Guild Wars 2

I hope I’m not the only one that sees the twisted logic Anet seems to use in their design direction decisions once in a while, I feel it’s very detrimental to the game, if any Anet employees actually read this, please please please re-consider the way you look at things. And thank you for GW2. That said here are some examples.

Dynamic Events :

People aren’t doing the dynamic events (because they’re pretty boring/generic and aren’t rewarding)…. so Anet decides to add 40 more of the same thing. People continue ignoring them… Anet Logic : Stop making events I guess.

Instead of just adding more of the same boring hooplah, you should’ve instead went back and fixed what you had.

Charr Armor :

They’re not worried about fixing charr armor, because the population for that race is so small…. and it’s small because of the armor issues.

That’s similar to not giving medicine to a sick person, who’s health is rapidly declining because their health is rapidly declining anyway, and it’s rapidly declining because you’re not giving them medicine.

Spvp :

People want more game modes. Anet refuses because it will split up the already small pvp population. A large reason there is a small pvp population is because there’s only 1 game mode, more twisted logic.

I also forsee Anet’s logic dooming spvp soon : “People didn’t like our esport event (because the game isn’t ready for esport yet), I guess we’ll just give up on Spvp completely”. Instead of fixing the problem, I fear they will instead just give up on it.

The game needs to be fun and varied for everyone (including casual pvp’ers) first before you stuff it into the esports hole.

Farming :

People want to make money, but hate doing the same boring thing for it (there is only 1 current way to farm at any given time). Anet Logic : Nerf the current farming method to uselessness and introduce a new and equally mind-numbingly boring way to farm.

For example Gauntlet farming, was way too good for too long then nerfed to uselessness, then they introduce Clockwork zerg farming, insanely profitable as well, equally boring and mindless, soon that will disappear and be replaced with some just as bad again.

Instead, they should just made the rest of the game rewarding instead of just one single activity so there is variety in things to do if you feel like making decent money/loot.

I’m sure there are plenty more examples, but this is what I’ve scrounged up for now. Post more examples if you have some.

Knote.2904:

Dynamic Events :

If you look at the surveys done recently it seems that DEs are one of the things people like doing the most.

Knote.2904:

Charr Armor :

Not sure how you can be sure that low Charr pop is due to armor clipping.
Usually, it’s not a good idea to base one’s criticism on an assumption; since you like analogies, it would be like building a castle on unstable terrain.
Clipping is also very present on other races such Asura, but you see a ton of Asuras around, which pretty much proves this theory wrong.

Then again, a lot of modeling and texturing needs to happen to fix clipping; devs don’t simply hit a big red “fix all clipping” button.
While this is somewhat important to a few players, there are much more important things than a piece of your armor clipping into your toes.
I’d rather have those graphics creator make new maps and skins.

Knote.2904:

Spvp :

This is indeed true.
Everyone requests new modes, but Anet only gives new maps.
I guess they either don’t want to invest developing time into new modes, or it’s low on their priority.

Knote.2904:

Farming

Every single MMO “nerfs” farming exploits such as the Gauntlet. It’s expected.
Actually, I would be pretty mat at Anet if I went offline a month, they made an exploitable event and let everyone abuse it so that when I come back the economy is destroyed and I’m way behind everyone.
I want Anet to keep their eyes closely on those things.

As for farming, GW2 actually rewards you more for doing a bunch of different things than farming a single thing over and over; if you are into brainless farming I’d suggest Diablo 3.

I believe their twisted logic is a result of laziness and greed. They’re too busy trying to make money from their gem store, so they try to make easy fixes so it’s not too much work for them…same goes for when they nerf PvP builds in PvE as well when they could easily just have the skills less powerful in PvP.

the charr armor is pretty bad though :P

Red Falcon.8257:

Knote.2904:

Charr Armor :

Not sure how you can be sure that low Charr pop is due to armor clipping.
Usually, it’s not a good idea to base one’s criticism on an assumption; since you like analogies, it would be like building a castle on unstable terrain.
Clipping is also very present on other races such Asura, but you see a ton of Asuras around, which pretty much proves this theory wrong.

Actually theres not that many asuras. They’re only marginally more popular than Charr, probably due to their small size which people consider an advantage in pvp. According to Anet 16% are Asuras, 13% are Charr. Thus i don’t think it proves the claim is incorrect although i suspect it’s not correct anyway.

source: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2-the-first-year/

Red Falcon.8257:

Knote.2904:

Dynamic Events :

If you look at the surveys done recently it seems that DEs are one of the things people like doing the most.

Knote.2904:

Charr Armor :

Not sure how you can be sure that low Charr pop is due to armor clipping.
Usually, it’s not a good idea to base one’s criticism on an assumption; since you like analogies, it would be like building a castle on unstable terrain.
Clipping is also very present on other races such Asura, but you see a ton of Asuras around, which pretty much proves this theory wrong.

Then again, a lot of modeling and texturing needs to happen to fix clipping; devs don’t simply hit a big red “fix all clipping” button.
While this is somewhat important to a few players, there are much more important things than a piece of your armor clipping into your toes.
I’d rather have those graphics creator make new maps and skins.

Knote.2904:

Spvp :

This is indeed true.
Everyone requests new modes, but Anet only gives new maps.
I guess they either don’t want to invest developing time into new modes, or it’s low on their priority.

Knote.2904:

Farming

Every single MMO “nerfs” farming exploits such as the Gauntlet. It’s expected.
Actually, I would be pretty mat at Anet if I went offline a month, they made an exploitable event and let everyone abuse it so that when I come back the economy is destroyed and I’m way behind everyone.
I want Anet to keep their eyes closely on those things.

As for farming, GW2 actually rewards you more for doing a bunch of different things than farming a single thing over and over; if you are into brainless farming I’d suggest Diablo 3.

They let the guantlet “Exploit” if you wanna call it, go on for a long time, and allowed tons of people to abuse it, that’s part of the problem. The other problem is that they nerfed to near uselessness so it can’t be farmed AT ALL, except for some daily silver.

I totally disagree with you on farming variety, there’s usually only one really good way to farm at a time right now that’s champ farming and clockwork champ farming. I’m afraid they would go and nerf champ loot instead of buffing the other areas of the game.

My example of DE’s was talking about when Anet said they weren’t going to bother with events because people weren’t playing them.

Asura armor issues aren’t even close to as bad as Charr armor issues, armor on Asura is just small, tons of armor looks terrible on Charr because it’s just stretched over their model.

Here’s some links about charr issues :

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/races/charr/The-agony-of-Charr-armor-Long-read/page/2#post2660707

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/races/charr/A-net-dissapointed-in-lack-of-Charr

I personally also gave up on both my charr and asura because of armor and (asura weapon) issues.

Considering the “treadmill/drive” in this game is all about cosmetics, is it really surprising Charr is low pop?

Anet should test their kitten before they release anything.

/problemsolved

Zacchary.6183:

Anet should test their kitten before they release anything.

/problemsolved

Or let us test their kittens. =p

But that would ruin the “magic” they try to go for I guess.

Knote.2904:

Zacchary.6183:

Anet should test their kitten before they release anything.

/problemsolved

Or let us test their kittens. =p

But that would ruin the “magic” they try to go for I guess.

So long as testing gets done, I don’t care. I mean their ideas look good on paper but they never really think to put their ideas to practice. Not only will it save them the hassle of going back and fixing it 5 times, but it’ll give them more time to focus on polishing up the rest of the game.

No the charr are the lowest played races for many many more reasons than armor clipping. The amount of aesthetic mistakes made in their design is astounding, especially coming from a team of industry professionals.

Conncept.7638:

No the charr are the lowest played races for many many more aesthetic reasons than armor clipping. The amount of aesthetic mistakes made in their design is astounding, especially coming from a team of industry professionals.

I said Charr Armor Issues, that sort of umbrellas not only clipping issues but everything else that’s wrong with it. It is definately horrendous.

Knote.2904:

Conncept.7638:

No the charr are the lowest played races for many many more aesthetic reasons than armor clipping. The amount of aesthetic mistakes made in their design is astounding, especially coming from a team of industry professionals.

I said Charr Armor Issues, that sort of umbrellas not only clipping issues but everything else that’s wrong with it. It is definately horrendous.

Aesthetics does not solely mean armor. The Charr were designed to look ferocious and driven by emotion, yet at the same time cunning, logical, and ambitious. Arenanet failed to convey any of that in their design. Between the ridiculously exaggerated overbites, lack of facial detail and expressions, the slurred speech patterns, and the gravity-defying posture the Charr look stupid (literally), unthreatening, emotionless, and frankly… inbred, regardless of what armor they are wearing.

Conncept.7638:

Knote.2904:

Conncept.7638:

No the charr are the lowest played races for many many more aesthetic reasons than armor clipping. The amount of aesthetic mistakes made in their design is astounding, especially coming from a team of industry professionals.

I said Charr Armor Issues, that sort of umbrellas not only clipping issues but everything else that’s wrong with it. It is definately horrendous.

Aesthetics does not solely mean armor. The Charr were designed to look ferocious and driven by emotion, yet at the same time cunning, logical, and ambitious. Arenanet failed to convey any of that in their design. Between the ridiculously exaggerated overbites, lack of facial detail and expressions, the slurred speech patterns, and the gravity-defying posture the Charr look stupid (literally), unthreatening, emotionless, and frankly inbred, regardless of what armor they are wearing.

That’s because they didn’t even try to, besides cultural stuff.

Everything is made for humans then stretched over charr.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Knote.2904:

Conncept.7638:

Knote.2904:

Conncept.7638:

No the charr are the lowest played races for many many more aesthetic reasons than armor clipping. The amount of aesthetic mistakes made in their design is astounding, especially coming from a team of industry professionals.

I said Charr Armor Issues, that sort of umbrellas not only clipping issues but everything else that’s wrong with it. It is definately horrendous.

Aesthetics does not solely mean armor. The Charr were designed to look ferocious and driven by emotion, yet at the same time cunning, logical, and ambitious. Arenanet failed to convey any of that in their design. Between the ridiculously exaggerated overbites, lack of facial detail and expressions, the slurred speech patterns, and the gravity-defying posture the Charr look stupid (literally), unthreatening, emotionless, and frankly inbred, regardless of what armor they are wearing.

That’s because they didn’t even try to, besides cultural stuff.

Everything is made for humans then stretched over charr.

You’re still talking about the armor, he’s talking about the actual models and such.

You want to know why else, I find? At least in WvW people want to play asura due to a potential size advantage – smaller and harder to spot rather than large, broad, and easy to see moving. I had it explained to me a couple times.

Oh my bad, I actually like the charr design though, the armor is absolutely terrible though which is why I gave up on a charr.

Knote.2904:

Conncept.7638:

Knote.2904:

Conncept.7638:

No the charr are the lowest played races for many many more aesthetic reasons than armor clipping. The amount of aesthetic mistakes made in their design is astounding, especially coming from a team of industry professionals.

I said Charr Armor Issues, that sort of umbrellas not only clipping issues but everything else that’s wrong with it. It is definately horrendous.

Aesthetics does not solely mean armor. The Charr were designed to look ferocious and driven by emotion, yet at the same time cunning, logical, and ambitious. Arenanet failed to convey any of that in their design. Between the ridiculously exaggerated overbites, lack of facial detail and expressions, the slurred speech patterns, and the gravity-defying posture the Charr look stupid (literally), unthreatening, emotionless, and frankly inbred, regardless of what armor they are wearing.

That’s because they didn’t even try to, besides cultural stuff.

Everything is made for humans then stretched over charr.

You’re still talking about the armor, he’s talking about the actual models and such.

You want to know why else, I find? At least in WvW people want to play asura due to a potential size advantage – smaller and harder to spot rather than large, broad, and easy to see moving. I had it explained to me a couple times.

When ANET says we listened to the players they really mean: We looked up the graphs stating x amount of people did y in z time. So lets try and please those players.

Its like this is not even a game company any more. Their original game has been completely trashed by such horrible design decisions over the course of the last year.

Where the core values at game launch were:
Fun, build variety, storytelling, action combat

They are now:
Progression, time gating, farming, zerg fests

I agree to the fact that anet’s biggest fail is not having a wider range of beta testers or more, a PUBLIC TEST SERVER. And with bi monthly releases, they’re not going to get enough time and feedback I reckon even if the contents were made months prior. I never get why Anet goes for the lazy path of “let’s release it full of bugs and we’ll let the real players find out what’s wrong”. Doesn’t that give you company a huge bad rep? A company which fails at every content they release because they couldn’t be bother doing appropriate amount of testing on it.

Nobody does pvp becsuse the only thing you will see is a team of.3 necros and.2 rangers ( all smallest asurans.btw)

The Eternal Grace.3157:

I believe their twisted logic is a result of laziness and greed. They’re too busy trying to make money from their gem store, so they try to make easy fixes so it’s not too much work for them…same goes for when they nerf PvP builds in PvE as well when they could easily just have the skills less powerful in PvP.

lol They are about as far off from a greedy and lazy game company as one can be. If you want to see greed, underhanded tactics, bad service; check out nexderp (games are fun and all, but I have no words to really describe how annoying? they are… it’s just nexon where you get nexowned; heck their company name itself has become synonymous with just poor service lol) Nexon puts rng in your rng so can gamble on your gamble (seriously you have to wade through sooooo much rng with pretty much every one of their games)… =_=’

No, Anet does a fair job when running their games. They don’t overdo the cash shop (although they certainly push the advertisements about it on you enough at times lol), but it’s fairly priced for most things and there isn’t anything about it that feels compulsive to make the most out of game play. Best of all you actually get updates on a regular basis.

They do need to work on fixing things including the combat in game; there is just way too much spamming going on in game. They need to update the animations so that they all have proper telegraphy (proper wind up animations and such). They also need to get rid of that random delay you have when you use a skill and just build it into the freaking animation already like any decent action combat game. Also, doing something like having more skills rely on the players endurance would help with the skill spam (might have to decrease the amount of endurance dodge uses depending on the extent skills would use this).

Also, contrary to what many people may say; GW2 isn’t a true action combat game. It’s more of a hyrbid of old school mmo and action (then again any mmo that has anything close to point-click/tab targeting is “old school” in my mind lol). The only real action element they have in game is an active dodge (and I guess no “caste bars” would be considered to a minor extent).

People don’t choose Char or Asuran because the general base players prefer being Human or Human-like. Look at other MMOs. You’ll notice the same trend in those games as well.

sinzer.4018:

Red Falcon.8257:

Knote.2904:

Charr Armor :

Not sure how you can be sure that low Charr pop is due to armor clipping.
Usually, it’s not a good idea to base one’s criticism on an assumption; since you like analogies, it would be like building a castle on unstable terrain.
Clipping is also very present on other races such Asura, but you see a ton of Asuras around, which pretty much proves this theory wrong.

Actually theres not that many asuras. They’re only marginally more popular than Charr, probably due to their small size which people consider an advantage in pvp. According to Anet 16% are Asuras, 13% are Charr. Thus i don’t think it proves the claim is incorrect although i suspect it’s not correct anyway.

source: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2-the-first-year/

We aren’t sure when those stats were taken either, i personally see far more Asuras now than i did say 5 months ago, also that math in those percentages are off it only makes 99% what happened to 1%?

Dante.1508:

sinzer.4018:

Red Falcon.8257:

Knote.2904:

Charr Armor :

Not sure how you can be sure that low Charr pop is due to armor clipping.
Usually, it’s not a good idea to base one’s criticism on an assumption; since you like analogies, it would be like building a castle on unstable terrain.
Clipping is also very present on other races such Asura, but you see a ton of Asuras around, which pretty much proves this theory wrong.

Actually theres not that many asuras. They’re only marginally more popular than Charr, probably due to their small size which people consider an advantage in pvp. According to Anet 16% are Asuras, 13% are Charr. Thus i don’t think it proves the claim is incorrect although i suspect it’s not correct anyway.

source: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2-the-first-year/

We aren’t sure when those stats were taken either, i personally see far more Asuras now than i did say 5 months ago, also that math in those percentages are off it only makes 99% what happened to 1%?

Probably rounding.

The remaining 1% are Mursaat.

Knote.2904:

Spvp :

People want more game modes. Anet refuses because it will split up the already small pvp population. A large reason there is a small pvp population is because there’s only 1 game mode, more twisted logic.

I also forsee Anet’s logic dooming spvp soon : “People didn’t like our esport event (because the game isn’t ready for esport yet), I guess we’ll just give up on Spvp completely”. Instead of fixing the problem, I fear they will instead just give up on it.

The game needs to be fun and varied for everyone (including casual pvp’ers) first before you stuff it into the esports hole.

As a business, to increase your revenue you should invest in potential. For lots of businesses, this potential equals a risk because it’s innovative and you’re unsure if its going to work. Anet doesn’t even invest in Pvp, while it’s proven to have a great potential, and not so much a risk if you look at amount of pvp’ers in the beginning of the game.

Gw2 pvp has been a sad story.

Knote.2904:

Dynamic Events :

People aren’t doing the dynamic events (because they’re pretty boring/generic and aren’t rewarding)…. so Anet decides to add 40 more of the same thing. People continue ignoring them… Anet Logic : Stop making events I guess.

Instead of just adding more of the same boring hooplah, you should’ve instead went back and fixed what you had.

I don’t know about anyone else but this one has been bothering me for a while.

I actually wanted to go and find and try out the new events. But as far as I can tell the only information we got was that there were 40 of them. I couldn’t go and try them even though I wanted to because I didn’t know where to look or what to look for. Even if I found an event I hadn’t seen before I had no idea if it was new or if I just hadn’t been there at the right time before.

As far as I can tell everyone else who was interested was in the same situation. Even the wiki couldn’t record which were new because there hadn’t been time to record all the ones already in the game so no one knew which of the ones missing pages were new and which just hadn’t been written up yet.

And then Anet somehow took this as a sign that no one was interested and scrapped the idea of adding more events.

Sollith.3502:

lol They are about as far off from a greedy and lazy game company as one can be. If you want to see greed, underhanded tactics, bad service; check out nexderp (games are fun and all, but I have no words to really describe how annoying? they are… it’s just nexon where you get nexowned; heck their company name itself has become synonymous with just poor service lol) Nexon puts rng in your rng so can gamble on your gamble (seriously you have to wade through sooooo much rng with pretty much every one of their games)… =_=’

You might want to Google Nexon and NCSoft.

Conncept.7638:

Knote.2904:

Conncept.7638:

No the charr are the lowest played races for many many more aesthetic reasons than armor clipping. The amount of aesthetic mistakes made in their design is astounding, especially coming from a team of industry professionals.

I said Charr Armor Issues, that sort of umbrellas not only clipping issues but everything else that’s wrong with it. It is definately ho

rrendous.

Aesthetics does not solely mean armor. The Charr were designed to look ferocious and driven by emotion, yet at the same time cunning, logical, and ambitious. Arenanet failed to convey any of that in their design. Between the ridiculously exaggerated overbites, lack of facial detail and expressions, the slurred speech patterns, and the gravity-defying posture the Charr look stupid (literally), unthreatening, emotionless, and frankly… inbred, regardless of what armor they are wearing.

I think the female charr models displays those pretty well, male models…. much to be worked on.

SonicTHI.3217:

When ANET says we listened to the players they really mean: We looked up the graphs stating x amount of people did y in z time. So lets try and please those players.

Its like this is not even a game company any more. Their original game has been completely trashed by such horrible design decisions over the course of the last year.

Where the core values at game launch were:
Fun, build variety, storytelling, action combat

They are now:
Progression, time gating, farming, zerg fests

True. There was a blog post before release talking about how ArenaNet defined success, considering that GW2 does not have a number of subscribers in which to base it; the conclusion of the blog was that success could be measured on how fun the game was.

That was a falsehood. We have seen multiple times ArenaNet mentioning how they saw a given piece of content as successful if a lot of people played it. This is a considerably different metric – it can show that content that a lot of people grind, farm and exploit is a huge success, even if those same people don’t see it as being fun.

IMO, that’s what happened. ArenaNet saw that the best dynamic events in the game take a lot of work to create, and are one of the least played features in GW2. They saw that the personal storyline was something very expensive (all those voice actors are very, VERY expensive) yet it’s proportionally empty considering the rest of the game. And then they saw how the content that is the easiest to make – grind – happens to be the most popular. So, they chose the logical path – instead of trying to make a good game, ArenaNet decided to do the same thing all other MMORPGs do and make a grind-based game. Hence all the grind-based content we have been receiving, with more to come soon (ascended weapons and etc).

I don’t really know who’s at fault. ArenaNet, for giving up artistic integrity (I don’t expect most people here to understand what is that) in order to make easy money? The farmers, grinders, addicts and exploiters, for flocking to a game that was originally meant for a different target audience? Said target audience, for simply not playing enough of the “fun” content in the game in order to show ArenaNet how the better content could also be the most played content?

Probably all of the above.

Erasculio.2914:

True. There was a blog post before release talking about how ArenaNet defined success, considering that GW2 does not have a number of subscribers in which to base it; the conclusion of the blog was that success could be measured on how fun the game was.

I actually saved that blog post and copied the text to the wiki:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Is_it_fun

As for Nexon. Not only do they own a lot of NCsoft, the monetization manager of ANET is a former Nexon employee. Just so you people know where all the RNG comes from.

SonicTHI.3217:

I actually saved that blog post and copied the text to the wiki:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Is_it_fun

Nice job. I’m surprised the wiki admins haven’t deleted it yet, though.

And funny to read this quote…

ArenaNet

He didn’t start in QA, but Eric “The Commissar of Common Sense” Flannum deserves a shout out for helping make all of this possible by building a design culture that lets us chase fun!

…And now I understand why Eric Flannum isn’t Lead Designer anymore. For the records, he has been replaced by Isaiah Cartwright, who worked on the economy and reward systems before release; and that is rather telling of ArenaNet’s priorities.

^that explains why there’s that iconic Nexon trademark of a RNG box in the game then. Well not really because that’s in every F2P.

Whoever this Crystin Cox guy is though, hes pretty bad at his job because in terms of the cashshop on its own, there’s literally nothing appealing in there.

Erasculio.2914:

SonicTHI.3217:

When ANET says we listened to the players they really mean: We looked up the graphs stating x amount of people did y in z time. So lets try and please those players.

Its like this is not even a game company any more. Their original game has been completely trashed by such horrible design decisions over the course of the last year.

Where the core values at game launch were:
Fun, build variety, storytelling, action combat

They are now:
Progression, time gating, farming, zerg fests

True. There was a blog post before release talking about how ArenaNet defined success, considering that GW2 does not have a number of subscribers in which to base it; the conclusion of the blog was that success could be measured on how fun the game was.

That was a falsehood. We have seen multiple times ArenaNet mentioning how they saw a given piece of content as successful if a lot of people played it. This is a considerably different metric – it can show that content that a lot of people grind, farm and exploit is a huge success, even if those same people don’t see it as being fun.

IMO, that’s what happened. ArenaNet saw that the best dynamic events in the game take a lot of work to create, and are one of the least played features in GW2. They saw that the personal storyline was something very expensive (all those voice actors are very, VERY expensive) yet it’s proportionally empty considering the rest of the game. And then they saw how the content that is the easiest to make – grind – happens to be the most popular. So, they chose the logical path – instead of trying to make a good game, ArenaNet decided to do the same thing all other MMORPGs do and make a grind-based game. Hence all the grind-based content we have been receiving, with more to come soon (ascended weapons and etc).

I don’t really know who’s at fault. ArenaNet, for giving up artistic integrity (I don’t expect most people here to understand what is that) in order to make easy money? The farmers, grinders, addicts and exploiters, for flocking to a game that was originally meant for a different target audience? Said target audience, for simply not playing enough of the “fun” content in the game in order to show ArenaNet how the better content could also be the most played content?

Probably all of the above.

There is nothing wrong with farming and grinding. Even exploiting is going to happen no matter what game you make.

It comes down to bad game design for not compensating for that.

The unrewarding “fun” content you’re talking about is fun the first couple of times, it’s not that amazing to begin with, that is part of the problem, and if it’s not rewarding either then of course it will be left in the dust.

You can’t just make something and say “oh well it’s kinda fun that’s good enough right?”, unless it’s the most well designed fun thing with a lot of replayability (like GOOD pvp) then it’s eventually going to be ignored w/o rewards, that’s just how it is.

So I put the blame on the designers, not the players.