As much as we complain, I just want to say we really do have a lot of confidence and respect for you.
Where’s this coming from?
A few days ago I helped a friend unload things into their new apartment. A few days before that I helped them get ahead on some work. Still a few more days before that… A very long story short we’ve been doing a lot for one another and it might seem like I’m getting the short end of the stick. But here’s the other end of the picture; they bought me dinner every day. When I made them and everyone else lunch, the next day they’d bought me that much worth again for the week. In the end, the little things add up. I need something for work, they get it; maybe not the day I need it or even when promised, but they do get around to it.
And okay, I get that there’s this whole thing about “being on time” that we’ve all heard from our parents. If have that ethic burned into you then you know what I mean how much it can start to weigh on a friendship when someone doesn’t come through when they said they would. However, I’ve known this person for some time now and they do keep their word and they do come even or top me in any kindness done for them eventually. It’s just never going to come down to that ideal moment of right when I need it, they need it, or altogether even all the time.
This is really where this post comes to rest. Maybe the Devs don’t come through today on the things we ask for. Maybe it’s something rather pressing if you only have time for just one character and suddenly it’s functionality just nose-dived because of a nerf or negligence. It’s not excusable then and you have every right to voice whatever that’s done to affect your experience of the game, because – well – that’s what’s true for you. And all the rest of us, might disagree about that, but actually that doesn’t really count there. It’s not true for us and nothing we say about that is going to change it. Nevertheless, there may be reasons why that happened we’re just as much negligent about. I watched a guardian do something the other night (with seemingly all the wrong stats) which I and some 20 others watching were convinced could not be done. It was impressive, clever, and not something I’m likely to ever see again. This player simply understood their class and the values to do what they were doing very well. Now, if everyone suddenly discovered how to do that? In this case, not much would be affected. A few nasty bottlenecks would become amazingly easier, and some bubble tactics would change. But what if it suddenly meant they could wipe an entire blob? We don’t always really get told the motives for the Devs, and for years, mostly the Devs have been silent, When their messages have reached us frequently they have been inconsistent, unreliable, or posted so ambiguously most people wouldn’t even find them before their content became active or had already come and gone (Living Story, Season 1, for example).
The Devs have consistently kept the game what it was, more or less, since launch. I stand by my beliefs that the New Player Experience was wrong, but I am also a long time gamer. My mother was into gaming and I followed right into it as soon as I could hold a nintendo controller. We thought we’d buy my father a Wii and a hunting game, as he likes to watch that kind of thing. He liked the idea, but despite only having to really move his thumb and mash the trigger button this was beyond him. We gave the Wii away to a friend for her children. For me, I would prefer have all the junk off my screen. I don’t care about or ever want to do Personal Story. I don’t care about or ever want to know there’s an event going on near by. Just as I don’t care about or ever want to have a mini map. Every single one of these things I have never had to have in any former game and they certainly didn’t force it on me. So, for me it’s just an overwhelming annoyance that takes me out of the game and aggravates me endlessly because it’s condescending and I have to put up with it. On the other hand, for my friend… this is her first MMO and she can’t play without these features (though she finds she would like to be able to toggle them too). For awhile we actually taped a piece of paper over them just so as not see them anymore. Too much information, don’t care.
The Devs definitely don’t always get it right, but they get more right than they do wrong. They haven’t blocked us out of content completely like other games have and do. Nor are we level 15 despite five continuous days of playing without sleep. There’s no emphasis that, despite you paying for this game, you’re only going to get to play it if you constantly live 6 hours a night in a dungeon for a chance at maybe one piece of armor for your character which you need to do the rest of the that dungeon and thereby advance in the game. And… yes, I know, I think we’re all on the edge of our seats if this is now over with these raids.
But keep in mind, most games have worked on the idea of Armor Class, Primary Stat, Secondary Stat, and so on: that is, Armor, Intelligence, Stamina, Wisdom, Charisma and all else DnD. What that meant was that the Developers really had a base set of stats to work on. Our don’t: They have Knights Gear, Soldiers, Clerics, Sinister, Berserker, and on and on.
So, their solution? Legendary armor; (which yes, we must earn), but so what? Did we really want it for free? No, probably not. We just don’t want to end up with the very real possibility now the game is about raids and those players while the rest of us are being lead to the door with a “Thanks for your money, now get!” I respect both sides of the positions on this. Respect in the same way I respect poisonous spiders.
I also respect having to wade into a place where they are. I mean this literally. Where I work there are a lot of spiders that come around. More than normal because there is a mixture of things there which are actually attractive to spiders. Some are poisonous. It creates a certain level of perpetual tension.
I’m sure developing games, and then getting on these forums to receive largely a wall of complaints is very much the same. Maybe the job is great, creating content is great, but this particular aspect (the forums) really can’t be appealing.
Especially since any one of those can come around later to bite someone. It gives new definition to why people say some comments can be ‘toxic’. But mostly people are being constructive. Posts are made because the person making them is voicing what is true for them.
That’s not “subjective” interpretation. It might be gross ignorance because no one ever kindly offered them another view point with full details and the process to achieve it… but this is something we all perpetually lack on every time we’re expedient or trite.
To me, this is the basis for the “anything goes” aspect of commenting made that come up on every internet forum ever. No matter what the post is there is a very good reason to face-desk about it… over… and over… and over. Nevertheless, usually there’s an equally valid and very good reason for that post we’re overlooking.
Example: I had no idea Empyreal Fragments could be farmed by world chests reliably. Why? Because I had no idea there was such a thing as reliable world chest locations. What other game has this? You can’t say WoW, only one person per server per hour gets it. I mean the way it is in Guild Wars 2.
I understood them to only ever come from Jumping Puzzles and a few rare places across Tyria: mostly Orr. But, someone had read a post I made about being angry with getting no meaningful reward of them after an hour hopping around on jumping puzzles. Instead of some other comments by people that were insults, they actually got in contact with me, pointed out all about gathering Empyreal from open-wrold in a few minutes and a whole aspect of play opened up for me that got me out of the Dungeon speedruns – which for anyone familiar with my posts know I dislike to the point of real contempt (I prefer camps, enjoying the scenery, sitting with friends for this purpose and single creature group encounters like the Wyvern or the madness of pulling all the dredge just before the twin boss in Sorrow’s Furnace. I’m a player that enjoys a few hours in an instance or at a single location, then an equal or greater sum in reward. This game is very much the other way around, so I have a lot of antagonism with that because for me. The game is too hectic. It has been since release and it hasn’t improved at all in this aspect. If anything it has gotten worse. Why do I play then? Because ever since Dark Age of Camelot closed down the Co-op server the only games out there have not cared an ounce about our time. We dump all these hours into the game and then instead of adding content, they add a new tier of armor that forces you to quit the game or dump months into getting it again. Anet has never done this.
The player community is pretty darn good, too. We gripe at one another on the forums, but the forums are really the place players put complaints. What else is to be expected? Temperance perhaps and much all else already said. In general though, eh, forums. To me, these are negligence reports. I think that’s really all they are unless you’re writing about lore or doing a fan fic.
Also, keep in mind there are how many hundreds of thousands (or millions) of us playing? Whatever they do to improve things it’s going to be generalized. I complain endlessly about ranged mechanics. Pretty much since launch. It’s been horrid and still is horrid for some classes/weapons. That doesn’t mean it’s going to change. That does nothing to improve my attitude about that. If you brought it up I’d dump a storm of contempt on the Devs about it. On the other end? If you asked me about Jumping Puzzles… I’d talk gleefully like a small child that had seen a duck for the first time… and then hug a Dev or two profusely. Most of the game has so many subdivisions of content that any single piece of it can be its own thing, without subtracting from the whole experience (or trapping you away from the whole experience). That’s called balance. It’s also called complexity, and we all have a lot of complex feelings about this game unless a direct question is put to us.
There are a lot of things I haven’t talked about people deserve mentioned, but the point is about about pinning down every gripe ever between here and forever ago…
So, as much as we complain… yeah, we love you peeps on the Dev team.
We’re still going to whine endlessly. Don’t get your hopes up. Just think of it as someone screaming, “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” As you’re about to back up over the family’s …<insert appropriate equivalent here>… as you park the car to unload new latest-greatest. Like me… when took my mother’s car and dragged the front end all along the garage trying to back it out for her so she wouldn’t hit dad’s… >.>