Guild Wars 2

Sarrs.4831:

I’m genuinely curious what posted ideas were actually actioned on.

At any rate, I don’t see anything really changing because a CM posted something on the forums. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to take away from this. That you’re listening?… I don’t see it. That you’re going to start listening more in future? Well, some real discussion would actually go a long way to that.

We’re apparently giving you ideas, but we really have no way of identifying which of our contributions are beneficial and which ones are wasted time on our part. Do we have a real impact on the development of the game, or not?

what I know off the top of my head is the following:

- Materials for crafting accessable from the bank
- discoveries in crafting using material directly from the bank
- Skins earnable ingame not just through BLC
- FOV changes
- Ascended gear / FotM (yes it was actually requested)
- Changes to the daily not once but twice
- costume brawl left in permanently
- guild missions
- super adventure box world 2 nerfs/fixes
- rotating mini games
- LS becoming more permanent then temporary
- Champions being more valueable
- Harder content
- Progression in WvW
- sPvP crafting
- dailies from sPvP
- Some/Many of the class changes? impossible to say which one are based on feedback or not
- Alternative way to acquire precursor (not in get but promised)
- MF and AR coming to fractals later on (didnt happen yet but was promised)

I dont know I am sure there are more but these are the ones I can think off.

Come on its not like they never acted on feedback, plenty of example when they did!

Skan.5301:

We all had expectations that weren’t fufilled over the course of a year. People didn’t start getting angry overnight. It was because of the actions the devs took that caused it. Over a year of short comings and other nonsense is what sparked all of this.

I would argue it’s the lack of communication from the developers – or worse, outright lies (we expect everyone to have exotic gear by the time they reach the level cap; we didn’t expect players to get exotic gear so quickly) – that’s caused most of the contentiousness we’ve got on the forums these days.

I’m wondering about a way to draw the attentions of forum posters to the sorts of behaviours ANET (and other posters) like seeing. At the moment, ANET and I guess whatever the code of conduct is called asks us to not post in such-and-such ways, and to instead post in other ways.
However the posts meeting the former criteria get actioned by the moderators and likely deleted or edited, whereas the latter posts get up-voted by other forum-goers, but nothing is communicated from ANET about how well it resembled their ideal post.
Please forgive me for making a school-like post, but I wonder how well a badge system would go in saying to forum-readers “Hey! We (ANET) really appreciated the way this post was written in x way!”. I picture a traid type badge system awardable by the forum moderators and community managers. Posts could be given 1-3 of any of these themes:
1/ “Respectful” / “Constructive” / “Like Sylvari Grace”
2/ “Specific” / “Detailed” / “Like a Charr Design Plan”
3/ “Novel” / “Creative” / “Original” / “Like Asuran Ingenuity”
etc etc
Not every post needs such an evaluation, but you’d expect every OP to be considered and there also to be a way on the moderator’s side of the forums (not the public side) for showing when they’ve been considered but overlooked for badges. We’d expect to see at least one badge in an entire thread, probably expect to see, on mouse-over, who awarded the badge, too.

Part of this method is about rewarding the favorable behaviours, part is about drawing the attention of everyone else to them, and part is about signalling to the community that we’re being heard.
Finally, people who earn a badge could get a sweet, temporary cosmetic glow in game or a temporary cosmetic item to use when they want to. It’d encourage people to try for the badges in their posts, and also encourage players to try the forums out and express their views.

Did any Anet employees play City of Heroes at all? Cause they were doing “Issues” before Living Story was a twinkle in Colin’s eye. Living Story isn’t groundbreaking, it’s just a gimmicky way to funnel content into the gem store and force people to log in daily/weekly to get things before they go away.

Oh any by the way, Co* Issues brought permanent content. Just FYI.

Varmyr.4253:

And I am going to be honest here, the last thing I want to hear as an answer to this problem is something starting with “hopefully”. This should be a clear yes or no, being one of the pillars of the game. I realize a clear answer can result in a loss of players, but vague answers won’t do much good either in the long term.

Thing is you cannot take a hard stance if you claim to listen to feedback.
They could come out and say we will never have a new tier but what happens if down the line a lot of people finish gearing up their alts and demand a new tier ? Do you ignore their voice just because you promised never to have a new tier and thus you’d be lieing about listening to the community or do you follow it through despite promising not to?

If you’re being honest to your community you can never do what you want them to do. They can only tell you their stance right now which is they dont want to add a new tier but they cannot promise it because they dont know if the situation changes in the future and they’d need to do it for best interest of the game.

@Chris Whiteside – if ArenaNet wants the best collaboration from the community, there is one simple thing that they are missing:

Communication.

We don’t know why many of your decisions were made, or what your goals are, or why certain issues appear to be being ignored (I say appear, because I doubt that they are), but without communication, there’s absolutely no way to tell. Explaining why you think the current Teq design is a good thing, for example, would be interesting (particularly the 1hr spawn window and effectively forcing all serious players into organised overflows), or why, in PvE, zerker gear is still so much more optimal than other gearing.

Pavel.8531:

Am I the only one that thinks this post was just one lengthy “throw some dust in their eyes” damage control type? Because after months of ignoring feedback and even stating that the forums are a vocal minority so they don’t care for them as long as they don’t notice players leaving the game it is hard for me to just accept this on blind faith.

you are not the only one! I bet most of us noticed that by reading just the first paragraph.
If you look back its A-net’s modus operandi.

I do agree with you chris. There are sadly a lot of … posts around, i feel with you guys if u have to actually borher reading them. But there are also a lot of nice constructive posts around i think, to bad some of them never get an awnser tho i always just hope they got seen. So far i am totally pleased with the game. Gave me a lot of fun times and still does. Looking forward espacially to any PvP Patch. Not everyone can be pleased everytime.

All I got from this is:

“If you’re passionate enough about something to get angry about it, you don’t deserve to have an opinion about it.”

I find this thread quite amusing.
Dev makes a “copy – paste” post to discourage inflammatory and derogatory posts by forum members, results = oil to the fire and achieves quite the opposite.
And now the well known ArenaNet development team pattern: Lesson learned from it? Hardly any at all. No disrespect intended.
Don’t mind me tho’, just observing.

If Anet really wanted to curb the stupid and rage-filled posts, they might want to start banning people from the forums more often.

Or better yet, make a subforum specifically for feedback that has strict grammar/spelling/tone rules.

There should be a name for the syndrome that Arenanet seem to be suffering (like Stockholm Syndrome for example) where a business dealing with the public begins to suffer resentment and anger towards its (paying) customer base. This syndrome is much more common in the gaming industry.

The relationship starts “all smiles” during the development process, begins to deteriorate at beta, further deteriorates at launch (mainly because some paying customers do not appreciate what was delivered, which is probably no-ones fault).

Then you have a major change in a largely settled game, e.g. ascended items, bloodlust buff, leagues or whatever which inflames a large section of the customer base. The customer has invested time and money in to the game (albeit less than the dev team has, but the customers time is their own and their money can be spent on whatever they like). During the initial period the customer develops a great deal of passion for the game and this change, well it feels like a betrayal.

The dev team, like the customers, are not perfect. They make mistakes, they pay too much attention to what the metrics tell them and largely ignore even the constructive posts on the forum. They fall back on the fact that the forum, reddit or whatever else is really just a small part of the community out there and most of that is full of jerks. Entirely missing the point that, by and large, happy gamers spend more time in game and unhappy gamers take to the forums to complain.

So when you see anger and disrespect it should tell you that you inflamed a great passion in these players but you let them down somehow. Those with the greatest investment (time, money, past games with Anet) will shout the loudest.

I’m a good example. I’m SO angry at the continuing WvWvW changes (siegewars, bloodlust, ill thought out leagues, ignoring GvG, giving PvE players everything on a plate, how long till we got ascended and when, if ever, can we get all ascended there etc). This is because I spent 3 – 4 hours playing WvWvW every day, bought three accounts and spent upwards of $1500 in the gem store.

I have no personal animosity to anyone at ArenaNet, even Devon Carver (I’m sure he is a reallly nice guy, I probably have more animosity to whoever decided he should be appointed to that job as it speaks volumes relating to the impotance Anet gives WvWvW in the grand scheme of things). But I reserve the right to speak my mind and get angry when so many of us have been beating our heads bloody against the Anet wall making constructive posts for over a year that are almost always ignored. Often there are good reasons, most of the time it comes across as it doesn’t suit “your vision” of WvWvW or you just don’t care enough.

So to all ArenaNet developers and staff – you really shouldn’t take it personally. Listen MUCH more to your paying customers, take metrics with a pinch of salt (hey check out Warhammer for how metrics went down for them?) and start putting real decision makers in the firing line instead of PR bots.

This community interaction thing is, after all, a two way street.

well we all know those threads about ascended items feedback ….
Proved almost everyone was against it….yet we had the most grindy stuff we could ever fear of introduced short after.

P.S: i swear i will buy gems regularly if for once they admit their mistakes and revert this ascended grind or find a solution to make it acceptable….
I’ dlike to play wjat i want …but if i do, i can t have enough gold to get equipment ….

First step to building a stronger relationship between developers and the community: admit your mistakes.

Instead of writing this post ArenaNet you should have made a post admitting the hundreds of mistakes you have made over the past year, apologise, then promise to make things better.

Arnath.2319:

First step to building a stronger relationship between developers and the community: admit your mistakes.

Instead of writing this post ArenaNet you should have made a post admitting the hundreds of mistakes you have made over the past year, apologise, then promise to make things better.

And go under a FFXIV:ARR like thing?

Because if we would really start to list all the issues, you’d end up with some very core things to fix.

Not going to happen, imo.

Gw2 place in MMO history: “The missed opportunity”.
This game could have been so much more, so much better.
Shame.

I have mixed feelings about this post. While I appreciate the sentiment and do think some people need to chill out (including myself probably on some occasions), his post also came across as attempting to downplay or deflect their own responsibility for the tone of the forums, which is quite large.

The fact is it came off as a little condescending and accusatory, like they’re attempting to shift blame to the paying customer base for caring about the game and getting irate when something doesn’t meet the expectations that have been set. They as a company have at least as much, if not more, responsibility for this than individual players do- not in the sense that they need to mindlessly center their develompent around players’ concerns and criticisms, but that they should keep communication channels wide open and explain their motivations for why something is being done or not being done that the community has strong feelings about.

The LW genuinely does not seem to be that popular, but they keep pushing it. Why, just for the sake of being innovative? There are a lot of conceptual problems with it that make it very dubious at best, but nothing is ever talked about concerning it. Nobody really wanted Ascended stuff – why was it done? Why was there never an admission of mistake and/or an attempt to correct? There are lots of class/weapon balance issues, but updates are painfully slow and extremely myopic. The list goes on.

Xcom.1926:

ASB.4295:

Jackie.1829:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/What-A-Dev-Think-About-The-Official-Forums

Here’s a mirror: http://www.guildwars2guru.com/arenanet-tracker/topic/268673-what-a-dev-think-about-the-official-forums/

That is pretty amusing.

Had to double check the dates for a second.

When you see “we need to do a better job communicating” the second time in as many months – especially when it’s practically a copy-paste statement like that – it just comes across as lip service. Being disingenuous with your customer base is worse than a lack of communication.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

The communication pipeline in most part lacks one very important component. Specifically, ArenaNet having more time to feedback on your ideas, concerns and our own plans.

Hi and thank you, I also agree that sometimes it feels that ANet does not have enough time to respond with feedback to our ideas or concerns. In many posts I’ve seen the standard answer formed something like this:
(Acknowledgement that Anet is moving towards fixing/resolving this, usually in one line)
(Link provided to the blog post made about how GW2 is moving toward overall goals for this year).
Problem is sometimes that form of answer doesn’t necessarily address the problem in that thread. The link is the “5,000 mile view” of what GW2 is doing.

On the flip side we’ve had great answers from you folks in red about the UI for Living Story and how to bring in the recap ideas we’ve pitched. It wasn’t in exact minutia but it did overall show that just slapping in a “Here’s the story” does take work and will take quite a bit of time.
So there is some progress for certain topic communications, but others might need some refocusing.

ArenaNet has been extremely busy of late listening to you all
(snipped text)
We are also trying to forge a truly ‘Living World’. Therefore with your continued support, and patience we can continue to break new ground. Not just with world of Tyria, but with the method by which we build worlds ‘together’.

ANet is busy, the more sensible posters here realize that. You can actually learn from the community and engage in building a world together with us. For example: Lost Shores was a bust, then SouthSun made it a bit more fun or at least redeemed the new zone in my eyes. Flame and Frost moved so slowly at the beginning, but you folks at Anet said to wait a bit and now I love Rox and Braham.

The problem is with some of the extra irons in your fires we still don’t know where they are going. What is Kiel doing now? Is Gnashblade planning anything after the elections? How is the new Fractal coming along? What were you thinking with Scarlet? Now that last one isn’t put to a mocking tone, but really what is the thought process in creating her? Could we have someone in the Lore team or whatever departments take some time and write up a blog entry about some things they did with her?

Sometimes seeing a character from not only the In Universe view, but also the Behind the Scenes view helps folks enjoy or at least understand the journey more.

Maybe tell us what’s in testing phase 2 or 3 at the moment? Basically leak to the forums before reddit or some other site gets a hold of the info. Yes the virulent members of the forum might still complain, but honestly they could go sip tea with Shiro for all I care.

Could we see another form of the beta survey for certain events in game? I’d love to see something like that for, say, Twilight Assault. This way you can get direct data from us as we just finished it and we get that feeling we’ve contributed.

Therefore you have to ask yourself: Is this a journey you want to take? ….

I can answer that I don’t mind the journey, but I’m tired of hitting the same potholes all the time with ANet. I understand that development takes time. I also understand that your teams are cycling through releases. I also acknowledge and praise the hard work they do. I develop software as well so sometimes we do get that dreadful feeling of wondering “why are we still doing this same mistake?” Only to realize its the time crunch that kills us.

With that said, I hope ANet does publically acknowledge some day that maybe some releases shouldn’t just have a shelf life of two weeks. At a compromise one could call a specific release Part 1 of (insert number) showing us that there’s a progression of story and it will continue next release.
Maybe for the more grand releases they still continue in game for the month and another smaller release is played out later or ties with it. Two releases tied together as one and lasting a month can be done. We’ve seen how Super Adventure Box still continued while “Boss Week” (clever pun) was going on.

I love the game, I’ve defended it, and I have also not agreed with some things.
When ANet said “Hey we’re releasing two week content” I grabbed the popcorn because I thought this would be an interesting experiment. Some releases worked well, some needed more time to play out or more time to debug.

I hope that as we move into the new year with the current stable of seasonal releases under your belt now we can move on to bigger releases. Hopefully the two week time table could be stretched a bit for some; allowing folks the proper time and scale to appreciate where not only the story, but the game itself, is going.

I’ve seen tons of great constructive criticism and suggestions here with 0 Arena Net replies.
They might be reading them, but, that’s it. Just reading them.

Galen Grey.4709:

Thing is you cannot take a hard stance if you claim to listen to feedback.
They could come out and say we will never have a new tier but what happens if down the line a lot of people finish gearing up their alts and demand a new tier ? Do you ignore their voice just because you promised never to have a new tier and thus you’d be lieing about listening to the community or do you follow it through despite promising not to?

That is exactly what you do. You need to take a hard stance on design decisions that are the pillars of your game and you can not under any circumstances back out on them. They did that back in november and look where we are because ANET wanted to please everyone. They chose a path almost every other MMO had chosen. The easy way out with mechanics like grind, dailies and content made only to keep people playing. The EXACT thing that they promised us to stay away from.

Yes you need to ignore a lot of people. But unfortunately ANET chose to ignore their core playerbase. Not only have they ignored the people that supported them for over half a decade and made GW2 possible in the first place but they also lied to us. Take a wild guess why we are not happy with a product that is not as advertised.

Personally i think i m done wasting my time by giving feedback to a wall. ANET has over the course of a year proven that they just do not get the idea of a game that was presented to us over the course of 5 years with numerous blog posts and interviews. They ve repeatedly ignored feedback or even bothered to ask for it, disregarded performance and drove the “living” world into a joke.

ViRuE.3612:

There should be a name for the syndrome that Arenanet seem to be suffering (like Stockholm Syndrome for example) where a business dealing with the public begins to suffer resentment and anger towards its (paying) customer base. This syndrome is much more common in the gaming industry.

The relationship starts “all smiles” during the development process, begins to deteriorate at beta, further deteriorates at launch (mainly because some paying customers do not appreciate what was delivered, which is probably no-ones fault).

Then you have a major change in a largely settled game, e.g. ascended items, bloodlust buff, leagues or whatever which inflames a large section of the customer base. The customer has invested time and money in to the game (albeit less than the dev team has, but the customers time is their own and their money can be spent on whatever they like). During the initial period the customer develops a great deal of passion for the game and this change, well it feels like a betrayal.

The dev team, like the customers, are not perfect. They make mistakes, they pay too much attention to what the metrics tell them and largely ignore even the constructive posts on the forum. They fall back on the fact that the forum, reddit or whatever else is really just a small part of the community out there and most of that is full of jerks. Entirely missing the point that, by and large, happy gamers spend more time in game and unhappy gamers take to the forums to complain.

So when you see anger and disrespect it should tell you that you inflamed a great passion in these players but you let them down somehow. Those with the greatest investment (time, money, past games with Anet) will shout the loudest.

I’m a good example. I’m SO angry at the continuing WvWvW changes (siegewars, bloodlust, ill thought out leagues, ignoring GvG, giving PvE players everything on a plate, how long till we got ascended and when, if ever, can we get all ascended there etc). This is because I spent 3 – 4 hours playing WvWvW every day, bought three accounts and spent upwards of $1500 in the gem store.

I have no personal animosity to anyone at ArenaNet, even Devon Carver (I’m sure he is a reallly nice guy, I probably have more animosity to whoever decided he should be appointed to that job as it speaks volumes relating to the impotance Anet gives WvWvW in the grand scheme of things). But I reserve the right to speak my mind and get angry when so many of us have been beating our heads bloody against the Anet wall making constructive posts for over a year that are almost always ignored. Often there are good reasons, most of the time it comes across as it doesn’t suit “your vision” of WvWvW or you just don’t care enough.

So to all ArenaNet developers and staff – you really shouldn’t take it personally. Listen MUCH more to your paying customers, take metrics with a pinch of salt (hey check out Warhammer for how metrics went down for them?) and start putting real decision makers in the firing line instead of PR bots.

This community interaction thing is, after all, a two way street.

I love you and your post. Everything I’ve ever wanted to say but not eloquent or organized enough to say it.

Zumy.6318:

Listen to your PvP/WvW playerbase and stop releasing things that go in a completely different direction.

We want less zerging, less passive effects (do not support skilled play), less broken/abusable mechanics (perplexity spam/stunspam/fearchain/stealthspam), less matchup imbalance, less orbbuffs V2.0, more entertaining/durable/thrilling sieges with actual fights and not groundtargetted spam, less siegeweapon overload and more rewards for skilled play.

People who play WvW and PvP dont need to get all the skill taken out of their hands. This game is getting easier and easier and classes get pushed into few OP builds more and more. Even when there is an issue with a mechanic being broken (e.g. warriors durability) the class gets buffed even more in the same direction (shouts/lungcapacity buff inc).
Yes 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 5v5, 10v10 and 20vs20 do matter! Because the players want it! And condition/cc spam are a big issue right here. They support the thoughtless game of numbers.
Players in WvW are in fact players that either like PvP in an open world environment or even siegebased or on the other hand dont care for the gamemode and just follow the loot train, no matter where they get it. Orr, Frostgorge trainframing, Queensdale or for Karma in WvW.

Why do we see more and more support for skillfree gameplay and none at all for people that actually play WvW for what we all took it? The open PvP heritage of DAoC and WAR? Move the PvE/Lootfocussed players back to the Living/Open world and please start enhancing the PvP experience the real group of interest for WvW wants.

How can it be that the needs of players that do not mind blindfolding aoe overload, huge fps-drops, insane skilllag and teleporting/warping during primetime in the mid&upper tiers as long as they get bags, currency and XP of any kind (blue, yellow, purple), are put above the needs/wishes of players that actually care about player versus player and guild/world versus guild/world interaction? Please stop protecting grinders from PvP-focussed “predators”. Give people the tools to kill the “blob” without counterblobbing or siegeoverloading the zone. Give us a laggfree game during primetime. Carebearing the “casuals” does no single favour to the gamemode and rewarding stacking in monozonetrains is killing the PvP in WvW.

Let sieges take hours to be finished for the people who love that. Siegeweapons deal way to much damage to structures and golemrushes are just overkill.
Once you give us the tools to bust the blob and make sieges of a reasonable length for the people who actually play WvW for what it was intended (massive sieges and massive !PvP!), the blobning problem will solve itself as the players that are abusing this gamemode for the simple fact of grinding will move on back to what they usually even like better. Grinding in the open world PvE.

Make WvW a better place for the people who came from WAR, Aion, Rift, SWOTOR, etc. hoping to finally find a gamemode full of epic fights between worlds and got rewarded with a zergfest with just and only epic and massive performance issues.

Do this for WvW. The people who dont like it will stick to the other modes of the game anyway. Afterall there is loot too.

And please please pretty please separate WvW from tPvP and PvE. So many gamebreaking changes to classmechanics that vastly have affected the PvP experience in WvW only happened to either balance PvE or a PvP oriented capture mode.

Great article. Agree with everything you said except for two things: 1. that people want less zergs. I think you have a split. Some people want to roam. Some people like to zerg. Some people like middle sizes groups. Maps should cater to all types.

2. I’m a bit worried about breaking balancing between PvP and WvW and PvE. I think that just gets confusing for players to remember the differences. In general, the main issues that you mention CC and conditions are a problem across all game modes.

ViRuE.3612:

There should be a name for the syndrome that Arenanet seem to be suffering (like Stockholm Syndrome for example) where a business dealing with the public begins to suffer resentment and anger towards its (paying) customer base. This syndrome is much more common in the gaming industry.

The relationship starts “all smiles” during the development process, begins to deteriorate at beta, further deteriorates at launch (mainly because some paying customers do not appreciate what was delivered, which is probably no-ones fault).

Then you have a major change in a largely settled game, e.g. ascended items, bloodlust buff, leagues or whatever which inflames a large section of the customer base. The customer has invested time and money in to the game (albeit less than the dev team has, but the customers time is their own and their money can be spent on whatever they like). During the initial period the customer develops a great deal of passion for the game and this change, well it feels like a betrayal.

The dev team, like the customers, are not perfect. They make mistakes, they pay too much attention to what the metrics tell them and largely ignore even the constructive posts on the forum. They fall back on the fact that the forum, reddit or whatever else is really just a small part of the community out there and most of that is full of jerks. Entirely missing the point that, by and large, happy gamers spend more time in game and unhappy gamers take to the forums to complain.

So when you see anger and disrespect it should tell you that you inflamed a great passion in these players but you let them down somehow. Those with the greatest investment (time, money, past games with Anet) will shout the loudest.

I’m a good example. I’m SO angry at the continuing WvWvW changes (siegewars, bloodlust, ill thought out leagues, ignoring GvG, giving PvE players everything on a plate, how long till we got ascended and when, if ever, can we get all ascended there etc). This is because I spent 3 – 4 hours playing WvWvW every day, bought three accounts and spent upwards of $1500 in the gem store.

I have no personal animosity to anyone at ArenaNet, even Devon Carver (I’m sure he is a reallly nice guy, I probably have more animosity to whoever decided he should be appointed to that job as it speaks volumes relating to the impotance Anet gives WvWvW in the grand scheme of things). But I reserve the right to speak my mind and get angry when so many of us have been beating our heads bloody against the Anet wall making constructive posts for over a year that are almost always ignored. Often there are good reasons, most of the time it comes across as it doesn’t suit “your vision” of WvWvW or you just don’t care enough.

So to all ArenaNet developers and staff – you really shouldn’t take it personally. Listen MUCH more to your paying customers, take metrics with a pinch of salt (hey check out Warhammer for how metrics went down for them?) and start putting real decision makers in the firing line instead of PR bots.

This community interaction thing is, after all, a two way street.

wow. +1. If ANET only pays attention to one message in this entire thread, I hope it is this one.

Chris Whiteside,

It seems to me a lot of the negative feedback has stemmed from the original pillars changing from the original manifesto video. You guys always say that you are an iterative design company. I respect that. The problem is, a lot of times you guys don’t tell us when that philosophy changes. We just get to see it when you release it. I think if you truly desire a discourse with us in a collaborative environment, then when you make the decision to change a pillar, you need to let us know.

We in the community need to get over when a pillar changes though. A LOT of us are hung up on design things from 2008-2010 etc. Those things are gone and we need to move on. If we feel we can’t move on and accept this new direction, we need to remember it is an MMO and there are literally TONS of MMOs vying for our dollars. Maybe some of us need to change MMOs. Either way, the communication channels need to be handled in a better way and that starts with ArenaNet, because ultimately, they make the decisions that shape the game. We offer feedback, but in order to offer feedback, we have to know in advance of a decision being implemented. Our feedback to something that gets released that we never knew was going to be in the game is pointless. If it’s actually “collaborative” and that isn’t just PR speak, we need to know a few things like:

When a design philosophy (a pillar) changes we need to know about it when it changes, not when you implement it in game(the skill update preview for the 15th of October is a good example of it being handled in a collaborative way)(I think the Ascended stuff was handled poorly in terms of communication and would be a good example of it being handled poorly).

Another example is transparency. The “Cantha District” vs. “Arts District” is a big one. It was officially called the Cantha District by ArenaNet people and then covered up. You guys at ArenaNet are usually pretty straightforward when it comes to being transparent, that one was a pretty big gaffe.

As a community we need to stay away from idle threats, people calling for people getting fired, and totally reprehensible comments being aimed at devs and other forum users. Blind rage is ludicrous and if we want real communication we need to talk, not just spew hate and anger.

Iason Evan.3806:

…
As a community we need to stay away from idle threats, people calling for people getting fired, and totally reprehensible comments being aimed at devs and other forum users. Blind rage is ludicrous and if we want real communication we need to talk, not just spew hate and anger.

No idle threats and no rage posts about perpetual class nerfs/buffs/changes (aka neverending open beta). I simply cannot afford the time required to grind Ascended Weapons and upcoming Ascended armor and hence moved on from GW2.

The devs need not accept feedback from a disgruntled individual or a group of like-minded individuals if the game is indeed growing in concurrency numbers.

Shakkara.2641:

Well thanks for reaching out to the community, but over the past year I have seen ArenaNet heading exactly opposite the direction that I (I’ll just speak for myself) would like the game to evolve in.

The reason I bought the game is for two reasons:

• The Manifesto
• Because I loved Guild Wars 1

Because of the above, I expected certain things from Guild Wars 2:

• Extreme horizontal progression where item stats do not matter and progression is aesthetics only, and you can get max stat items in less than an hour – NO GRIND, NO GEAR THREADMILL
• Extremely deep character customization, making me think what skills to bring and what gear to equip on my character
• Extremely fast to max level and max gear a character to max to make it easy to have alts (takes me 3 hours to get a GW1 char to 20 and have him kitted out)
• An enviornment permanently shaped by players, not devs
• Exciting, carefully balanced PVP

Thus in my eyes, the devs have done a few things wrong and are continuing to do things wrong:

• High level cap that takes ages to reach (in my opinion, having levels in the first place is a mistake)
• Restricting players to a single class and having very very few skills and traits per class – thus very few options to make interesting builds
• The boring stat system (power, vitality, etc) and the item system that came out of it that only offer simple +stats, instead of ‘cool’ situational bonusses such as +20% enchantment length or +10 armor when in a stance. In my opinion, stats can and should be completely removed from GW2 and such bonusses on items should be replaced by a whole boatloat of diverse situational bonusses that are a direct part of the characterbuilding/planning process.
• The legendary and ascended items. Exotics were just about right, maybe even a bit too hard to obtain in the first place. I don’t want a gear grind; this game shouldn’t be about obtaining items with stupid stats in my opinion. Again, items should be diverse in what they do and not have bigger numbers.
• PVP and WVW just isn’t interesting at the moment, but I think that is largely because of the above points, with the inability to make interesting and diverse character builds and the game focussing highly on the base stats.
• The dynamic events don’t care that I’m there, because next hour they just replay and reset themselves. Thus they lack meaning and epicness.

I personally don’t think that temporary content is the biggest issue, I have much more problems with the fundamental game mechanics (stats, skills, items, progression).

What I personally want to play this game for:

• Discovering new character builds that noone else found before (not possible)
• Equipping my character with fancy clothing, armor and weapons in combinations that almost noone else has (already possible)
• Influence the way the server evolves and make it different from other servers (not possible, outside the elections we had, which were not per-server unfortunately)
• Build a nice place for myself, such as a nice house, and haul loot and decorations in there (not possible, home instance is terrible because other players cannot easily see it, and it is not customizable)
• Compete with others based on creativity and skill (not really possible)
• Challenge myself playing multiple accounts and doing all of the above with them (not possible unless using outlawed programs. In GW1 it was possible because game had much easier controls. GW2 is the only MMO that I have only one account in, normally I have 3 accounts…)

If ArenaNet is seriously reading and considering the feedback they receive on the forums, then I hope they see Shakkara’s comment. More importantly, I hope they reflect on it. I haven’t completely given up hope on this game—GW is dear to my heart, and GW2 has incredible potential—but I am losing faith.

Arnath.2319:

First step to building a stronger relationship between developers and the community: admit your mistakes.

Instead of writing this post ArenaNet you should have made a post admitting the hundreds of mistakes you have made over the past year, apologise, then promise to make things better.

Because everything that you think is a mistake is a mistake? I think not.

Calling something a mistake doesn’t make it one. To be sure, mistakes have been made…but that’s true of every game, every person on the planet. Some mistakes are probably more significant than others, but I’m 100% sure everything people call a mistake isn’t one.

nethykins.7986:

Kuzzi.2198:

@Chris Whiteside

As an active player and forum reader/contributor since Beta, I have definitely noticed the many improvements to the game that originated from the community and ended up being implemented. I respect Anet for seriously taking player suggestions and shaping their game in the direction that the community wants to see it go.

However, I think the turn-around time from when suggestions are made to when they are released (if they are released) is something that needs serious improvement. A couple examples that come to mind are Edit Guild Message of the Day and Targeting without a party. Both are great quality of life improvements and I’m very glad that they are now part of the game, but I’m disappointed that it took over a year for them to be implemented even though they were constantly being suggested since day 1.

There are still many similar things for which the community has asked over and over, but have not even received an official response. Two which are in my opinion most important and most frequently suggested are Guild Features and TP Search Options. I feel that after one year, Anet has no excuse for not at the very least addressing these issues. Is that something we can ask for right now?

As for continual improvements, I think a good way to get a feel for what the community really wants is to monitor Reddit, as quality of life game improvement suggestions usually surface to the front page every couple days. Seeing a greater percentage of them come to life would really solidify this Dev-Community bond that you are describing.

While they’re at it, it’d be awesome if those people who contributed got a little shout out (not everyone, but ya know…highlighting the MAIN reddit post that caused the shift or gave the most valuable feedback) and saying “This -Link- was asked of us XX months ago. We kept an eye on it and thought we’d share our progress”

The problem with ANet is that, the secrecy for things that we are really eager to see, is not working in their favour. They’re attempting to create suspense.

You can’t be excited for something you know nothing about.

They can’t use suggestions from third party sites because they don’t have permission to do so. The official forums however require you to accept an agreement which allows them to harvest ideas from it.

I’m sure third party sites are great for gauging the temperature of the community and judging how content is received by different communities, but they can’t take suggestions from it. That’s part of the reason why GW2 has official forums.

I was just thinking about how angry people seem on this forum. For example, yesterday there were threads complaining about the combat system (ridiculous in my opinion)… This made me think back to my days playing other MMOs. Here is a little story for you:

I used to play Rift. Rift was a game that tried to make things as complicated and hardcore as possible. There was one class (thief or assassin or something like that) where you could perform various combos. Main hand, off hand, main hand, finisher, that kind of thing. 1, 2, 1, 3 or 4. In PVE this was fun, but in PVP I found myself quickly falling behind. Eventually I realized that the reason I was falling behind was because the game had the ability to program macros. Eventually I figured out the following macro:

-Ignore error messages.
-Attempt skill 3 (finisher). It will either give you an error message (unavailable) or start the skill.
-Attempt skill 2 (off hand). It will either give you an error message (unavailable, or currently performing skill 3) or start the skill.
-Attempt skill 1 (main hand), same as the above.
-Use keyboard macro to repeatedly press the button to run this macro.

I would make one of these for each finisher, but the truth was that one of the finishers was better than the rest, so really I just ignored the others.

Essentially, I held the 1 key and my attack would run by itself. If I wanted to do something else I would release the key and press something else.

Think about that for a second. Sound familiar? Yeah, its called your “1” key auto attack. Thanks GW2 team.

He’s right honestly. Even if there are things you HATE about this game, and you want it to get better because youre a fan, theres just better ways to say things XIV on and off lately and that game honestly sucks, but the community is SOOO supportive of the game its amazing. SQENIX has been horrrrible to their fans for almost a decade and people still support them. ANET tries really hard to make a lot of fans happy, in a game thats three pronged. just be respectful and remember that this is a work in progress. Things game time and this is a great game whether things about it kitten you off or not.

Azure.8670:

He’s right honestly. Even if there are things you HATE about this game, and you want it to get better because youre a fan, theres just better ways to say things XIV on and off lately and that game honestly sucks, but the community is SOOO supportive of the game its amazing. SQENIX has been horrrrible to their fans for almost a decade and people still support them. ANET tries really hard to make a lot of fans happy, in a game thats three pronged. just be respectful and remember that this is a work in progress. Things game time and this is a great game whether things about it kitten you off or not.

A video game should not be a work in progress the same way your car shouldnt be a work in progress once its released… In an ideal world the game would have had the foundation for their 2 week release cycles prior to release and the game would have included all the basic features it needed (like leaderboards and custom servers for PvP) right from the start. When you release a half developed game as one of the most anticipated games your gonna have a bad time. Shame on us for expecting a AAA title to actually be AAA in quality.

Parisalchuk.9230:

Azure.8670:

He’s right honestly. Even if there are things you HATE about this game, and you want it to get better because youre a fan, theres just better ways to say things XIV on and off lately and that game honestly sucks, but the community is SOOO supportive of the game its amazing. SQENIX has been horrrrible to their fans for almost a decade and people still support them. ANET tries really hard to make a lot of fans happy, in a game thats three pronged. just be respectful and remember that this is a work in progress. Things game time and this is a great game whether things about it kitten you off or not.

A video game should not be a work in progress the same way your car shouldnt be a work in progress once its released… In an ideal world the game would have had the foundation for their 2 week release cycles prior to release and the game would have included all the basic features it needed (like leaderboards and custom servers for PvP) right from the start. When you release a half developed game as one of the most anticipated games your gonna have a bad time. Shame on us for expecting a AAA title to actually be AAA in quality.

A driving game shouldn’t be a work in progress. Every MMO ever made is a work in progress…not just at release but through the entire life cycle of the game, as long as it’s viable.

When you buy a driving game, you’re buying a game. When you’re buying an MMO you’re buying access to a world…you’re not paying for the program you’re paying for the account. It’s a completely different thing.

There isn’t one MMO I’ve ever seen, AAA or otherwise, that released as a finished product.

Zumy.6318:

Listen to your PvP/WvW playerbase and stop releasing things that go in a completely different direction.

We want less zerging, less passive effects (do not support skilled play), less broken/abusable mechanics (perplexity spam/stunspam/fearchain/stealthspam), less matchup imbalance, less orbbuffs V2.0, more entertaining/durable/thrilling sieges with actual fights and not groundtargetted spam, less siegeweapon overload and more rewards for skilled play.

People who play WvW and PvP dont need to get all the skill taken out of their hands. This game is getting easier and easier and classes get pushed into few OP builds more and more. Even when there is an issue with a mechanic being broken (e.g. warriors durability) the class gets buffed even more in the same direction (shouts/lungcapacity buff inc).
Yes 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 5v5, 10v10 and 20vs20 do matter! Because the players want it! And condition/cc spam are a big issue right here. They support the thoughtless game of numbers.
Players in WvW are in fact players that either like PvP in an open world environment or even siegebased or on the other hand dont care for the gamemode and just follow the loot train, no matter where they get it. Orr, Frostgorge trainframing, Queensdale or for Karma in WvW.

Why do we see more and more support for skillfree gameplay and none at all for people that actually play WvW for what we all took it? The open PvP heritage of DAoC and WAR? Move the PvE/Lootfocussed players back to the Living/Open world and please start enhancing the PvP experience the real group of interest for WvW wants.

How can it be that the needs of players that do not mind blindfolding aoe overload, huge fps-drops, insane skilllag and teleporting/warping during primetime in the mid&upper tiers as long as they get bags, currency and XP of any kind (blue, yellow, purple), are put above the needs/wishes of players that actually care about player versus player and guild/world versus guild/world interaction? Please stop protecting grinders from PvP-focussed “predators”. Give people the tools to kill the “blob” without counterblobbing or siegeoverloading the zone. Give us a laggfree game during primetime. Carebearing the “casuals” does no single favour to the gamemode and rewarding stacking in monozonetrains is killing the PvP in WvW.

Let sieges take hours to be finished for the people who love that. Siegeweapons deal way to much damage to structures and golemrushes are just overkill.
Once you give us the tools to bust the blob and make sieges of a reasonable length for the people who actually play WvW for what it was intended (massive sieges and massive !PvP!), the blobning problem will solve itself as the players that are abusing this gamemode for the simple fact of grinding will move on back to what they usually even like better. Grinding in the open world PvE.

Make WvW a better place for the people who came from WAR, Aion, Rift, SWOTOR, etc. hoping to finally find a gamemode full of epic fights between worlds and got rewarded with a zergfest with just and only epic and massive performance issues.

Do this for WvW. The people who dont like it will stick to the other modes of the game anyway. Afterall there is loot too.

And please please pretty please separate WvW from tPvP and PvE. So many gamebreaking changes to classmechanics that vastly have affected the PvP experience in WvW only happened to either balance PvE or a PvP oriented capture mode.

Very well stated … and a great summary of the feedback that ANet has been getting (and ignoring) for months on these forums.

Want collaboration, Chris?? Start by holding up your end.

I feel like one of the biggest problems is that ANET is terrible at controlling expectations. Think about how many mixed signals they send us…. they respond sometimes to complaints by changing things to make people happy, but then they tell us to stop complaining. They tell us they’re not going to create a gear grind, and then they create ascended weapons. (I actually love ascended weapons, but its a perfect example of my point.). They tell us they are going to create an expanding world, and then they focus on “organic improvements” and bi-weekly events in the existing world. They tell us that personal housing will be in the game, and they keep adding mining nodes to an uncustomizable home instance. They tell us guild activities and community building is a priority, and then they exclude guild halls from production and give us no concrete info on when they will be released, while wild star is being developed to have housing.

I think its difficult sometimes to be a player of this game. Its so close to everything you ever wanted, but that connection skips a beat sometimes and its a little tough to accept. Some people definitely handle it better than others though.

Tagus Eleuthera.7305:

… (I actually love ascended weapons, but its a perfect example of my point.). …

Not to be offensive, but I think you are a minority in a recent player conducted poll.

Absolutely agree, it is important to have productive discussions about the direction the game is going.
For example, let’s talk about the “living world”. You talk about it all the time, and it is obvious that you consider it “the thing”, the killing feature of Guild Wars 2.However, players generally do not share this conviction, just because it was not very impressive so far. You can not make “living world” doubling or tripling the rate of content producing, instead of making it live you make it survive on life support machine. Just imagine the situation a couple years in the future, when you stop the development of your game. Will it still be living? Or will it become a dead wasteland? That’s the big difference between just making a lot of content and making the world truly alive.
A lot of players understand “living world” as some sort of “sandbox” style of gameplay, gameplay where the experience is created by the players, not by the game masters. But there were no signs of this so far, just the same old theme park, that is just not what “living world” is.
Could you explain your stance on the “living world”? What do you mean by it? And how is it different from the world, that just has a lot of content incoming for players to burn through?

It’s really nice in text, but from the community’s standpoint you have to realize that while you may be taking feedback in to account (and of course you are, you’re game developers) The sentiment of this post is that you’re integrating the community in important ways, and the appearance and practice is that you simply don’t appear to be.

There are several methods to go about this that other games have done in the past in terms of test servers, community liasons, developers responsible for specific balance communication and areas of the game, etc.

The only two areas of the game that I, as a user, have really felt communicate with the user base well are John Smith’s impromptu Q&A in regards to economic topics, or Josh Foreman on the SAB boards. In both cases these staffers have responded to and engaged in conversation with the user base rather than making monolithic statements.

That’s really all it takes. If you see a 9000 page post, chances are it’s important to the community at large, and not just the small fraction that regularly browses the forum. If a topic is critical of design, don’t be afraid to enter in to that discussion. Don’t just drop in to threads with posts like “thanks for the feedback” or “well this because this” as some monolithic statement with no followup. It makes your users feel like they’re not being engaged.

Ask questions, see if there’s a common thread in the answers to that question, and respond to that overall answer or two conflicting answers if there seem to be some lines of consensus.

Post information on your own website. Social media is great, but you should be using it to link to the portal for your community, which is this site, not the other way around.

Think about ideas like promoted user groups which can help you filter community feedback in to more easily digestable channels (class liasons, server liasons, etc.) or let users opt in to the polling system that was used in beta to collect information in a more managable dataset so you don’t HAVE to scrape through forums to get a line on how the community feels.

Currently, a wide berth of your community seems to feel like it’s not being heard about one thing or another. Whether that is true or not isn’t something I can personally say, but I will say that people will rarely go out of their way to give positive feedback.

I understand and believe in the idea of the living world, and applaud the concept and the idea of drawing a line in the sand to say “this is what the game is about, if that’s not what you want maybe this is not a game you will enjoy” because at some point you really can’t make everyone happy.

Personally, I like the living world concept and I think its implementation has been getting better in the past year. I’d like to see more radical changes and more opportunities for player action to shape it. Like much of the community I’d like to see the living world start to resolve some of the many hanging plot threads from GW1 as well as the many hanging plot threads still present in GW2.

True, if they continue to behave the same it’s just void PR stuff.
And this is how I would like to express myself for this kind of statements xD

All of this reminds me of one of my first university oral exam.
The teacher exhorted me to proceed with the electronic registration of my mark telling me to insert my password, but then I said: oh kitten I forgot it ._.
He again: don’t worry we can do without.
He bypassed the password system and confirmed the registration.
Me: WUT? °-°
It’s all an illusion.

Things may change, and some of us are still waiting for that change.

Pavel.8531:

Am I the only one that thinks this post was just one lengthy “throw some dust in their eyes” damage control type? Because after months of ignoring feedback and even stating that the forums are a vocal minority so they don’t care for them as long as they don’t notice players leaving the game it is hard for me to just accept this on blind faith.

Exactly my thoughts. And it’s best displayed by the devs creating this thread and then completely ignoring the constructive criticism in here and not responding to it.
We don’t expect them to fix all the bugs immediately and improve the ame to where it should be within 2 weeks, but I think we all wish for them to explain more on the forums. For example to really explain to us why it takes so long to implement certain features, where problems with certain bugs are or why they chose to ignore a request issued by many players, etc etc etc.
But, seems easier to tell all the people on the forum that they are the ones misbehaving, instead of thinking about WHY the forum developed into its current state.

chris, you have the right idea and you say the right things. but until you guys give us a public test realm, im going to say that you dont really UNDERSTAND what collaborative development is.

lead and live by example. stop trying to placate us with words.

Chris, thank you for the post. Even if it is a repost, it is important for people of the forums and it seems that many people do not yet fully understand what it takes to put out a gorgeous and functional game. I know there are lots of things I’d love to see in game, but I know they’re not as easy as just adding a line of code here and voila guild management tools or whatever other addition.

Dear Forum Goers…the forums are not the only way the developers and Anet members get our feedback. You might even have a dev or two in your guild and you’d never know it unless they told you. They don’t always tag up while they’re in game. They play the same content as we do and experience many of the same issues. No amount of beta-testing will find every single bug before release and new bugs will emerge once something goes live. They do listen and just because they don’t take your suggestion doesn’t mean they don’t take some of our suggestions.

Personally I want the following in game:
1-Guild management tools. Show last time logged on, last time repped, show what guild a member is repping when not repping my guild.

2-A way to place objects into my home instance. Be able to add my sanctum model to my home instance, wall display of back items earned but I’m not going to wear…make it somewhat like GW1 Hall of Monuments.

3-A unique arena for GvG (so those people will stop whining). Maybe utilize the arena in the black citadel and use the stands as a viewing area where people can mingle and watch.

4-A way to account bound a soulbound item so I can transfer it to an alt. i.e. A crystal from gem store that allows me to move a permanent harvesting sickle from my main to an alt so I can put the new version on my main.

5-A mini pet slot so that I can “equip” a mini on my character that will come out when I enter a new zone or move between land/water.

6-Let me dye my aquabreather and back item. Leave some (like the books) undyeable, but let me change my look a little bit there.

7-Let me craft aquabreathers! We have one recipe for a water filter and it’s only a lvl 20 heavy and masterwork. Give us recipes we can get from vendors in Orr or somewhere with karma. Let us craft rare/exotic/ascended versions.

8-I personally love the zone hearts, but the rewards are a bit lackluster. Maybe start the beginning areas out with a 50c reward and scale up to 10-30 silver for the lvl 80 hearts. Put a few hearts in southsun too while you’re at it. I love that zone and it’s so empty most of the time.

9-More bats and creepy looking armor/weapons. When the designers do start with the next set of legendaries they should be a dark counterpart to the “light” version we have now. We already have Sunrise and Twilight…why not Bifrost and Yggdrasil (which would have a dark shadowy foot-trail, and crow projectiles) and like Sunrise/twilight you can combine the two to form a third legendary that combines the properties of both.

10-The bane of my gaming existence. RNG. While I know RNG will never go away, it is very disheartening when I try and try for something (precursor, weapon claim ticket, etc.) and even after 1000+ tries I end up with empty pockets and empty handed while someone else after 10 tries has three or more of what I was wanting. Sclerite weapons – husband got a ticket on the very first box on the very first day. I bought hundreds of boxes and farmed for more and didn’t get a single one (I cried at the end of the SS event because that was the first weapon skin I really wanted more than anything else). Dragon coffers – husband opened 4200 coffers before getting one weapon ticket. Guildie opens a couple hundred and gets 9 claim tickets. There is a huge disparity here and something needs to be done. I don’t know what, but something.

11- Can we please get the event skins we’ve gotten put into our account skin claim area too? Pretty please? This way my account will have access to the skins I’ve earned (Dragon helm, Wings, fused gauntlets). And then I don’t have to worry about losing a piece….and then people can make a copy for PvP and keep one for PvE. I don’t PvP and don’t care, but lots of people do.

Things I love that you’ve done:
1- While skeptical at first, I love the change with Magic Find. I love it as an account bonus. Still peeved about the lack of clarity regarding the MF armor soulbound/acct bound thing, but I’m over it.

2-The living story – While I don’t love all parts of it and don’t quite see the big picture of the story. I love having new things to do and new achievements to gain.

3-Account rewards for achievement points. Brilliant. Just awesome. Love how I can claim the skins I’ve earned thru my hero panel…love all the rewards.

4-LFG tool. I love it. So easy to use.

In short, thanks for your hard work ANET. I hope you continue to listen to us and implement some of my suggestions (and others from other people too). And try to reply to us just a little more often

Nice post Chris and I agree completely. Some people are just unrealistic and fail to realize there are individuals behind this company; not some machine. These same unrealistic individuals will argue something along the lines of "I paid for the game", but that’s a moot point when it comes down to basic human interaction. Although I’m not the biggest fan of the living story model, I still enjoy many of the other aspects GW2 provides and trust there will continue to be QOL improvements and other engaging content outside of the living story, as there have been for well over a year now. People need to realize not every single patch Anet puts out will hit 100% of the time specifically on the issues the individual wants addressed and engage with each other better as a community.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi All,

I would like to thank everyone for their support toward the pioneering work we are doing, as we drive the world of Tyria forward.
The passion, and intelligence that our community devotes to making this game great is both humbling and essential.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
So thank you all so much for your support, passion and collaboration, and please understand that Arena is an amazing team with an amazing community. And together we build worlds!

Chris W

Chris, that was a wonderful post that should assuage many, but probably not all.
In my humble opinion, this type of philosophical design approach to some problems is lacking to help assuage the boilover effect that some bugs or system limitations have created in a very reactionary Forum.
Has Anet ever considered a Communications director to bring the Arena teams vision, and it’s reality, to point with the communities vision and reality. This type of relationship lacks continuity without a single point of contact, ala Press Secretary.
I can give you loads of posts where any response, however small, would go hand in hand with your vision of a truly collaborative relationship.
A Fulltime continuity / Press contact on the Forums is necessary, IMHO.

Lets get access to the Cantha little by little.

All starts when Shiro wake up again and escape. He has tied up all 6 God’s together with Kormir’s blindfold and that’s why those 6 God’s have been so silence and dissappear so suddenly. Shiro have take them inprisonment.

First part could be 6 – 10 Living stories what brings players to the dream world, where players have to release all other 6 Gods from their inprisonment. Shiro would take all kind of forms to attack players with his army. All those Canthan monsters will be reveal this way to the players. All those Saltspray Dragons, Rockhide Dragons, Scuttle Fishes, Creeping Carps, Irukandjis, Nagas, Kappas, Wardens, Juggenauts, Turtles, Gakis Mantises, Undergrowths, Dragon Mosses, Onis, Yetis, Island Guardians, Rot Wallows, Fallen Luxons and Fallen Kurzicks and many more a.k.a all habitants from Cantha.

Last living story in Cantha episode would be, that Shiro will take Dragon form and start to tyrannize all good Canthan people with his new form and with his army. Tengu’s does not have any other choise than open those gates to the Cantha and plead to help Tyria. And Tyria will answer the call. And all those heroes who will accept the challenge will leave to the Cantha under the supervision of Trahearne….(What did I just said?) And this moment Cantha would be reveal.

( And with these Living Story parts would not be even one dungeon, all would happen that dream world, open space, it might look like Tyria.)

All areas in Cantha would have heart quests, all somehow related to the 6 gods or defeating Shiro’s monsters. New Dynamic Events every areas and meta events Main areas. Later when all another areas are find again bored Arenanet could reveal new playable race and their starter areas and fun could start again.

There has been a lot of great post in this thread from people and still the lack of response from Anet in this thread alone still show the commutation they need to improve on. It’s nice you guys read these threads on a daily basis but how do we know that? Some of these threads have great ideas/fixes with no reply from Anet. A simple reply to these threads would go long way.

I am deeply, deeply disappointed in the direction that Anet has taken GW2.

In general:

• I suppose the first inkling that things were going downhill was when dye went character bound in the beginning for the sake of “character progression”, instead of staying account bound. I argued against it, because quite frankly dye shows nothing about character progression when the money to buy the dye comes from a primary character anyway. The logic was deeply flawed and suggests only one reason dyes became character bound.

• Then came ascended trinkets, with its alt unfriendly time-gated gearing dependent on laurels. There were multiple threads and posts begging Anet not to proceed with time-gating or ascended gear, but alas, they were merged into one giant thread and every constructive post became buried behind “this is our vision of the game”.

• Then came ascended weapons, and soon to come, ascended gear, behind more time gating and massive grinds to reach 500. The threads are also merged and ignored for the sake of the vision of the game.

The reasoning: it took too little time to obtain all exotic gear.
Wasn’t that one of the original selling points of the game – the ability to reach level and gear cap quickly so everyone can participate in WvW on an equal footing without much time or grind?

That brings me to WvW.

• Orbs were a bad mechanic. Yes, they were removed because they were hackable, but behind that was also the problem of the snowballing effect it gave to the winning server. Yet it was brought back, against our protests because and I loosely quote “WvW isn’t supposed to be fair.”

Is the vision for WvW one of unfairness, then, with blowout matches and the winning server flipping everything quickly because “it makes for more exciting matches”? Where alts are detrimental to server performance because they lack points in wexp?

• On the WvW forums, we begged and pleaded for leagues to be canceled, or in the alternative, gave multiple wonderful constructive suggestions for how leagues could be organized and scored for a better player experience. Instead, we get a “Q&A” session with Devon a week before leagues will go live – a session where he will most likely evade questions and nothing will be changed.

• Plopping down ruins in WvW, providing new maps in PvP, or bringing back a broken mechanic into the game is not more content. Especially when there are so many imbalances and issues that should and could be fixed first before being further imbalanced by these new and exciting features!

TLDR It seems that no matter how much helpful, constructive feedback is provided, Anet will decide to go its own route and give silly answers such as:

• “character progression”
• “not supposed to be fair”
• “makes the game more exciting”
• “our metrics say that WvW population isn’t declining” (so it must be a great mechanic?).

I honestly don’t see the point for anyone to post in the hopes that their opinion won’t be taken as a “vocal minority”, and frankly, I only posted this to vent.

P.S. I see GW2 heading towards more grind, more levels, more levels of gear, and more time-gating. If you would like to have a meaningful conversation with the community, perhaps you could address, in a blog post or in this forum, why this vision is definitely not happening, or if it is happening, provide a kitten good reason. Otherwise, I’d say to expect more angry outbursts on the forums.

Immanuel.1560:

Lets get access to the Cantha little by little.

All starts when Shiro wake up again and escape. He has tied up all 6 God’s together with Kormir’s blindfold and that’s why those 6 God’s have been so silence and dissappear so suddenly. Shiro have take them inprisonment.

First part could be 6 – 10 Living stories what brings players to the dream world, where players have to release all other 6 Gods from their inprisonment. Shiro would take all kind of forms to attack players with his army. All those Canthan monsters will be reveal this way to the players. All those Saltspray Dragons, Rockhide Dragons, Scuttle Fishes, Creeping Carps, Irukandjis, Nagas, Kappas, Wardens, Juggenauts, Turtles, Gakis Mantises, Undergrowths, Dragon Mosses, Onis, Yetis, Island Guardians, Rot Wallows, Fallen Luxons and Fallen Kurzicks and many more a.k.a all habitants from Cantha.

Last living story in Cantha episode would be, that Shiro will take Dragon form and start to tyrannize all good Canthan people with his new form and with his army. Tengu’s does not have any other choise than open those gates to the Cantha and plead to help Tyria. And Tyria will answer the call. And all those heroes who will accept the challenge will leave to the Cantha under the supervision of Trahearne….(What did I just said?) And this moment Cantha would be reveal.

( And with these Living Story parts would not be even one dungeon, all would happen that dream world, open space, it might look like Tyria.)

All areas in Cantha would have heart quests, all somehow related to the 6 gods or defeating Shiro’s monsters. New Dynamic Events every areas and meta events Main areas. Later when all another areas are find again bored Arenanet could reveal new playable race and their starter areas and fun could start again.

This ^ is probably the only comment in this thread that actually gives A-Net an idea of how to expand the game. The majority just argues if the OP statements are true or false, believable or not.

RNG in loot drops is fun. Look at Diablo 2. RNG you pay money for is not necessarily fun. It makes money from the compulsive, thrills the lucky, but it breeds resentment and distrust in the unlucky. Since most people are unlucky, that is a lot of resentment.

I know gems make lots of money. It’s human nature to gamble, and we and Arena net are obviously extremely aware of that. However; being apparently happy to make a mint off the compulsive, while breeding resentment and disloyalty among the unlucky is not sustainable. The unlucky majority have begged to be able to hand over their money to straight out purchase items. They/ we have also begged to have RNG results adjusted so that the whole experience of handing Arena net money feels more rewarding.

Not giving loyal customers more reasons to give you money is not sensible.

Also, I understand that this game has a major conflict present in all mmos; rewarding players tanks the economy. RNG numbers are kept punishingly low to give goods market value. This needs to be worked on. When I need a break from GW2, I play Borderlands 2. It is glorious to play a game that gives you rewards that you can use to play the game, with no regard for whether it will spoil the market for your awesome new toys. I want to feel like my hours and weeks and months in GW2 are spent using all my fun items, not desperately wishing for them. I’ll work for them, all day… as long as I GET them.

Thanks you for showing interest in what the community has to say.

Here is my 2 cents:

• Don’t make this game into a grind fest and armor/weapon centric. The introduction of ascended weapons and armors (soon I am assuming) and then legendary armor set (I predict) shouldn’t happen. Keep this a fun MMO and don’t try to keep players by adding grind work. If someone likes grind and feels that there is no challenge then they will leave one day no matter what….you will only hurt the GW2 core player base.

• The living story grind. Again the living story adds nothing to the core game. It is basically an achievement grind fest for players and dies soon.

The core improvements/development should go to dungeons, world events, WvW, guild system. As an example the new TA dungeon is a perfect example of content. keep it up.

Personally, I am just really sad to see how the game has strayed away from the original manifesto. What drew me to this game originally was that I could get the best gear playing the game however I wanted. That was a great perk. I didn’t need to do dungeons and could spend all my time working on map completions or WvW which I enjoyed. The best gear was obtained naturally. If I wanted a specific look for a weapon or gear, then I could grind for that.

Instead now, it takes a grind to get the best gear. The means I have to take time away from actually having fun in the game to doing certain tasks ANET wants me to do. It’s totally in opposition to the original spirit of the game.

My other issue is with new content. Changing Teq was a bad idea. It was a suitable and accessible dragon for casual players. Instead of changing existing content, add new. A lot of players do enjoy Teq. The whole mechanic for that dragon should have been added to a new dragon somewhere in the world. In other words, the game needs to cater to both casuals and hardcores. GW2 has lost that ability.