Guild Wars 2

Have you ever read the book, “How to make friends and influence people”? There’s a trick in that book that shows how to get what you want from others. It’s called giving those others what they want. Here’s an example from that book:

Ever notice how a friendly dog gets lots of attention and kindness? Why is that? Think. Why is that? It’s because the dog shows care for everyone else around it. It doesn’t care about itself, it cares about others. By giving people what they want (a nice, friendly dog), the dog gets what it ‘technically’ wants (since it doesn’t really care): attention and love.

I’m going to now relate this to Guild Wars 2: communication between the devs and the players. There is a lack of communication from the devs. Because of this, it creates dissent, unhappiness, and anger from the players.

We want to enjoy your game, we want to play your game because it is a great game. But for many of us, the game is becoming less and less fun, and thus, we don’t want to play it anymore. There’s no reason to do something for fun that’s supposed to be fun if it isn’t. If so, it becomes a waste of time and just leaves people disgruntled.

I’m not speaking for everyone. I’m not even sure if I’m speaking for the majority, but I do know that I am speaking for a portion of the playerbase when I say communicate with us. Tell us what you’re doing. Don’t hide changes in the patch notes (the steal ‘bug fix,’ which most thief players consider a nerf), instead, when you release a patch, reveal everything that you know that has been changed. Stealth changes are a no-no.

A lot of these problems, in my opinion, started with the 2014 September Feature Pack. The personal story was gated, as were the 2-5 abilities of every character. Instead of gaining abilities by using already known ones, the players were, in a sense, punished, and had to grind to get their 2-5 abilities. The personal story was always a nice break from the grind and the farm when a character reached the right level, but by gating the personal story into 10 level x Chapter number, it created a massive hole in that respite. As a result, people tend to use Tomes of Knowledge to avoid leveling.

There were unnecessary changes, too. For example: the “what’s coming” popping up every time a character leveled was not needed at all when there were bugs to be fixed, and balance checks/patches to be made.

Please, listen to us, and talk to us. Blizzard does a great job with communicating with their players. One-up them, and do even better. Without communication, players will just leave the game, disgruntled and angry because they feel like they are talking to a wall.

ArenaNet, you’re not a wall. You’re a group of human beings that could easily change that unhappy portion of players’ attitudes by just talking to us.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

~Aegis

I’m expecting nothing good to come from this company again at this point. Seems GW2 has hit the end of the road. Time to move on.

Communication is so poor it’s rivaling or worse than a lot of Asian imports that have no local development staff. That’s so disgustingly pathetic for the western market that it pretty much defines poor management and bad business.

Such a shame, too, considering this game had amazing potential and started out so strong, and has a lot going for it still. But I expect silence to continue and the complete lack of understanding of where to focus attention and resources to only get worse as recent trends incline.

I’d love to be proven wrong, but I sincerely doubt I will be. Until then, the search for a new game to give my business continues. Hell, I’d love a worthwhile sub game like this to ensure quality.

Fist thing they must listen is : Stop trying to make this game become an E-Sport like MOBA . This is MMORPG . Focus on WvW , contents , storyline , event , …. Those are strengths of their game .

Anet’s got their hands too full deciding what spell effects to nerf next. No time for listening/speaking to the players.

if we really want to get anets attention . then this needs to happen much sooner then that time . as i have noticed there used to be 4 full servers and no there is only 2 at my last check . puts me in mind of another game from this company . called city of heros or something like that. any ways story goes anet pulled the plug on the game out of the blue . and never to this day said a word about it . in my book in many ways i think they are trying to do that here. but maybe we all need to take a page out of there book and do it to them before they do it all to us yet once again . then maybe and maybe only then will they listen to us. other wise i do not think they care about the players no more in the first place.

One way to get their attention is to pull the plug on their income. I think I’ll be skipping Gem store purchases until they start listening to their customers on this. Maybe others will join me.

Want us, Need us, Love us. It’s hilarious how COLIN responds on reddit but not here on the OFFICIAL FORUMS!

I will stick around, I like this game. But my gem purchases have dropped.

Check out reddit, plenty of responses from Colin on there. Why they choose that over their own forums is strange though.

Probably because there’s far more toxicity on the official forums

NixiPixi.8320:

Check out reddit, plenty of responses from Colin on there. Why they choose that over their own forums is strange though.

Read the comments above you, feel the rage and anger and how they are ready to tear apart anyone who has different opinion. I wonder why devs dont respond here.

LovelyVirus.9432:

Fist thing they must listen is : Stop trying to make this game become an E-Sport like MOBA.

But they want that soooo bad…

GW1 had an e-sport PvP world wide competition, that’s why they think it could draw players in GW2.

Also with no barrier to entry to PvP with the P4F account, they are hoping that if it draws enough interested free players, some of those may fork over the B2P cash for a full account.

Baamoink.4281:

Probably because there’s far more toxicity on the official forums

And yet, to my knowledge, most of the time when there is a dev post on the forums, it is received very warmly. Sure, there’s the random kittenhead or two who decides to try to take a potshot, but that’s what moderators are for.

I’d be interested to know why they think reddit is better for communication, but I’d probably have to go read reddit to see the response on why.

Somehow I doubt toxicity is it. There is plenty of negativity and criticism on reddit. The only real difference is the interface and, perhaps the number of people who use it? I suppose it could be a matter of this forum being archaic software and not even having a good search function, but then, dev posts are highlighted in the tracker, so I dunno!

They do listen. They just can’t respond and react to millions of players who want every special need attended to. It’s just not feasible.

LovelyVirus.9432:

Fist thing they must listen is : Stop trying to make this game become an E-Sport like MOBA . This is MMORPG . Focus on WvW , contents , storyline , event , …. Those are strengths of their game .

MMOs are dying rapidly. Even WoW is dying. It’s down to 3 million now (in one quarter!). MOBAs and Esports is where the money is currently, but even that is dying now too.

LovelyVirus.9432:

Fist thing they must listen is : Stop trying to make this game become an E-Sport like MOBA . This is MMORPG . Focus on WvW , contents , storyline , event , …. Those are strengths of their game .

From what Colin said on reddit (see: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3v24hg/the_reduced_visual_noise_changes_have_to_stop_gw2/cxk2o2z)

The visibility stuff has little to do with E-Sports and “the PvP pro league is pretty much entirely a marketing team thing and has almost no impact on the dev team.”

So you can put the pitchfork away on that.

nexxe.7081:

LovelyVirus.9432:

Fist thing they must listen is : Stop trying to make this game become an E-Sport like MOBA . This is MMORPG . Focus on WvW , contents , storyline , event , …. Those are strengths of their game .

MMOs are dying rapidly. Even WoW is dying. It’s down to 3 million now (in one quarter!). MOBAs and Esports is where the money is currently, but even that is dying now too.

I don’t believe either is dying. It’s just that the market is now much more widespread. A kiddy pool turned into an olympic swimming pool, and then expanded out into the Pacific Ocean. There are just not enough players to fill all those games. Saying it’s dying because WoW has only 3 million now, or because e-sports was the latest craze, is not proof of anything.

Baamoink.4281:

Probably because there’s far more toxicity on the official forums

This is possibly true, but the toxicity would probably decrease due to an increase in communication. I don’t go to reddit, I want to know what they are saying there that they are not saying here.

Lolno. -ArenaNet

Loli Ruri.8307:

nexxe.7081:

LovelyVirus.9432:

Fist thing they must listen is : Stop trying to make this game become an E-Sport like MOBA . This is MMORPG . Focus on WvW , contents , storyline , event , …. Those are strengths of their game .

MMOs are dying rapidly. Even WoW is dying. It’s down to 3 million now (in one quarter!). MOBAs and Esports is where the money is currently, but even that is dying now too.

I don’t believe either is dying. It’s just that the market is now much more widespread. A kiddy pool turned into an olympic swimming pool, and then expanded out into the Pacific Ocean. There are just not enough players to fill all those games. Saying it’s dying because WoW has only 3 million now, or because e-sports was the latest craze, is not proof of anything.

I thought it was 5.6m last count? Losing 1.5m (GW2’s current active paid playerbase) from the last count and losing 4.4m from Q4 2014. They’ve got the biggest fan service of an expansion coming next year and they’ve lost more people since Q4 2014 then GW2 (F2P) currently has, so they’re pretty safe.

Although they said they wouldn’t talk in sub numbers anymore so will be hard to judge what’s going on when the expansion hits.

“Blizzard does a great job with communicating with their players”

I lol’d. Or maybe you’re american, but Blizz don’t give a kitten about EU realms. And their games are getting worse and worse, talking for both Warcraft & Starcraft.

There was a time were the dev’s and other anet-members have written a lot here in the forum, but this has suddenly stopped for unexplained reasons. You feel the lost, and this feeling is already known for many players from the subforums. A nice warning: Don’t try to necroposting threads with anet answers like it happened in the wvw forum, where the communication is an rarely event. These attention beggings will bring you only this warning:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/A-Note-on-Necroposting-don-t-do-it/first#post4245260

This has the to be the worst gaming company when it comes to communications with their players. These same players that they are trying to sell gems and expansion to…just unbelievable.

Shen Slayer.3058:

This has the to be the worst gaming company when it comes to communications with their players. These same players that they are trying to sell gems and expansion to…just unbelievable.

And then they shirk responsibility for it and instead blame players for the malcontent on the official forums.

It’s completely kittening laughable.

AegisRunestone.8672:

Ever notice how a friendly dog gets lots of attention and kindness? Why is that? Think. Why is that? It’s because the dog shows care for everyone else around it. It doesn’t care about itself, it cares about others. By giving people what they want (a nice, friendly dog), the dog gets what it ‘technically’ wants (since it doesn’t really care): attention and love.

This goes both ways. A friendly dog will shy away from people who are shouting at it

Shen Slayer.3058:

This has the to be the worst gaming company when it comes to communications with their players. These same players that they are trying to sell gems and expansion to…just unbelievable.

Actually they’re not, at least they’re talking to Reddit readers, Turbine for example doesn’t even do that and never talks to its forums except to announce the Store’s latest offers or when they’re merging their servers due to lack of players as they’re doing at the present time.

warbignime.4610:

NixiPixi.8320:

Check out reddit, plenty of responses from Colin on there. Why they choose that over their own forums is strange though.

Read the comments above you, feel the rage and anger and how they are ready to tear apart anyone who has different opinion. I wonder why devs dont respond here.

If you are asking for my money, at least stand behind your product. I am not looking for a lip service, patronizing response on someone else’s forums. Trying to avoid negative criticism is not an excuse.

Goldberg.4831:

warbignime.4610:

NixiPixi.8320:

Check out reddit, plenty of responses from Colin on there. Why they choose that over their own forums is strange though.

Read the comments above you, feel the rage and anger and how they are ready to tear apart anyone who has different opinion. I wonder why devs dont respond here.

If you are asking for my money, at least stand behind your product. I am not looking for a lip service, patronizing response on someone else’s forums. Trying to avoid negative criticism is not an excuse.

Pretty much this.

Katamaranthine.4679:

Lolno. -ArenaNet

D:

Aodlop.1907:

“Blizzard does a great job with communicating with their players”

I lol’d. Or maybe you’re american, but Blizz don’t give a kitten about EU realms. And their games are getting worse and worse, talking for both Warcraft & Starcraft.

Perhaps. I am in the U.S. It seems like they have some decent communication with us. I’m sorry to hear the EU realms are getting bit in the butt, though.

Lazy Mesmer.7923:

AegisRunestone.8672:

Ever notice how a friendly dog gets lots of attention and kindness? Why is that? Think. Why is that? It’s because the dog shows care for everyone else around it. It doesn’t care about itself, it cares about others. By giving people what they want (a nice, friendly dog), the dog gets what it ‘technically’ wants (since it doesn’t really care): attention and love.

This goes both ways. A friendly dog will shy away from people who are shouting at it

EXACTLY. You get it, man.

ham.8209:

if we really want to get anets attention . then this needs to happen much sooner then that time . as i have noticed there used to be 4 full servers and no there is only 2 at my last check . puts me in mind of another game from this company . called city of heros or something like that. any ways story goes anet pulled the plug on the game out of the blue . and never to this day said a word about it . in my book in many ways i think they are trying to do that here. but maybe we all need to take a page out of there book and do it to them before they do it all to us yet once again . then maybe and maybe only then will they listen to us. other wise i do not think they care about the players no more in the first place.

ANEt has nothing to do with City of Heroes. Or at least they have not more to do
with it than Blizzard with Kings Quest or Larry Laffer.

“Give the players what they want” Which players? We want different things.

Further “listening” doesn’t mean “doing exactly what the other person wants” — sometimes, the people offering a criticism confuse the solution with the issue and the company needs to figure out the core concern and address that.

For each controversial change made recently, there have been good reasons:

• Players asked for more challenging content with rewards gated behind it.
• Players wanted more variation from what they had done before.
• Players wanted less visual clutter, so they could see what foes were doing.
• Players requested open-world and instanced content foes that would benefit stats other than zerker.
• Rebalancing is required to maintain a healthy PvE/PvP/WvW and a healthy economy.

And so on.

We can disagree about whether ANet succeeded in finding the right balance in all the above, but I don’t think it’s remotely fair to accuse ANet of not paying attention to our concerns.

tl;dr “listening” isn’t the same as “agreeing”, let alone doing exactly as demanded by the other party.

LovelyVirus.9432:

Fist thing they must listen is : Stop trying to make this game become an E-Sport like MOBA . This is MMORPG . Focus on WvW , contents , storyline , event , …. Those are strengths of their game .

It takes a lot less development time to keep the PVPers happy if they can get E-Sports off the ground. That’s a big if, but I can see why it’s a dream they want to chase.

Look how easily players burned through all the PvE content it took months to create for the first big “expansion”. Look at how they tried to crank up the grind in order to keep people doing that PvE content.

If you can get PvP to work, you get a lot more play-hours from your players than from the same amount of development time spent on PvE.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

“Give the players what they want” Which players? We want different things.

Yep. The big mistake of GW2 is that ArenaNet didn’t decide who they wanted their core audience to be. Launch was so successful, they went from building a niche game, “the MMORPG for people who don’t like MMORPGs” to trying to please everyone in turn. That just means that each group of players gets “what they want” for a brief time when the current development iteration heads in their direction, then spend the rest of the time feeling disenfranchised.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

“Give the players what they want” Which players? We want different things.

Further “listening” doesn’t mean “doing exactly what the other person wants” — sometimes, the people offering a criticism confuse the solution with the issue and the company needs to figure out the core concern and address that.

For each controversial change made recently, there have been good reasons:

• Players asked for more challenging content with rewards gated behind it.
• Players wanted more variation from what they had done before.
• Players wanted less visual clutter, so they could see what foes were doing.
• Players requested open-world and instanced content foes that would benefit stats other than zerker.
• Rebalancing is required to maintain a healthy PvE/PvP/WvW and a healthy economy.

And so on.

We can disagree about whether ANet succeeded in finding the right balance in all the above, but I don’t think it’s remotely fair to accuse ANet of not paying attention to our concerns.

tl;dr “listening” isn’t the same as “agreeing”, let alone doing exactly as demanded by the other party.

True.

But my overall message IS: communicate with us. Tell us what’s going on. Don’t hide things from the patch notes. It’s not cool to do that. :S I rarely hear from the devs on anything these days. The Thief Forum is a great example of a lack of communication; Karl doesn’t talk to us. And Gaile (on the other forums) used to talk to a lot of people. It seems she’s gone scarce, too.

Shen Slayer.3058:

This has the to be the worst gaming company when it comes to communications with their players. These same players that they are trying to sell gems and expansion to…just unbelievable.

And the sad thing is that there was a time when it was the opposite.

Leading up to launch and a while after, I used to pitch the game to people partly based on the strength of ANet’s communication and openness.

Willowfalls.9814:

One way to get their attention is to pull the plug on their income. I think I’ll be skipping Gem store purchases until they start listening to their customers on this. Maybe others will join me.

Unfortunately, for a while now it looks like their business model is based around a steady stream of new players, not consistent player retention. Waves of players have stopped spending and later stopped playing, but we are being replaced out by newcomers.

Look at Colin’s defense of the tournament. It’s essentially a commercial, run by marketing, not a strategy for long-term population health.

Gibson.4036:

Shen Slayer.3058:

This has the to be the worst gaming company when it comes to communications with their players. These same players that they are trying to sell gems and expansion to…just unbelievable.

And the sad thing is that there was a time when it was the opposite.

Leading up to launch and a while after, I used to pitch the game to people partly based on the strength of ANet’s communication and openness.

That’s… really sad. Really, really sad. Personally, I’m happy with the expansion, I’m just not happy with them not being open anymore.

Most of the nerf can be summarized by too much grinding.

I’m not sure what you expect the response to be? “Working as intended?”

First of all, many players have too much time. The developer need to keep feeding them rewards to keep them happy. So the casual players complaint other hardcore players have things they don’t have.

Another is this game is sustained by the gem shop. So in order to keep the game running, Anet need to reward people who buy gems. And the cheep people complains people with jobs or rich parents have things they dont’ have.

I hear you. I opened the launcher, downloaded the patch after not playing for a week or two, and I thought “Why?”. I had no answer. So I closed the launcher. Try it. I’ve sunk a lot of time into this game but it isn’t wasted time, just time to move on perhaps.

Game will still be here (maybe) in a year or two if you want to come have a revisit. But I suggest taking a break like I’m doing. Possibly for a year or so I think would be good. It actually feels nice not to log in. Because you don’t get that frustrated feeling of wasting your time.

I would be happy if they could just better communicate internally. This is how I see things working:

Management/multiple team meeting: Hey we need less visual clutter. Everyone agrees.
Department A: how are we going to make less clutter? Oh I know lets reduce auras and fireball.
Department B: Let’s get some pvp hype by adding icons to player names. If we make them stand out players will be more likely to get back into pvp.

Patch goes live:
-Visual clutter remains on bosses where the real problem is (communication with player base disconnect; players unhappy).
- Visual clutter added to characters with pvp display meanwhile reduced with auras (company communication disconnect).

You guys need some more communication overall.

stop the e sport thing… please. 2k view is just sad stop trying.

This game is not fun to watch at all. It is extremely chaotic the fights during pvp. Unless you play the class it all seems like a bunch of ($()_#_@)(*# $and the next thing you know some one took some points. It is not LOL or DOTA stop trying please.

Focus on what made you money and what got you started in the first place the PVE players. I love this game a lot, and I spend a lot ( way too much) of USD in this game trying to support Anet because how much we LOVED the game. I bought almost everything that came out of the gem store. Money is not an issue for me and my Fiance but we don’t want to waste it on a game that keeps promoting PVP but have bunch of PVE bugs it still needs to fix. I been playing this game for three years and love dungeons. Now dungeons are dead and the fractals have massive problems. I do not have the time to do raids, if you have the time then you are very lucky. Nor can I easily find 10 people and progress. Raids are suppose to be for special group of end game players. Give something to the average end game players please. There is nothing new with fractals nor dungeons. This is extremely frustrating, if this continues, we will have to support another game who actually listens to its PVE players.

warbignime.4610:

NixiPixi.8320:

Check out reddit, plenty of responses from Colin on there. Why they choose that over their own forums is strange though.

Read the comments above you, feel the rage and anger and how they are ready to tear apart anyone who has different opinion. I wonder why devs dont respond here.

Arguably some portion of the rage/anger is justified due to anet’s actions. But that’s all beside the point – this is their official forum and they have a professional duty to administer it, not run scared or criticise their customers on a third-party forum. They’re not children avoiding a bully. The devs don’t have to respond. Colin doesn’t have to respond. A properly trained customer relations person needs to respond, and if that person isn’t available in-company, hire one. This is a standard business situation with tried and tested solutions. Every business faces it and handle it with varying degrees of success. There is no justification for a company to avoid communication on their own forum (this point cannot be stressed enough) because “it’s too toxic”. And it’s wrong to excuse it, as you keep doing. Running a business means managing your customers and guiding them to an outcome which avoids conflict, creates greater satisfaction and leads them to buy more of your product. To do otherwise isn’t just unprofessional, it’s foolish and detrimental to the business.

[I’m really trying not to say any more on this topic, and especially not repeat myself, but customer relations is an interest of mine and a big part of my work, so it bugs me to see it so badly managed.]

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

“Give the players what they want” Which players? We want different things.

Further “listening” doesn’t mean “doing exactly what the other person wants” — sometimes, the people offering a criticism confuse the solution with the issue and the company needs to figure out the core concern and address that.

For each controversial change made recently, there have been good reasons:

• Players asked for more challenging content with rewards gated behind it.
• Players wanted more variation from what they had done before.
• Players wanted less visual clutter, so they could see what foes were doing.
• Players requested open-world and instanced content foes that would benefit stats other than zerker.
• Rebalancing is required to maintain a healthy PvE/PvP/WvW and a healthy economy.

And so on.

We can disagree about whether ANet succeeded in finding the right balance in all the above, but I don’t think it’s remotely fair to accuse ANet of not paying attention to our concerns.

tl;dr “listening” isn’t the same as “agreeing”, let alone doing exactly as demanded by the other party.

Exactly this!!!!

And…i don’t even want to go back at the forum after a 1 minute reading…i don’t blame the devs.

Nury.3062:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

“Give the players what they want” Which players? We want different things.

Further “listening” doesn’t mean “doing exactly what the other person wants” — sometimes, the people offering a criticism confuse the solution with the issue and the company needs to figure out the core concern and address that.

For each controversial change made recently, there have been good reasons:

• Players asked for more challenging content with rewards gated behind it.
• Players wanted more variation from what they had done before.
• Players wanted less visual clutter, so they could see what foes were doing.
• Players requested open-world and instanced content foes that would benefit stats other than zerker.
• Rebalancing is required to maintain a healthy PvE/PvP/WvW and a healthy economy.

And so on.

We can disagree about whether ANet succeeded in finding the right balance in all the above, but I don’t think it’s remotely fair to accuse ANet of not paying attention to our concerns.

tl;dr “listening” isn’t the same as “agreeing”, let alone doing exactly as demanded by the other party.

Exactly this!!!!

And…i don’t even want to go back at the forum after a 1 minute reading…i don’t blame the devs.

One problem: in real life we have to do things we don’t want to do. Communication is one of those things in this situation.