Guild Wars 2

Is there some sort of internal road map for development? As far as I can tell, the development unit gets specific quarterly directives on what the business side needs (ie, focus on new box sales) and just does that for the remainder of the quarter. Of course, I know there are large gaps to this story, but ANet has not given me faith that anything other than the above strategy is how they approach Guild Wars 2’s future. Is there a longer term framework at work for growing Guild Wars 2, both in terms of its game world and its player base?

Planetside 2, for example, released a public road mapping forum quite early in its development which helped to massage user expectations, but also helped to make sure the game was connected with its community. While there has been some disappointment over the pace at which new content is coming out, they seem to be doing relatively well with a fairly public and transparent approach. (Here is a link for those that are curious: https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?forums/roadmap.59/) This allows the game to actually show users the kinds of progress they are making in terms of development as well as give users a general sense of where the game is looking to head. Of course, these roadmap posts for PS2 have raised expectations (and perhaps sometimes unreasonably), but the system has been great to make sure that many of the stakeholders for the game’s success at least feel like they are being heard.

As far as Guild Wars 2 is concerned, the community has no idea what is down the pipe at all, or even what ANet considers to be development objectives in both the near term and long term. There is incredible excitement and energy in the Guild Wars 2 community, but it is currently not being harnessed well by your public relations team at all – which relates to the fundamental problem of development and progress. The game has not seemingly moved forward in any direction for veteran players and there are no plans on the horizon to keep us at all engaged. There was a job posting for a Raid designer recently, and everyone went nuts. The CDI for raids is coming up, but CDIs really don’t mean anything, it seems. There is no stated goal to the CDIs other than to try and get a pulse on the community. The expectation management your community team does is non-existent. So we see a raiding CDI and the job post and we think “HOLY kitten RAID CONTENT SOON!” Rather, all it would take is a simple, vague timeline a, la: “We do plan on adding end game content, which is why we have/will hire/d a raid designer. We expect the preliminary stages of raid content planning to be underway by Q2 of 2015 with tangible end game content being released in Q1-2016/Q2-2016. This timeline is, of course, subject to change based on the challenges we will face along the way.” This way, your player base knows, vaguely, what is coming down the pipeline and (I know this is dangerous), can hold you accountable for delivery. We want the game to be a success as much as you do, but you have to give us something to work with.

As it stands, I feel that Guild Wars 2 is no longer making any productive progress and I do not see much from ANet to the contrary.

I should add, an element of PS2’s road mapping that is completely missing in GW2’s CDIs is any tangible progress or timeline. In short: CDIs lack concreteness that PS2’s roadmap has.

Notice how all of the posts in the roadmap forum have a month in which the team plans on embarking on those specific challenges. Guild Wars 2 CDI posts are nebulous in that regard and fail to provide a sense that the team is focusing on specific issues. I should also mention that the scale of the roadmap posts in PS2 have been retuned. A lot of the older roadmap posts had timelines much longer than the ones currently on the table, and also had more ambitious changes laid out.

It is hard to articulate the difference, but the roadmap posts for PS2 seem to be much more tangible than the Guild Wars 2 CDI threads. This, I think, heavily relates to the amount of energy I perceive to be invested in the CDI threads relative to the roadmap threads in PS2. To be sure, SOE drives the conversations in the Roadmap posts by putting up what they consider to be major issues in the game, but let the community provide feedback and suggest changes. For CDIs, ANet does not seem to drive the conversation, but rather provide general parameters for a broad and nebulous discussion.

In effect, a roadmap-like feature would force the development team at ANet to really focus on concrete problems, rather than blow smoke up the GW2 community’s butt.

Yes, there is a roadmap.

No, you can’t see it.

I was actually gonna say the exact same thing Timmy just said…
There is a roadmap, but they’re not aloud to talk to us about it, because of spoilers in the story… (Quite literally the excuse presented from one dev)

Actually, my guess is that it’s a policy set by Mike O’Brien. The decision was made at a level higher than Colin.

they actually had one for 2013 and then didn’t deliver what they said they would,
pvp ladders and seasons, regular new skills and traits etc.
don’t expect another roadmap.

Roadmap is greed, lackluster new content, and lack of communication.

It’s a shame, I think Anet could do much better on the communication front, but hey – I’m just a player.

You’ll never see a roadmap like that because the A.net communication policy is not to talk about speculation on what they might be doing but only on things that are completed and ready for consumer consumption aka release.

I was honestly thinking of enlisting the help of other frequent forum members to put together a large, updating road map based on player input, but then I remembered that I’m lazy.

Serelisk.6573:

I was honestly thinking of enlisting the help of other frequent forum members to put together a large, updating road map based on player input, but then I remembered that I’m lazy.

This wouldn’t be a roadmap it would be a wish list, and most likely a completely unrealistic and generally dumb one at that.

Zaklex.6308:

You’ll never see a roadmap like that because the A.net communication policy is not to talk about speculation on what they might be doing but only on things that are completed and ready for consumer consumption aka release.

And players like us don’t see any direction the game is going to. It doesn’t help that they massively oversell the Living Story content as well.

timmyf.1490:

Yes, there is a roadmap.

No, you can’t see it.

Hey – Get in line!

A roadmap would be too confusing

‘We decided that a map is something which is too confusing for new players to read, so we decided to replace it with a blank page instead.’