about it.

Whether such discussion happens directly with red posts or indirectly through a forum specialist, I believe it needs to happen if development efforts are going to be well received. I know there are policies that prevent you from commenting on whether information will be replied to (or even passed upstream), but I sincerely hope we will see some meaningful discussion happen as ArenaNet works to address issues as they arise.

Somewhat unrelated, but since it came up:
I also believe that the Aetherpath flop could have been avoided by involving the community after its release — we’ve pointed out why it is unpopular, but there have been no changes to try to improve the situation. I suppose this is a Human Resources issue on ArenaNet’s side, and I’d hope to see that rectified. Without people to do work on dungeons, I can’t see how any initiative can achieve success.

Good luck, mate. I look forward to seeing how this initiative plays out, and will do my best to help out in anyway I can.

Congrats! Looking forward to some positive changes.

I’m starving. This is too good.

cries in laughter

It’s good this forum got an experienced dungeon player as specialist. Imagine if it were someone who doesn’t run dungeons and who doesn’t understand stacking and skipping!

Rising Dusk.2408:

Wethospu.6437:

By the way, do you think you still got time for approving stuff?

Absolutely, although I won’t be able to approve every record that comes through, but I didn’t think that was required.

With a fancy title like that I obviously expect a lot more!

Anyways if devs are interested of doing some serious small scale content they should use the dungeon community much more. Test their stuff on us, get ideas from us, etc. At this point I could even do their work and design their encounters for free.

grats rising dusk. time to celebrate with grump party time.

http://iwantmoar.com/1870

Lord Kuru.3685:

It’s good this forum got an experienced dungeon player as specialist. Imagine if it were someone who doesn’t run dungeons and who doesn’t understand stacking and skipping!

It’s just not going to matter.

I actually feel sorry for the WvW specialist. Have you seen the welcome he got? I dont envy the task he has ahead of him.

Communication improvements are always good. And i trust Rising to do a good job communicating our feedback. The real question is whether the Devs actively take on the feedback given in the right way. But that is out of our hands and always has been. Atleast this way they are less likely to miss the core issues that concern us the most. It all depends on the devs in the end though.

spoj.9672:

I actually feel sorry for the WvW specialist. Have you seen the welcome he got? I dont envy the task he has ahead of him.

Communication improvements are always good. And i trust Rising to do a good job communicating our feedback.

No question, he will.

spoj.9672:

The real question is whether the Devs actively take on the feedback given in the right way.

They won’t.

I’d love to tell Dub to knock it off and give this program a chance, but….I honestly gotta agree with him here, unfortunately.

I wish I could have any hope for this program having any real effect on the game or ANet/player interactions, but ArenaNet has built themselves quite a reputation that is going to take a lot of effort to overcome. After seeing dungeons neglected for so long while unwanted, unneeded development efforts like the NPE were prioritized…it’s hard to believe ArenaNet even gives a flying squirrel about this part of their game.

Hope I’m wrong, but not counting on it. Again, Dusk — if there’s anything we can do to help, we’ll do as much as we can.

As we saw many moons ago when Regina broke our hearts — this community will put in all the effort we possibly can to improve the game and make their dungeons shine.

But will ArenaNet? Time will tell, but history says “no”. It’s hard to shake that feeling of “All is vain”

I just hope that forum specialists are properly compensated for doing a job that Anet has failed to do since ever.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Aetherpath, for context, has been poorly received by the community on the whole because of time-gating and puzzles that rely minimally on combat expertise and just drag things out.

I don’t think so. It might be a reason for more experienced dungeonrunners but most PUGs will be scared away because it’s too difficult. I like aether, since it’s one of the few dungeons which needs some kind of talking and coordinating players.
But some groups will fail at the oozes or will have a hard time at the clockheart, for example. Many/Most players in the dungeon forums are not the average player. Look at their guilds, names, knowledge. The speedrunning fraction might be the “top 1000 dungeon players”.
To get a better impression of different kind of players I recommend to PUG a lot.
It’s an advantage to know each side.

In my opinion there are at least two different kind of players: good player searching for a challenge – and players looking for fun/success/teamcontent.
GW2 offers not much teamcontent (only dungeons), so you will find those different playergroups in dungeons. I think it was a questionable decision to implement only dungeons as groupcontent – which results in players looking for some easy teamcontent entering dungeons and players looking for a challange. Try to balance it for both groups…

Imho you can see this conflict in others topics too. Have a look at those anti-zerk or trinity threads: they exist since release. Haven’t read them here, but in other forums I read players saying they want to play as a team and not “5 people solo”: play together, work as a team – not playing “standing near each other and thats it”.
Better groups will have some kind of trinity (might stacking, stealth – roles). PUGs with five warriors might have a smooth run but they experience GW2 in a different way (autoattack + 100b only should work in most dungeons).
A player starting with zerk-gear has to learn a lot, will die a lot – and he might get scared away from dungeons because of that.

If you scare away too many players (too difficult content – aether) there will be less dungeonplayers. Less active dungeons might result in Anet paying less attention to dungeons and focussing on SW-like content.
So it might be a good idea to think about content which offers challenging bosses – which can be easily but slowly defeated if you (for example) range them (SE3 – car).

“Elite Players” (like most here) can tell you a lot about challenging stuff, bugs, how to improve stuff – but keep in mind that there a lots of average skilled, bad or inexperienced players.

A long time ago I suggested to bring back GW1 style missions and teamskills. They don’t need to change anything at the current “highend-meta-gameplay”. Maybe a skill which adds strenght related to vita/toughness can improve the dmg of a low-dps group – but it won’t have an impact on zerker groups since they don’t have that much vita/toughness. Zerk should stay on the dps top – but skills like that can close the dps gap a bit. PS-War is a nice teamsupport, hammerguard can offer a lot of defense/stabilize a team: sharpen those teamsupport roles can help bad groups to have a more satisfying dungeon experience.

tl;dr: there are not only good players. Keep an eye on average or bad players and try to understand their point. I think it’s possible to bring both sides together, instead of playing them off against each other.

spoj.9672:

I actually feel sorry for the WvW specialist. Have you seen the welcome he got? I dont envy the task he has ahead of him.

Communication improvements are always good. And i trust Rising to do a good job communicating our feedback. The real question is whether the Devs actively take on the feedback given in the right way. But that is out of our hands and always has been. Atleast this way they are less likely to miss the core issues that concern us the most. It all depends on the devs in the end though.

Well the WvW forum got the equivalent of someone who’s run only a couple dungeons. Imagine someone like that as a specialist in this forum; what ideas might be forwarded to the devs? Pretty scary sounding.

I have as much faith in ArenaNet acknowledging our thoughts, suggestions and opinions as I do with the fact that they’ll fix Alphard’s bone wall.

But nevertheless, congrats on the title Rising Dusk ^^

Purple Miku.7032:

I have as much faith in ArenaNet acknowledging our thoughts, suggestions and opinions as I do with the fact that they’ll fix Alphard’s bone wall.

But nevertheless, congrats on the title Rising Dusk ^^

Thanks! I think the biggest hurdle is that I am going to be pushing for some kind of buy-in from the developers. We will see. I think fixing dungeon bugs is a place they could make a lot of progress in restoring faith with the community.

I personally think giving us new, hard, non gimmicky content with complex bosses would be the best thing to restore faith.

Yes, but that also requires the absolute highest developer time investment, which makes it an impossibly slow turn-around. I’m hopeful we’ll see something good for us in HoT, but if not there, then not for a long time yet.

But there’s also less (well, no) chance to mess up existing, working content.

cough Hodgins cough Tzark

Dub.1273:

But there’s also less (well, no) chance to mess up existing, working content.

cough Hodgins cough Tzark

So Dub, when can I see how do I make the AC p1 p2 p3 all-in-one trick?

Do you have an EU account? I’m busy with exams at the moment so speedruns won’t be easy to coordinate.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Yes, but that also requires the absolute highest developer time investment, which makes it an impossibly slow turn-around. I’m hopeful we’ll see something good for us in HoT, but if not there, then not for a long time yet.

I don’t think something like fixing bugs is going to do anything. Not that it’s bad — aside from introducing new bugs — but what’s needed is new content and no amount of bug fixing is going to convince people that new content is coming.

(But while you’re at it, what about getting Brie’s terminal to reset to 100% health if you die so you don’t have to lie there for a minute waiting for that to happen.)

Lord Kuru.3685:

I don’t think something like fixing bugs is going to do anything. Not that it’s bad — aside from introducing new bugs — but what’s needed is new content and no amount of bug fixing is going to convince people that new content is coming.

It probably won’t be enough, but it’d be something. I’m still hopeful that we’ll get something that blows us all away in HoT. fingers crossed

My main wants are better fractal rewards, new fractals and tiers, [b]aetherpath tweaks[b] and new content in HoT. Dungeon bugs are pretty minor issues for me but i wouldnt complain if they got a bit of attention.

I think pushing for aetherpath tweaks towards replayability is definitely something quite reasonable and should not be too much work for the devs. There was a lot of ideas in those feedback threads we made which we never got any news about. No idea if we can still see them somewhere or if Regina moved them somewhere hidden.

Can we please rework the exp reward from storymodes? The storymodes are terrible exp, at lvl 50 I get a little over 1 level from doing 3 storymodes (AC, CM, TA). They’re each more like 30-40% or something. It’d make more sense if gave 1 level Each (I think exp mode lvl can stay as it is – people do those for the tokens anyways).

Also would love to see fractal ascended rings being able to mystic forge or salvaged to asc materials too.

A start in restoring faith with absolutely zero effort would be giving us back the removed TA path.

Lendruil.9061:

A start in restoring faith with absolutely zero effort would be giving us back the removed TA path.

Speaking of restoring faith, this would be a really good gesture.

Yeah totally forgot to mention that. It would definitely make me very happy.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Lord Kuru.3685:

I don’t think something like fixing bugs is going to do anything. Not that it’s bad — aside from introducing new bugs — but what’s needed is new content and no amount of bug fixing is going to convince people that new content is coming.

It probably won’t be enough, but it’d be something. I’m still hopeful that we’ll get something that blows us all away in HoT. fingers crossed

Well hopefully something comes from that Raid CDI discussion. I particularly liked that talk about soft roles even if the discussion devoted into trinity/zerker non-sense eventually.