Guild Wars 2

Are you ever going to do something on this forum? I am getting frustrated with the amount of devs that keep posting on Reddit and topics here get ignored.

Sird.4536:

Are you ever going to do something on this forum? I am getting frustrated with the amount of devs that keep posting on Reddit and topics here get ignored.

While I also would like to see more dev activity on the forums, Reddit makes for a much, much more readable format for a Q&A than these forums. It’s easier to do Q&As there, in general.

She’s explained this before ….. reddit just makes it easier for chatting than here.

So what is the point of having these forums. More and more devs are posting in Reddit these days.

Yeah might as well scrap these forums and just link in the sub reddit. Not that I like reddit. I personally find reddit messy.

I could never get the hang of Reddit’s layout. If someone links me to a topic I can read most of it…I think. But I’d never consider going there voluntarily because it just looks a mess to me.

I’ll just take your word for it that it’s better for this sort of thing and hope someone posts a transcript here afterwards.

RoseofGilead.8907:

Sird.4536:

Are you ever going to do something on this forum? I am getting frustrated with the amount of devs that keep posting on Reddit and topics here get ignored.

While I also would like to see more dev activity on the forums, Reddit makes for a much, much more readable format for a Q&A than these forums. It’s easier to do Q&As there, in general.

I pretty strongly disagree, reddit (behavior-wise as well as lay out) is an unmitigated disaster and I won’t go there. I’d like to remind everyone of Gaile’s (sweetest woman alive) reddit account having negative karma once simply because the reddit community were mad at anet.

These forums are at least in chronological order. Just scroll to the red posts if nothing else.

I say use the tool most appropriate for the job. Also, reddit seems to move faster than these forums in general, so it makes sense to me that the threads there would get looked at more (more people posting means more comments to comment on afterall). If you want theseforums to be the main post location I believe it should start with the GW2 community using them more first. The devs will follow.

Danikat.8537:

I could never get the hang of Reddit’s layout. If someone links me to a topic I can read most of it…I think. But I’d never consider going there voluntarily because it just looks a mess to me.

I’ll just take your word for it that it’s better for this sort of thing and hope someone posts a transcript here afterwards.

Me too, hopefully dulfy will make a summary like they have done in the past.

Sird.4536:

So what is the point of having these forums. More and more devs are posting in Reddit these days.

That discussion was held in https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Comments-about-Communications-1/first (now locked due to the tone the thread took). Perhaps it is a little off topic here?

On topic: I’m glad there will be some Q&A time, though even if I had a Reddit account I’d be too busy doing things in the new patch in my short time window before Tuesday errands take me away to spend out of game time talking about the new things. I’m just hoping the new things are in fact delightful enough and would have been spoiled by a few days’ notice to warrant the silence in advance.

Is it really something to celebrate though ?

I mean really, it’s an update that will mostly address the flaws, which could have been fixed incrementally instead of waiting to fix them in bulk which in turn helped drive down player activity due to the perception of nothing happening behind the scenes until this patch.

Zedek.8932:

So.. uh… Europeans are left out of that “chat” because of the time zones or am I totally wrong?

So, the staff that lives on the west coast of the US should stay up 24 hours to cover everyone else’s availability?

TexZero.7910:

Is it really something to celebrate though ?

I mean really, it’s an update that will mostly address the flaws, which could have been fixed incrementally instead of waiting to fix them in bulk which in turn helped drive down player activity due to the perception of nothing happening behind the scenes until this patch.

I don’t know. Is that a tengu in that picture?

So are most NA folks who work normal hours as it will be either during their working day or during their commute home. It’s held during ANet’s workday afternoon.

What concerns me is that it is set “after the patch is live” but is set for 5 pm my time, which is about when I have to stop playing on a Tuesday. Maybe they’re just leaving a time cushion and the patch will hit earlier … I hope so! 2 PM Pacific is fairly late for their normal patch times.

Excellent, I really appreciate it when you guys make yourselves available for these. Good luck with the update!

Donari.5237:

Sird.4536:

So what is the point of having these forums. More and more devs are posting in Reddit these days.

That discussion was held in https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Comments-about-Communications-1/first (now locked due to the tone the thread took). Perhaps it is a little off topic here?

On topic: I’m glad there will be some Q&A time, though even if I had a Reddit account I’d be too busy doing things in the new patch in my short time window before Tuesday errands take me away to spend out of game time talking about the new things. I’m just hoping the new things are in fact delightful enough and would have been spoiled by a few days’ notice to warrant the silence in advance.

Like the last Q & A? Where they didn’t really say anything other than they where looking at this and that. The last time it was a more of what we are not working on, and damage control. I’m getting fed up of having to look at Facebook, Twitter and every thing else just to get information on this game when they have a forum, but I guess they know best……

I’m looking forward to seeing what tomorrow’s patch brings but I might avoid the forum afterwards.

Spare a thought for the poor forum mods who will have to deal with the usual rage about what changes were not made, plus the usual rage about what changes were made. We’re a tough crowd to please…

I swear, people will complain about anything. If it’s not using the official forums enough, then it’s using reddit too much or time zones or someat other malarkey that just sounds really argumentative.

Get some perspective people:
*Yes it sucks that the devs live and work in the US and keep with US time zones for stuff like this but it’s be even more inconvenient to shift sleep schedules and life commitments just so one other time zone can feel included (while excluding other time zones).
*Yeah, it’s a bit annoying that the chat won’t be on the official forums but have you tried having decent chats on this one? It gets messy and clunky and it’s overall slow.
*Why even have these forums? Why not just reddit? Have you seen the complaints? Some people don’t like reddit!
*Yeah, reddit is tough to get used to but when you’re Q&Aing, it’s far more clearer what is being discussed and who is being addressed without all the clunky forum bugs and inefficient tools here.

That all said, you’re not the center of the universe. Other people get shafted with any decision or action, just not everyone is going to be that guy that complains about what is essentially how the world works.

DoctorDing.5890:

I’m looking forward to seeing what tomorrow’s patch brings but I might avoid the forum afterwards.

Spare a thought for the poor forum mods who will have to deal with the usual rage about what changes were not made, plus the usual rage about what changes were made. We’re a tough crowd to please…

Ah yes. It had occurred to me to recommend that the devs on the Q&A keep the link handy to the official post that says in essence “We will restore the Alpine Borderlands but not in this April patch, this patch will hold tweaks to Desert while we continue to work on redeploying Alpine.” Because dollars to donuts there will be people posting that ANet lied because WvW is still set in the desert after the patch.

So is there going to be a dev posted thread for some general questions from players that may not be able to attend but have questions they would like answered?

Sird.4536:

Are you ever going to do something on this forum? I am getting frustrated with the amount of devs that keep posting on Reddit and topics here get ignored.

Though I agree, at least this time we got some kind of notice.

I may be overly dense here.. but what exactly is the celebration about?
I thought this was supposed to be a standard quarterly update.
Or is it going to be a celebration of the fact that something, no matter how insignificant, is going to be released by anet?
Not that it matters, really. I don’t use reddit, so I’ll never find out. I’ll just log into the game tomorrow to see how Mike will delight me.

Blockhead Magee.3092:

Zedek.8932:

So.. uh… Europeans are left out of that “chat” because of the time zones or am I totally wrong?

So, the staff that lives on the west coast of the US should stay up 24 hours to cover everyone else’s availability?

I actually deleted that post because I figured out it is roughly 19/20 (7/8 pm) here. I simply overlooked the minus for some reason^^ Too bad the forum glitched up and I had to delete it again in a new tab, enough time for you to catch my failure

But apart from that and just for the records , why not? Why would you leave out the Europeans when advertising such an important things? Are our Euros / British Pounds less worth or are we 2nd class customers here? I noticed stuff like this happening at US companies often (e.g. RIOT games).

We can scratch that since I was wrong, but I hope you got my point, too. It’s the “EN” forums, not “NA”.

Zedek.8932:

But apart from that and just for the records , why not? Why would you leave out the Europeans when advertising such an important things? Are our Euros / British Pounds less worth or are we 2nd class customers? I noticed stuff like this happening at US companies often (e.g. RIOT games).

Europeans aren’t being left out. They can very much participate in the Q&A if they want to stay up. They can also go back and re-read it (like many Americans who will be at work/school during the Q&A session) at a later time. But since Anet is an American company with their office in the US, they have to do these things when they have work hours. The same goes for other US companies. They’re all run by human beings who have lives outside of work.

Ashandar.2570:

I may be overly dense here.. but what exactly is the celebration about?

I’m a bit confused myself. No indications other than a fairly standard patch. Nothing as of yet has got the community excited due to the strange new policy of keeping it under wraps.

Having an AMA is all very positive news, but a lack of hype and excitement has got a lot of ppl head scratching.

I will celebrate, if this Patch is finally a significant milestone towards the right direction to bring this game forward again to its right path, which can be measured by following points:

• Reviving the Dungeons through an overworked and expanded Reward System
• Bringing the Reward System of WvW to an equal Level to PvP Reward Tracks and playing PvE/Fractals
• Removing pointless and insulting Time Gate and RNG Systems to reduce artificial Grind of this game and to make the Game again more Multi Character friendly in general
• Balancing finally alot of Class and Combat Mechanics, that have been ignored since Game Release Date, like balancing Hard CC Spam by adding finally a mechanic, that stops Perma Stunlocking, rebalancing the base Health Values of all Classes by finalyl balancing all Class individually, instead of balancing in 3 archetypes, rebalancing the whole Boon/Condition System and merge things to reduce the amount of Boons and Conditions, this game has already too much of both!!! The Combat System woudl be alot more fun with a bit lsser boons and conditions, especially when the Boons and Conditions that stay are then more MEANINGFUL due to merged effects that make sense to be merged.
  *Rebalancing of the defensive Attributes to make them more valuable and useful, so that you actually FEEL a difference when fightign against someone with really alot of Vitality/Toughness so that you can’t mow such enemies down like in 2-3 seconds just with Direct Damage, high defense builds need to feel more like fightign these high defensive Mordrem, that take only serious damage from Conditions, but are seriously longer and highder to fight against with just Direct Damage doe to their high defense.
  Bring Toughness/Vitality to this point finally in the Game Balance, and I will seriously celebrate like theres no tomorrow!!
• Add finally things, that should have been there already since Game Release, like Polymok, like Bar Brawls… if these things get finalyl added, I also surely will celebrate then like theres no tomorrow
• Close finally many other Game Design Holes that you have created yourself over the last years with the next upcoming quarterly patches, like bringing finally Chef and Jewelry 500, adding lastly also the missing legendary Accessoires to make that system in itself complete too
• Bring back Living Story Season 1 reintegrated back into the game under Season 2’s Design System
• If the Grind Reducement Changes overall in this patch are more, than just some changes to Scribing and some Map Changes in HoT, so the known facts, if they surprise us with something special that significantly reduces grind in this game in other aspects of this game also too and can be seen as great quality of life improvements – thats something I personally would celebrate…

If things like this happen tomorrow, then I will truly celebrate, because then I have personally for myself seen finally again after a real long time a REAL REASON to celebrate in this game.

However, we will all see what this patch brings us tomorrow, if this patch is some kind of long awaited saviour, that leads this game back on to its right path, or if it will be nothing but just alot of hot air full of more or less pointless band aid fixes.

I see it as a milestone patch ,that will decide over this games further future …

PS: but i appreciate also the clearly visible intent of the devs to communicate with us more lately, be it now on reddit or not, I dont care, the intent is whats counting, not the place really where it is done…
If these AMA’s on reddit and general reddit discussions where we can questino the developers directly are their new form of brief “Mini-CDIS”, would I call it, then thats fine for me, as long it is fruitful and leads to positive results!

Gaile Gray.6029:

Windemere.6534:

Excellent, I really appreciate it when you guys make yourselves available for these. Good luck with the update!

I’m personally really looking forward to it, as a ArenaNet team member and as a daily player. Can’t wait to see what you guys think!

If this update doesn’t have playable Dwarves and race change contracts then I’m not going to celebrate anything Gaile!

Zedek.8932:

But apart from that and just for the records , why not? Why would you leave out the Europeans when advertising such an important things? Are our Euros / British Pounds less worth or are we 2nd class customers here? I noticed stuff like this happening at US companies often (e.g. RIOT games).

Perhaps this will help you to understand? http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/20/why-crunch-time-is-still-a-problem-in-the-video-game-industry/

This was brought to my attention by a dev friend of mine (not in ANet) who is fortunate to work at a company that seldom makes him work over 50 hours a week. The work load for a game dev can be soul crushing enough without having to stay up to 2 or 3 am for the convenience of people halfway around the world. Heck, in my old job the state decided that every freshly arrested person had to have a lawyer from the very first moment at their initial bail review before the commissioner, and that the public defenders would cover that, and oh yes this would mean 24/7 attorney availability. Fortunately the legislature refused to fund the costs of tripling the attorneys in each jurisdiction to cover the extra shifts.

If you want devs available to answer questions at 3 am their time, I hope you are willing to fund the salaries needed for that.

So, how does it work? Is there a single thread and people comment on it and the devs respond to comments?

As a secondary question, is the main difference between the function of these forums and reddit that the forums are chronological and that reddit is hierarchical by reply?

I am rather curious to see what about this patch, as opposed to so many others, calls for a celebration rather than just a chat…color me intrigued (its a shade of pink).

ekarat.1085:

As a secondary question, is the main difference between the function of these forums and reddit that the forums are chronological and that reddit is hierarchical by reply?

Reddit comments are ranked by popularity, which makes it effectively useless for a real conversation. Usually off topic jokes are at the top of the page, and dissenting opinions backed by facts are made invisible.

Donari.5237:

Sird.4536:

So what is the point of having these forums. More and more devs are posting in Reddit these days.

That discussion was held in https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Comments-about-Communications-1/first (now locked due to the tone the thread took). Perhaps it is a little off topic here?

That was no discussion between ANet and the players though until the end, and was apparently, never intended to be, which was part of the issue with that particular “discussion”.

Donari.5237:

On topic: I’m glad there will be some Q&A time, though even if I had a Reddit account I’d be too busy doing things in the new patch in my short time window before Tuesday errands take me away to spend out of game time talking about the new things. I’m just hoping the new things are in fact delightful enough and would have been spoiled by a few days’ notice to warrant the silence in advance.

Grain of salt. Again, at least this time, they gave us more than 5 minutes notice.

TexZero.7910:

Is it really something to celebrate though ?

I mean really, it’s an update that will mostly address the flaws, which could have been fixed incrementally instead of waiting to fix them in bulk which in turn helped drive down player activity due to the perception of nothing happening behind the scenes until this patch.

The refusal to speak with the customers about anything till it is deployed is not ideal in my mind, but hey, it’s their game.. I hope there is all kinds of “delight” up in here tomorrow, I’ve certainly paid for it. I anxiously await it’s arrival.

Gaile Gray.6029:

RoseofGilead.8907:

Sird.4536:

Are you ever going to do something on this forum? I am getting frustrated with the amount of devs that keep posting on Reddit and topics here get ignored.

While I also would like to see more dev activity on the forums, Reddit makes for a much, much more readable format for a Q&A than these forums. It’s easier to do Q&As there, in general.

Yes, this.

PyrateSilly.4710:

She’s explained this before ….. reddit just makes it easier for chatting than here.

And this.

It’s not a matter of preferring reddit, it is — as I mentioned previously — simply the case that reddit formatting makes what is essentially a chat session work better there.

The official forums are still where we post our major forum-announced comments, such as Mike O’Brien’s comments about Upcoming Changes in the Spring Update and his update on that subject, not to mention the thread about Legendary Weapons in which he was active many times, and a WvW Priorities thread as well. As you can see just from citing one person’s posts, this forum is important to us, and we continue to be active on a daily basis.

Ah, but see, though “Major Announcements” are posted here, COMMUNICATION still happens on a much more consistent basis over on Reddit. Just take a look at their Dev Tracker versus the Dev Tracker here. I think that is what people are commenting on.

• edit- Poor Reddit, apparently they also just heard about this, too.

I don’t understand Reddit all that well, nor can I ever find quotes in it later. But it does have a dev tracker to go straight to ANet comments, and then you can click on the comment to expand the conversation to see everything in that sub thread. I think.

Just a Flesh Wound does sterling service by abstracting all the dev comments with enough player text surrounding them for context and putting them in a forum thread here. I think Flesh is gonna be fairly busy tomorrow!

TexZero.7910:

Is it really something to celebrate though?

On the face of it, it would seem not. Maybe it’s because the 28th is the 11th anniversary of the release of the original GW?

Someone mentioned the cost of leveling Sribe will be reduced.. if that is the case I want my money back.
As for WvW, I honestly hope there will be more than just reverting back to snowball maps because that alone is just a cowering attempt to keep members active, but at least a step in the right direction.
PvE loot is atrocious.. no hope for that in my books.
Player weighted rewards from zommoros and some other areas favor the bot farmers, shame, huge shame on that, total game failure.
PvP is rubbish with the current system in place.
Can only hope for some light at the end of this tunnel as myself and many of my friends want to continue our run in Guild Wars 2 and beyond as we have since beta GW1.
Lack of information for future releases surely puts a dampener on enthusiasm at the present moment.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Windemere.6534:

Excellent, I really appreciate it when you guys make yourselves available for these. Good luck with the update!

I’m personally really looking forward to it, as a ArenaNet team member and as a daily player. Can’t wait to see what you guys think!

2PM is 14:00? (I’ll never remember that AM/PM stuff…) Add 9 hours, I think I’ll be nicely asleep by then. I might read about it the next day…

Xupok Moonheart.9412:

Someone mentioned the cost of leveling Sribe will be reduced.. if that is the case I want my money back.
As for WvW, I honestly hope there will be more than just reverting back to snowball maps because that alone is just a cowering attempt to keep members active, but at least a step in the right direction.
PvE loot is atrocious.. no hope for that in my books.
Player weighted rewards from zommoros and some other areas favor the bot farmers, shame, huge shame on that, total game failure.
PvP is rubbish with the current system in place.
Can only hope for some light at the end of this tunnel as myself and many of my friends want to continue our run in Guild Wars 2 and beyond as we have since beta GW1.
Lack of information for future releases surely puts a dampener on enthusiasm at the present moment.

No reverting to ‘snowball’ maps, so there’s no need to worry about that. I don’t know where people get this from…

Fluffball.8307:

ekarat.1085:

As a secondary question, is the main difference between the function of these forums and reddit that the forums are chronological and that reddit is hierarchical by reply?

Reddit comments are ranked by popularity, which makes it effectively useless for a real conversation. Usually off topic jokes are at the top of the page, and dissenting opinions backed by facts are made invisible.

They are ranked by popularity by default, but you can change the order to chronological ascending/descending, rising popularity, and most controversial. In fact, it makes it far better than a forum like this for a conversation specifically because comment replies are nested in the parent comment instead of further down the page.

Also, anything a developer replies to will basically get thrown to the top. Normal reddit threads tend to have the issues you describe but AMA and Q&A formats do not have this issue.

♪ ♪ Celebrate, celebrate. Dance to the Dev posts. ♪ ♪

Now if only I knew WHY I was celebrating some update with (from what I can tell) mostly QoL features. Unless they’re going to add new content this is an odd announcement.

Gaile. I honestly adore you. I do. Ever since getting to “know” you from GW1 days and events. This is why I say this with the utmost sincerity: please stop putting a target on your back for Anet. Let those making these decisions catch more of the heat. They lean on you because they know we genuinely like you.

Best of Luck to all of us…

(Knocks on Wood)

Yeah, I’m disappointed. I thought this thread was going to outline a new festival or something or maybe more info on the update.

Not just a Q & A.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Instead, I’ve been reading the update notes

Alright people, lets start the bribes.

I bid 4 waffles for the info!

PyrateSilly.4710:

She’s explained this before ….. reddit just makes it easier for chatting than here.

Then how about changing this forum to make it as easy to communicate. The entire point of a company having its own forums is for the company to communicate with its customers and customers to communicate with themselves.

Classic anet, they always go the absurd route to solve its problems.

I dont really know what exactly they are going to talk about tomorrow when their trailer shows that there doesnt seem to be anything to hold some special discussion for. If there really is content in the patch tomorrow that wasn’t in the trailer then like forums they really don’’t know what a trailer is for either.

Waffles? Might have a chance … but not if someone is able to offer, hmm, three red frogs on a rock …

(If they have readable patch notes, maybe they can put them up before the game message “a new build is available” goes out? I mean, at whatever point they aren’t editing them any more?)

Let’s celebrate my vanquishing the forum bug!