Guild Wars 2

Long Ago when I first started MMO’s I began with GW1. I had played others, but never really been as heavily invested as I was with GW1. ANet at the time was a company I looked up to and respected. They released fun content and it was enjoyable. They went through great lengths to provide a new and fresh experience every update. They strived for a well balanced and fun pvp, and even intentionally made metagame changes just to freshen up the game. PvE was great as well. Good enough to where most everyone I knew had beaten every campaign across multiple characters. Every time ANet released an update they did a great job developing and testing it. It felt polished and well tuned. Unfortunately, the recent patch updates aren’t of the same quality as what ANet has delivered in the past.

Before launch, you released a manifesto. Do you feel you have provided an experience that lives up to your manifesto? "We just don’t want player to grind in GW2. No one enjoys that. No one finds it fun.” This quote in particular is what I am referring to. Every one of these living stories has had some kind of grindy element. Some, like dragon bash, contained absolutely nothing, but a grindy element. If you recognize that not one wants to bash a bunch of pinatas then why even bother wasting resources on this. You have some really well designed content, but its overshadowed by the multitude of pinata bashing achievements. It also seems like some of your content isn’t tested well due to the amount of bugs. We as a community want the game to succeed and assuredly would love to help it do so. So why not try to include our feedback on how things progress. You have succeeded in making an amazing game let us help you improve it. :]

I truly want this game to do well. I had high hopes and really cared about ANet. You were something of role model to me, and I look up to your staff immensely. The state of the game though has made me sad and disheartened.
Some suggestions:
1)Include a PTR or somethign to help with the bug problems. I know many people would be willing to do this and you’d see a much smoother release. Let the community help you with your problems instead of being adversely effected by them.

2) The state of the game videos where dev’s speak to the sPvP teams are great. Could we get something like that for PvE or living story? The community would love any feedback we can get on how the living story and updates are progressing from the Dev’s Point of view. I think a large portion of the complaints come from not understanding what is going on. Why is it taking 4 months to get the Aetherblade dungeon added to fractals since its already been made. If youfor instance were fixing bugs like the kiel pathing one and adding multiple explorable paths then the community would understand and be more accepting. Include us inyour development process, I’m sure we’d love to hear it and what better way than through a communtiy centered stream like your current livestream formats.

The Game is great it just needs a little work. I’m sure us as a community would love to help. Thanks for your time. I look forward to anyway his could help in the future. If the community was more involved in the game I think it’d be a much better prduct over all and could definitely help the game grow, both financially and in over all satisfaction.

I’ve said it a gazillion times. MAKE A FLIPPING TESTSERVER! The best way to get feedback is to let the community take part in ongoing content development.
To create segregation between player and developer is the worst thing you can do, and to quote the designer behind the God of War series – Testers prevents the game from sucking.

I mean geez ANet, what coconut is in charge of the community?

Yes, PTR instances would help. I feel Living Story is a good place to test out concepts.

Although it’d also help if people would stop pretending their lives depended on the game too.

What does everyone else think? Any dev care to comment?

I was so let down by Anet with gw2.

I definately fell for the mega hype just because I had so much faith in Anet from GW1, they were just, amazing.

Seems like they completely changed in GW2, and even now just seem completely oblivious to most of the problems that plague the game and are just afraid to even talk to us, despite all the good feedback that is given, ESPECIALLY in the pvp department.

I don’t understand why there isn’t atleast one guy who just talks to players on the forum constantly (who has thick enough skin to ignore all of the misguided hate).

It’s the one thing that is absolutely amazing about Riot.

I think your reference to the word grind shows a lack of understanding in what Colin was saying in the manifesto. The word grind can have more than one definition.

The original usage of the word grind was to grind experience to level. Later on people started using that word to mean everything repetitive that they didn’t have fun doing.

Using the rest of that paragraph as a source of information (instead of the two lines you took out of context), what leads you to believe they were talking about stuff like gear grind?

Because from my point of view, the grind Colin was talking about was already explained. “In most games there’s this annoying grind to get to the fun stuff”. That’s what he was talking about. Not gear grind. Not a grind for a legendary weapon. He was talking about leveling to get to raiding. In fact, the paragraph ends with the words “we want to change the way people view combat.”

There’s nothing at all in the paragraph to suggest Colin was talking about gear or gear grind. He was talking about fun stuff to do. That’s why so many of the big zone wide events were put in the starting areas.

How do I know this? Because Colin has said so.