Guild Wars 2

There has been a lot of talk about collaborative development, and how much player feedback shapes the game coming, from devs as of the last few months.

The problem that a lot of GW2 community members have (from posts on official forums, facebook, reddit, guru, and a few other fan sites) is that it is largely a one way line. We scream into a void and get nothing back. Six months later a change vaguely resembling the thing we were discussing comes along and we are left wondering whether we influenced that or if it was just a coincidence.

One developer was actually acting in the spirit of collaboration. He was openly discussing how a piece of content was designed, why some things worked the way they did, and acknowledged players directly when he thought they brought up valid concerns. That open communication led to a patch that was a true collaboration between the dev and players and it made that event much smoother for players of different skill levels. And then he was stopped. Valid reasons as the company may have had, they put the kibash on something that was productive on both ends.

My suggestion to the dev, or even PR teams, is to adopt an activity currently used by another studio and developer that, itself, has already borrowed heavily from GW2’s original design principles.

They have a weekly round-table, where a question that is currently on the whiteboard gets asked to the community with poll style options to answer and at the end of the week there is a short video where devs (Chris and Colin would be my nominees) discuss the popular choices from players and what those could mean. There is no guarantee that they will implement whatever was voted on for a variety of reasons (budget, man power, time constraints, complexity); however, this creates a limited, but very direct and transparent line of communication. Anet gets valuable data (I heard Mike O likes data) and players get to feel involved. It’s a win win for everyone.

There is real merit behind this process and I hope the guys over at the studio at least toss the idea around and give it serious consideration.

Transparency is always nice. I’d love to see how we directly affect things. Having something we can vote on and then they discuss is something I’ve sort of wanted ever since the Evon-Keil thing… but outside of the game (where real choices can be made without immersion breakers in game).

When it makes sense to have the vote in game (it doesn’t break immersion), then I’m all for it, but I can’t help but think that there might be a lot of big things that could be decided upon outside of it (Help direct priorities of new features or content? Not saying we should directly affect this… In the end it’s ANets call, but I’d like to give my input as I’m sure many others would as well.. and if they find the data they gather is useful to that end, great!).

I agree whole heartedly. Communication is always good. Of course the devs will always go with things they themselves think work and sound cool but the community helping to frame the discussion between devs of where to go with the game would be universally loved.

Communication is a good thing. It’s a huge part of what makes any relationship work, and let’s face it…there’s a relationship here, between gamers and the devs that make the game that the gamers play.

I did suggest during the last Twitch stream that they maybe do some Q&A streams on occasion. Maybe start a thread or something where people can post questions they would like answered. Select some of the ones that they can answer (obviously people will want answers to things they might not necessarily be able to talk about right away, they can go on a backlog of ‘to be answered’) and then do 30 minutes of just straight forward answers. The mod did seem to think it might be an ok idea and was going to pass it along, whether anything comes of it… I guess we’ll see.

But things like that go a long way when it comes to reassuring people that they are listening, and keeping us in mind.