Guild Wars 2

Really Anet, how can you manage to kitten up a game on every level in just 3 days:

Several one time events which 1/3(I know an estimate) of the players can’t attend even if they wish to due to lag, crash and dc when they go near the event.

If you choose to do the quests, they are bugged to hell.

Handing out rewards for the last event, which dedicated players weren’t able to obtain since the game was launched.

Breaking your own manifesto about vertical item progression.

Dividing the whole game community because of a gating mechanism introduced through a dungeon.

Insult every asking player in the forum with no reaction to anything except on Twitter with one line responses, concerning the events.

Something really bad must’ve happened internally. To go back on their manifesto that’s almost a decade old at this point makes no sense. These events that limit access to all players makes no sense. Nothing makes any sense.

I really don’t understand why they suddenly made all these changes. They are driving their game into the ground and alienating a lot of loyal players. Breaking their manifesto has broken my trust and I just can’t understand why they chose to betray the community like this. How are these decisions making them money?

Spencer.1386:

How are these decisions making them money?

This is the most bizarre thing to come out of all of it, because none of what they’re doing leads directly making more money from the game.

There’s nothing new in the cash shop – at least nothing substantial.

The update funnels all players into the new dungeon, making the rest of the game world seem even more underpopulated, which makes the game seem less active and less worth spending money on.

The new equipment isn’t tradeable and the main components to create it are Account-Bound, so players can’t even buy Gems to convert to gold to buy their own max equipment.

Absolute best case scenario, the update improves the average number of players logged into the game at any given time, as everybody grinds for Ascended equipment. But the game doesn’t make money directly from time played or from how many people are logged on at one time – so what’s the motivation?

Yeah… I’m not going to lie this is a weird turn of events. I did not see this coming at all. I was actually very surprised that their “huge surprise” for November was a content update that violates all of the rules in their manifesto…

Spencer.1386:

Breaking their manifesto has broken my trust and I just can’t understand why they chose to betray the community like this. How are these decisions making them money?

Been playing since GW1 and in a year I will most probably still be playing GW2. However, whenever I play, I can’t seem to get this terrible after taste out of my mouth…

Crater.1625:

Absolute best case scenario, the update improves the average number of players logged into the game at any given time, as everybody grinds for Ascended equipment. But the game doesn’t make money directly from time played or from how many people are logged on at one time – so what’s the motivation?

In a typical F2P game, the longer someone is online, the more likely they are to buy a cosmetic item from the store. Problem is, they buy them so that the cosmetic item is seen. Town clothes don’t get seen often enough to count. Remove the town clothes from the gem store and what cosmetic items do you have left ?
– Transmutation stones. But we get more than enough of the level 80 stones via PvE
– Random dyes. When you can get specific dyes through the trading post.
– Random Minipets. Which turn off randomly, go to your collectable tab should you deposit them all. I don’t know if you can still trade specific minis or not.
– 1 armor skin. I find them ugly
– Cow finisher. The only thing that might be worth the asking price. But I don’t sPvP, and I just DPS people down in WvW.

They don’t even have the standard appearance changer that everyone else has.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Crater.1625:

Absolute best case scenario, the update improves the average number of players logged into the game at any given time, as everybody grinds for Ascended equipment. But the game doesn’t make money directly from time played or from how many people are logged on at one time – so what’s the motivation?

In a typical F2P game, the longer someone is online, the more likely they are to buy a cosmetic item from the store. Problem is, they buy them so that the cosmetic item is seen. Town clothes don’t get seen often enough to count. Remove the town clothes from the gem store and what cosmetic items do you have left ?
– Transmutation stones. But we get more than enough of the level 80 stones via PvE
– Random dyes. When you can get specific dyes through the trading post.
– Random Minipets. Which turn off randomly, go to your collectable tab should you deposit them all. I don’t know if you can still trade specific minis or not.
– 1 armor skin. I find them ugly
– Cow finisher. The only thing that might be worth the asking price. But I don’t sPvP, and I just DPS people down in WvW.

They don’t even have the standard appearance changer that everyone else has.

Maybe they simply need to rethink their online store! And town clothes as well.

• Step 1: Be a company who’s stock is falling rapidly.
• Step 2: Look for ways to bring in more profit. Your flagship product is GW2. Hmmm…
• Step 3: In GW2’s case, getting more profit means getting more players.
• Step 4: See why existing players are leaving. Visit forums. See complaints about “endgame.” Don’t take the basic time to read them or the responses very well.
• Step 5: Order that an “endgame” be added immediately.
• Step 6: Wince in pain as your lack of market knowledge, research, effort or business sense of any kind, and lack of respect for your internal leaders who no doubt warned you about what will happen, causes a rush of refunds and massive loss of customers.
• Step 7: (yet to happen) Downsize to cut costs; try desperately to reverse Step 5 and 6, possibly eating a major short term loss in the process.
• Step 7a (bad ending): Find a scapegoat, other then yourself, who just happens to be the person(s) most able to regain customer support for your product. Fire them. In turn, get fired yourself because the remains of your product team can’t keep it afloat. Product dies.
• Step 7b (good ending): After major internal reorganizing, downsizing and re-budgeting, and finally listening to your product developers, step back, leave the product in their qualified hands, and allow the long slow recovery to take place. Lower your ambitions to something actually achievable, doing market research this time to figure out what that is. Turn a small but consistent profit off the product over the next decade.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Remove the town clothes from the gem store and what cosmetic items do you have left ?

Here’s some they could add with way less effort then designing a new dungeon takes:
-Animated dyes (think Svanir Ice formation type)
-Dyes with particle effects
-Glowing dyes
-Unique armor and weapon skins
-Unlocking skins you’ve earned in PVE into PVP (or the reverse).
-More toys and gizmos (like the pirate cannon)
-Guild Housing, furnishings, and services.
-Skill graphical changes (making mesmer spells blue, or adding more bones to necro spells, etc).

These things are fun. People like me, who like to hang out and mess around in game, would happily spend gems on these if we could feel invested into the game. Of course, the existence of a gear treadmill undermines that sense of investment because there’s no permanence to it.

Rhyse.8176:

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Remove the town clothes from the gem store and what cosmetic items do you have left ?

Here’s some they could add with way less effort then designing a new dungeon takes:

How about a $60 monocle ?

Thinking of stuff they could add is easy. Problem is, the stuff isn’t there.

Rhyse.8176:

• Step 1: Be a company who’s stock is falling rapidly.
• Step 2: Look for ways to bring in more profit. Your flagship product is GW2. Hmmm…
• Step 3: In GW2’s case, getting more profit means getting more players.
• Step 4: See why existing players are leaving. Visit forums. See complaints about “endgame.” Don’t take the basic time to read them or the responses very well.
• Step 5: Order that an “endgame” be added immediately.
• Step 6: Wince in pain as your lack of market knowledge, research, effort or business sense of any kind, and lack of respect for your internal leaders who no doubt warned you about what will happen, causes a rush of refunds and massive loss of customers.
• Step 7: (yet to happen) Downsize to cut costs; try desperately to reverse Step 5 and 6, possibly eating a major short term loss in the process.
• Step 7a (bad ending): Find a scapegoat, other then yourself, who just happens to be the person(s) most able to regain customer support for your product. Fire them. In turn, get fired yourself because the remains of your product team can’t keep it afloat. Product dies.
• Step 7b (good ending): After major internal reorganizing, downsizing and re-budgeting, and finally listening to your product developers, step back, leave the product in their qualified hands, and allow the long slow recovery to take place. Lower your ambitions to something actually achievable, doing market research this time to figure out what that is. Turn a small but consistent profit off the product over the next decade.

Doom and Glooming aside, this is a very likely scenario that is occurring right now. NCSoft had a horrible financial year last year. They even shut down City of Heroes because of it. What I don’t understand is why when that game was still turning a profit according to the development studio in charge of it.

Very recently Nexon bought up roughly 15% of NCSoft’s stock. That makes them a major share holder now with a lot of weight when it comes to making decisions. Nexon publishes a ton of pay to win game models (why is it even legal for competitors to buy stock from each other?). It is likely that Nexon is causing NCSoft to get more involved and meddlesome with their published titles, which includes Guild Wars 2.

I really hate publishers. They care nothing for the quality of the product itself. They just see dollar signs and will kitten anything up in an attempt to generate more. Very, very rarely does changing a design philosophy/goals in the middle of a games life ever lead to positive profits in the long run. Examples of this are Dark Age of Camelot, Ultima Online, and Starwars Galaxies.

If anyone would like to provide examples of games that have benefited and been turned around by such major shifts, I’d love to hear about them. Right now I can’t think of any game that has ever done better by radically altering their original design goals.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Rhyse.8176:

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Remove the town clothes from the gem store and what cosmetic items do you have left ?

Here’s some they could add with way less effort then designing a new dungeon takes:

How about a $60 monocle ?

Thinking of stuff they could add is easy. Problem is, the stuff isn’t there.

Hah, you’re speaking to someone who was subbed to EVE during the Jita riots.

Yeah, the stuff isn’t there- and there seems to be a general lack of thought (by players AND the gem shop operators) about why not, and what could be there. My point is it shouldn’t be that hard to get things in there.