Guild Wars 2

This is just a copy/edits added in of this reddit post

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3v3hzc/anet_you_need_to_be_better_than_this_to_your/

I am sure I am not the only one who has broken down and somewhat has lost my joy of playing GW2, is tired of the kitten Anet is pulling as of late, and is sitting here watching our dream of what we expected slowly fade.

HoT IS LACKLUSTER

I like many had high hopes for HoT. But like many I am somewhat disappointed in what we got. There are good things about it, but to have major bugs that have been reported, especially the ones that have stopped legendary progression, as well as meta event progression is a slap to the face of a community that has invested so much in you Anet.

FORCED OBSOLESCENCE OF CONTENT

The dungeon reward nerf was stupid. Plain and simple. I was not a fan of dungeons, but with the plenty of players who enjoyed them. You just spit in their faces. Same goes for fractals at this point. Why are you trying to force your players to play content they might not want to? As many have stated this goes against your principal of “Play your way.” As mentioned on reddit, it is because dungeons made gold out of thin air, but so does SW, so does farming rich ore nodes.

STOP WITH THE ESPORTS

http://i.imgur.com/kxbGKG5.jpg ¹

Take a look at that screenshot from Twitch. You are straight up irrelevant. I am not the only one who states this. A friend of mine from high school works for twitch, and got me in touch with a rep from goodgame.gg For those who don’t know who they are, they connect brands with streamers/teams in eSports. The company I work for wanted to sponsor a streamer/team and the rep flat out told us to avoid MMOs like the plague. They are pretty much the single worst investment you can make. You guys as brought up by the community don’t even do at least monthly balance patches. So take the money you’re throwing at eSports and use it to hire talent that will fix your game. I can even provide proof of my connects to skeptical people. Just PM me.

LACK OF COMMUNICATION/TRANSPARENCY

Hands down out of all the games I have played. You guys have close to the least amount of communication with the community. We have to depend on people like Dulfy(and thank you for all your work Dulfy along with everyone else who datamines), to have any clue what to expect. All I feel we ever see anymore is announcements on things you want us to spend money on. Fix the major bugs, work on major features your community has asked for.(Colorblind Mode). Scratch our backs and we will scratch yours. But for now I urge the community to speak with your wallet and not buy anything/cut your spending on gems. F2P players don’t buy the expansion. If you REALLY want it wait for it to go on sale. The visual changes you made this patch should have been something you asked the community about.

FOCUSING ON MONETARY GAINS OVER MAJOR BUGS/FUN

You guys have been churning out new weapon skins, glider skins, outfits quickly for the past month, but yet MAJOR bugs have gone unfixed despite being repeated on reddit, and the forums. We all understand GW2 is a business, and you want to make money. You know how great companies rake in the cash? They take care of their community. As stated above, focus more on fixing issues and we will in turn pay you back by buying gems. I promise you. Taking care of customers always resorts in gains 100%. I know designers are not coders, but have them take a break to work on other cool stuff.

TOO MANY DIRECTIONS AT ONCE

Now this might be my own personal opinion, and I realize I may be the only one who thinks this, buy I feel that Anet is trying to go in too many directions at once. They put in raids, now want to fix WvW, but at the same time want to push sPvP. Pick one thing Anet ONE THING to do and stick with it, instead of a bunch of things you have no idea what the hell you’re doing. I am not saying only choose one game mode forever, but if you want to overhaul WvW. Focus just on that so it is great.

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”

“Vision without execution is just hallucination.”

“A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”

-Henry Ford

TL;DR Anet we love you, but you have to admit you have been pretty kittenty to your community as of late. We know you can be better, we all want you to be better. Just communicate with us more, be transparent, and listen to us. Profits will come by doing that. More than you can imagine. “Speak not just to speak, but to be heard.”-Redditor on original post.

Only ANet knows how many are playing in which maps or mode of the game. I see lots playing in what ever map I go to. Even in WvW I see lots of people playing. I am enjoying all of the game, yes even Heart of Thorns. I just play to have fun and if I wasn’t having fun I wouldn’t play it and would just find a new game but I am having fun and nothing so far is making me want to stop playing.

You may think less are playing but only ANet knows for sure.

Agreed. The game has lots of stuff going on all the time and I really appreciate how I can always find something to do, but the lack of communication from Anet is astounding. We all want to see some specificity or at least a note saying “We are aware of this issue and are working on it” instead of the multitude of problems that go completely unaddressed, in some cases for years.

I understand that the devs have limited time. I understand that they are working hard and they appreciate it.

But for the love of Rytlock, don’t treat us like we don’t exist. Don’t ignore the people who care enough about the game to try to have discussions about ways we would like to see improvements. Be involved with us as a community!

This post is ridiculous.

A screenshot of twitch viewership when no tournament or the like is on is so inconsequential. As is some laughable anecdote from your ‘friend from highschool’. What would be more concrete would be sPvP player activity statistics, which Anet has come out and said is the fastest growing section of the game. The money in the tournaments further grows it, and acts as marketing.

Staff working on glider skins are not the same that work on game bugs.

There’s some real irony in this call for more communication. That communication goes both ways. If Anet have to respond to player input I wouldnt expect them to do it for posts like this, which are long unsubstantiated rants. Responding to a post like this would be a waste of Dev resources and time, not pushing esports, not designing skins, not developing the game in many directions at once.

OP, that was actually well said. It wasn’t an uninformed, regurgitated anti-GW2 rant like pretty much every “Manifesto!! GW2 is dying!!” thread that has popped up recently.

I agree on many of your points, and this is coming from a pretty big GW2 fan.

HoT lackluster: I’ve not really spent enough time in HoT zones to have experienced any of these major bugs. But I understand they exist and, honestly, Anet has been pretty notorious for taking excessive amounts of time to fix bugs, if they even ever get fixed. Some say that they won’t do patches for one thing here and there, but rather wait for a large number of items to be fixed and then release a patch. If that’s the case it needs to stop. That method has built a terrible reputation. I don’t think any player would care having a tiny update every day if it meant some bug was addressed. If that isn’t the reason then I dunno what to say. Pick a team of people, give them a list, and give them a deadline.

Obsolescence: Disagree fractals should be listed in obsolescence category. It’s like the most popular thing right now haha. But I agree it was a really odd decision to nerf dungeon rewards. I get you want to shift focus, but why reduce the rewards for a game type that still had fans? Like why ? Finding a dungeon group takes forever now, if you find one at all.

eSports: I agree MMOs have never really been in the eSports scene, but I believe they wanted to give it a shot. Someone has to be an innovator. It’s still early on, but in general it’s an uphill battle. Accessing PvP in an MMO for eSports is too much of a commitment. Even if the game is F2P. Most other eSports have a very low barrier to entry. Want to play some LoL and never played before? Go download it and you can jump in instantly, each hero has very few abilities, you can get good quickly, but takes time to master.

Want to play GW2 PvP and never played before? Download it and make 9 different characters and then learn the far more complex combat system and 40 or however many skills per class this game has. Plus their player and audience pool is already very niche compared to every other major eSport.

Note: It’s surprisingly close to Smash Bros. on that Twitch list, which, I think we can all agree, is the greatest fighting game in existence. So that’s something.

Lack of Communication: Yea, I agree. They are pretty low on the transparency/communication front. I mean, whatever your people tell Dulfy is what you should be telling us on your own official forums. You obviously have the information!

Focus on Monetary: Here I disagree a bit. I don’t believe making monetary items and fixing bugs are mutually exclusive. I’m personally fine with the level of cosmetic crap they keep making. I feel that even if they stopped making cosmetic stuff, that bugs wouldn’t be fixed any faster. I think they are simply poor at implementing bug fixes in a timely manner (perhaps a separate team?), which is something they should work on. Keep that sparkly crap coming, though!

Too many directions: I feel they have a relatively small development team, which makes trying to focus on each area simultaneously harder and slower. I do think, however, that they can focus on one for a while, then move on to the next. The problem is they seem to release things when they’re mostly done, but not totally done. Which is fine, I suppose, but they either never finish them or take inordinate amounts of time to finish them.

Still love the game though haha.

omgdracula.6345:

This is just a copy/edits added in of this reddit post

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3v3hzc/anet_you_need_to_be_better_than_this_to_your/

I am sure I am not the only one who has broken down and somewhat has lost my joy of playing GW2, is tired of the kitten Anet is pulling as of late, and is sitting here watching our dream of what we expected slowly fade.

HoT IS LACKLUSTER

I like many had high hopes for HoT. But like many I am somewhat disappointed in what we got. There are good things about it, but to have major bugs that have been reported, especially the ones that have stopped legendary progression, as well as meta event progression is a slap to the face of a community that has invested so much in you Anet.

FORCED OBSOLESCENCE OF CONTENT

The dungeon reward nerf was stupid. Plain and simple. I was not a fan of dungeons, but with the plenty of players who enjoyed them. You just spit in their faces. Same goes for fractals at this point. Why are you trying to force your players to play content they might not want to? As many have stated this goes against your principal of “Play your way.” As mentioned on reddit, it is because dungeons made gold out of thin air, but so does SW, so does farming rich ore nodes.

STOP WITH THE ESPORTS

http://i.imgur.com/kxbGKG5.jpg ¹

Take a look at that screenshot from Twitch. You are straight up irrelevant. I am not the only one who states this. A friend of mine from high school works for twitch, and got me in touch with a rep from goodgame.gg For those who don’t know who they are, they connect brands with streamers/teams in eSports. The company I work for wanted to sponsor a streamer/team and the rep flat out told us to avoid MMOs like the plague. They are pretty much the single worst investment you can make. You guys as brought up by the community don’t even do at least monthly balance patches. So take the money you’re throwing at eSports and use it to hire talent that will fix your game. I can even provide proof of my connects to skeptical people. Just PM me.

LACK OF COMMUNICATION/TRANSPARENCY

Hands down out of all the games I have played. You guys have close to the least amount of communication with the community. We have to depend on people like Dulfy(and thank you for all your work Dulfy along with everyone else who datamines), to have any clue what to expect. All I feel we ever see anymore is announcements on things you want us to spend money on. Fix the major bugs, work on major features your community has asked for.(Colorblind Mode). Scratch our backs and we will scratch yours. But for now I urge the community to speak with your wallet and not buy anything/cut your spending on gems. F2P players don’t buy the expansion. If you REALLY want it wait for it to go on sale. The visual changes you made this patch should have been something you asked the community about.

FOCUSING ON MONETARY GAINS OVER MAJOR BUGS/FUN

You guys have been churning out new weapon skins, glider skins, outfits quickly for the past month, but yet MAJOR bugs have gone unfixed despite being repeated on reddit, and the forums. We all understand GW2 is a business, and you want to make money. You know how great companies rake in the cash? They take care of their community. As stated above, focus more on fixing issues and we will in turn pay you back by buying gems. I promise you. Taking care of customers always resorts in gains 100%. I know designers are not coders, but have them take a break to work on other cool stuff.

TOO MANY DIRECTIONS AT ONCE

Now this might be my own personal opinion, and I realize I may be the only one who thinks this, buy I feel that Anet is trying to go in too many directions at once. They put in raids, now want to fix WvW, but at the same time want to push sPvP. Pick one thing Anet ONE THING to do and stick with it, instead of a bunch of things you have no idea what the hell you’re doing. I am not saying only choose one game mode forever, but if you want to overhaul WvW. Focus just on that so it is great.

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”

“Vision without execution is just hallucination.”

“A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”

-Henry Ford

TL;DR Anet we love you, but you have to admit you have been pretty kittenty to your community as of late. We know you can be better, we all want you to be better. Just communicate with us more, be transparent, and listen to us. Profits will come by doing that. More than you can imagine. “Speak not just to speak, but to be heard.”-Redditor on original post.

Some of this sounds good in practice it’s well-worded and not a drivel of complaint, however many in this is just out right wrong.

Re Dungeons – They nerfed the GOLD reward only. How many people did dungeons because they enjoyed them compared to how many did them because they got significant gold for limited investment is the real question. There are still many reasons to do dungeons if you enjoy them, there are tons of rewards unique and tied to them. They just didn’t want people flooding the economy with the liquid gold from dungeons, it was one of the only places to get direct gold. People didn’t do dungeons for fun, because dungeons are still there and to be honest the rewards are still better than current fractal ones. (this might change when they update the re balance of fractal rewards).

RE HoT Content – I don’t agree with this at all. I love HoT, I love what it brought to the game and I have already sunk hundreds of hours of my free time into doing it and I still don’t have all the achievements or things, and it just got better with Raids (only beated VG personally), and the PvP League. This is why it’s subjective.

Re Cosmetics over Bug Fixes: This is VERY short sighted. People that make the cosmetic items and the like are ARTISTS. They are not Developers they aren’t programmers. No one does it all. Cosmetics and sales are INDEPENDENT of programming. Further, bugs aren’t always easy fixes, and it is evidenced by the amount of patches we’ve gotten since the update that they are working hard to fix what they can as fast as they can. You CANNOT at any time test for a live environment. ANet tests their updates, we know they do we’ve been allowed to help test in betas and have seen results directly from that. But there is no way to mimic the live environment in the testing one. It may work fine in testing and then break when its pushed live. This is the way of online games. Yes, it sucks, no one is denying this. But bug fixes have nothing to do with cosmetic items at all. They are putting off fixing bugs to sell you things.

ESports – Why should they stop? It’s working, it’s fun we HAVE professional teams, we HAVE casters and ANet has ESL. I don’t personally think that ESL is the best company for Esports, but I do know that it still counts and it’s awesome. During tournaments GW2 pvp pulls in some serious viewers. I don’t get the hatred for e-sports, at all. As for the balance patches they said 3 a year starting in 2016. Last I checked it’s not 2016 yet.

RE Boycotting – I will vote with my wallet, when I see something the gem store I want I’m going to buy it. I don’t think that boycotting them is going to do anything. Especially since the visual changes while perhaps flawed in execution were needed and much appreciated especially in PVE, and I cannot wait for more (for the record I play an auramancing Tempest Ele with a staff so I am a ‘victim’ of these changes the most) to make the experience better for all in the long run. Other things could be worked on and there is definite room for improvement in communication and QoL updates.

Conclusion: it’s not as bad as it seems from reading things. thins can be improved on all fronts, but this is getting out of hand and everyone needs to calm down. No one is wrong or right in this situation and there are no sides to take.

omgdracula.6345:

STOP WITH THE ESPORTS

http://i.imgur.com/kxbGKG5.jpg ¹

Take a look at that screenshot from Twitch. You are straight up irrelevant. I am not the only one who states this. A friend of mine from high school works for twitch, and got me in touch with a rep from goodgame.gg For those who don’t know who they are, they connect brands with streamers/teams in eSports. The company I work for wanted to sponsor a streamer/team and the rep flat out told us to avoid MMOs like the plague. They are pretty much the single worst investment you can make. You guys as brought up by the community don’t even do at least monthly balance patches. So take the money you’re throwing at eSports and use it to hire talent that will fix your game. I can even provide proof of my connects to skeptical people. Just PM me.

Assuming this isn’t being taken out of context, it is pretty disheartening one of the least popular Final Fantasy titles got more views.

Makai.3429:

omgdracula.6345:

STOP WITH THE ESPORTS

http://i.imgur.com/kxbGKG5.jpg ¹

Take a look at that screenshot from Twitch. You are straight up irrelevant. I am not the only one who states this. A friend of mine from high school works for twitch, and got me in touch with a rep from goodgame.gg For those who don’t know who they are, they connect brands with streamers/teams in eSports. The company I work for wanted to sponsor a streamer/team and the rep flat out told us to avoid MMOs like the plague. They are pretty much the single worst investment you can make. You guys as brought up by the community don’t even do at least monthly balance patches. So take the money you’re throwing at eSports and use it to hire talent that will fix your game. I can even provide proof of my connects to skeptical people. Just PM me.

Assuming this isn’t being taken out of context, it is pretty disheartening one of the least popular Final Fantasy titles got more views.

It’s outta context because there is no tournament going on (the last tournament had thousands of viewers at any given time, I know because I watched many of the matches), there was likely no bigger streamer streaming at the time, and looking at the games surrounding it, it was probably taken in an off peak timing. Melee only has 500ish viewers and that pulls in A LOT when they have tournaments.

EDIT: I just went and peeked at Twitch and GW2 at 7 pm MST has almost 1k viewers, no tournament going on but its in peak NA hours. It’s no LoL or CS: GO but it’s not terrible with nothing going on.

I agree. GW2 was the best MMO I ever played, and me and my friends had a lot of fun with it, I still like GW2 but not as much as I used to :<
OP’s arguments are really true for me. But it doesn’t mean that game is dying, there is a lot of people who’s still playing. Sadly – it’s not me, not because “omg I hate gw”, I stopped cause… I just can’t. There is a lot of things, and OP wrote them but the biggest problem for me are bugs and this unexplainable feeling of being crashed by new content. I know there have to be new content, it’s just “really too many directions”.

Agree with the OP when he stated “investing into MMOS as Esports is a bad investment” This is a 100% fact. MMO’s are just that Massive online games with a huge variety of communities to cater to, neglecting the majority in pursuit with the minority just because Esports has became mainstream is greedy and delusional.

First person shooters, Real time strategy, MOBAS, are all BUILT to be competitive and have strong competitive community for Esports to be possible in those genres, developers can focus on making their game harder and more competitive.

MMOS are huge insanely costly projects, they require so much attention and development time on so many different aspects for different player bases, its very unrealistic to focus on a very niche and small portion of the MMO community to try and make your pvp an Esport.

Even World of Warcraft is not considered a legit ESport, Blizzard understands this and invests very little into WoW. Blizzard puts their Esport team to work on Starcraft 2, Heroes of the Storm, and Hearthstone, games designed for competitive play.

You are destroying and neglecting soo many beautiful communities in GW2 by focusing on making the very small small player base of Spvp an Esport.

I would love to see a company somehow make MMO pvp work in Esports, but unfortunately seems pretty far fetched due to financial and community diversity reasons. I’m sorry but you can’t neglect majority of your game to focus on a small aspect of your game, that’s how MMO companies get a bad rep and destroy their own product.

Yeah they need to stop with that e-Sport business and just focus on giving us fun events like Wintersday but more frequent.. once per month or something.

And FIX MAJOR bugs that prevent mastery progression… like the fractal weapon skin achievement… is bugged. So many things are bugged that hinder progression.

Living Story season 2 achievements are bugged, can’t get the achievement even though I clearly done the objectives. There are so many things I had to do twice in order to get the masteries.

Potoni in Tangled Depths is another one…

I will stop spending $$$ until they start releasing info on their “major wvw overhaul”. I’m so tired of their secrets while my favorite game mode is slowly dying.
So yep, this is time to voice my opinion with my wallet. And it’s really sad.

I agree with OP on pretty much all counts here, save one.

I don’t think Anet need to stop with the Esports angle, but now is not the time.

• You just brought out an expansion, which is relatively low on content (for the price) and quite high on bugs. these bugs are slowly being fixed, but not nearly fast enough. throw in the questionable design leaning towards artificial difficulty (timegates anyone? and who doesn’t want to throw 800g into a bookcase?!), and you’ve got an expansion’s worth of fixing to do. and that’s just in PvE

• you can’t really hope to sell GW2’s PvP to anyone right now. PvP Balance is a mess – easily at the worst it’s been as far back as I can remember. PvP leagues are worse – I can’t even begin to describe how horribly that’s gone.

• your attempts to “fix” various gamemodes have invariably made them worse, and in ways that could easily have been prevented by talking to the community

• Fractal changes:

• the single-island format is good.

• the rewards are terrible. if this was a simple bug, the fix should and likely would have been out sooner.

• the instabilities are boring, do not promote new methods of play – as advertised, and are in no way tailored to the individual fractals. instead, we get blanket, 10-level instabilities that punish basic mechanics. 30% of fractals now punish dodging which is only worse when you realise that these changes shipped alongside an Elite specialisation built around dodging. seriously – who thought that was a good idea?

• Toughness scaling. I honestly don’t get how you missed this. I applaud the attempt to incentivise condition builds, and I think it worked really well with the husks in the silverwastes. but if you’re gonna increasingly add toughness to every enemy as the fractal scale increases, you’re gonna get a situation where direct damage isn’t viable. and that doesn’t fix the problem, it just switches it round…

• Fractal Variety. when all major loot comes from dailies, the most rewarding of which aren’t tied to any specific fractals, of course people are gonna just run the easiest ones. we now have less variety in fractal runs than we did before HoT launched, and that can’t be intentional.

• World vs World.

• I’m not even sure what to put here. I’m not the most involved WvW player, and I’ve seen a number of posts which explain the issues with WvW and the new borderlands far better than I could. but what I could tell was that there were a number of issues which would have become apparent had there been any real communication on the subject. the fact that these issues made it into the game is astounding really.

• Guilds: for a game with “guild” in the name, I’d think these were something of a priority. however, what we got with the expansion was:

• buggy missions – PvP missions being almost impossible to do due to overlaps with the mission timer and queue times. PvE missions being buggy, often not giving rewards (which is an issue for a number of other reasons)

• ~~Gold Sink~~ Guild Halls – incredibly expensive, likely prohibitively so for smaller guilds. this isn’t always bad – I don’t enjoy the upgrades, but I can tolerate them. the decorations, however, are a disgrace. a base cost of 1 crystalline ore on every basic decoration (now removed, granted), and exorbitant costs for the most miniscule of items. needing a gift of exploration for a globe barely the size of an asura. needing hundreds of gold for a clock that doesn’t tell the time. it’s horrendous. and due to the quantity (you only receive one of each item) and quality (a complete lack of utility – purely decorational), it’s almost impossible to convince guild members to contribute to these.

• Scribing – while I understand the idea of a shared crafting profession, scribe is another example of ludicrously expensive. I have no idea who chose the pricing on anything guild related, but it was not well chosen.

• Content – Cosmetics

• the expansion launched with 3 new armour sets, one of which was unobtainable until very recently. these armours have proven difficult to obtain, but this doesn’t make up for the fact that three sets is an incredibly low amount for the price of the expansion. add to this the large number of outfits seen in the gemstore since HoT launch, and it feels like you pulled resources from possible in-game content and reassigned them to the cash-shop instead, which is not a cool move.

• weapons. similar to above, only a handful of new weapon skins in game, the majority of which are quite difficult to obtain (and thanks to bugs or design flaws, some were downright impossible) add to this the 4 full weapon sets we’ve seen flowing through the gem store, and the feeling of potential expansion content being funneled through the cash shop grows.

I dunno, I may have missed stuff, but what I’m trying to say (TL;DR) is:

• Walk before you run. you can’t build a competetive scene on a hilariously broken PvP system. solid foundations are key.

• fix your expansion. Heart of Thorns has far, far too many bugs, and they’re not being dealt with as fast as they need to be. I don’t even mean fixed. in many cases, progression blocking bugs have been noted for days, even weeks by the community, and no attempt has been made to acknowledge this. Anet’s communication (as a company) needs a lot of work, but that’s a whole other discussion.

• Salt in the wounds. Don’t ship a full-price expansion with low content, and then release a bunch of paywalled content that could easily have been in the base expansion. don’t release your paywalled content in dumb packs that no-one wants. and don’t neglect the community to the point where they intentionally avoid using your cash-shop. it’s just not good.

• Just, pick a thing. do that thing. do it fully. don’t stop halfway, don’t ignore the players, and don’t abandon it. do this, and you will find your thing is good. don’t, and you’ll find your thing is not good

I want HoT, and GW2 in general to be a good thing, but as my sylvari are fond of saying – “I can’t do this alone”

so come on guys. make the thing a good thing. because if you do. if you stop giving up halfway through, if you admit when you make mistakes, and if you work with the players, you might just find that the good thing can be very, very good indeed.