Guild Wars 2

Thanks for the info. Are we getting CDIs back soon?

Mike O Brien.4613:

I know some are concerned about whether ArenaNet is communicating with you and listening and responding to your feedback. As you saw with yesterday’s announcement, we do. All of us at ArenaNet play the game with you, chat with you and read your forum posts, and work on the things that we think will most delight and entertain you.

We’ve set a clear policy in the past year: we don’t talk speculatively about future development. We don’t want to string you along. Creating fun is an uncertain business: sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t; sometimes we go back to the drawing board over and over before we get something right. If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers. So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.

Don’t read that as meaning that we don’t want to talk with you about the longer-term roadmap. The intention of the CDI threads is to talk with you about the roadmap. We want to talk design philosophy with you and hear how you want to see the game evolve. When those discussions trigger development, we’ll work internally until we have something we’re proud of before we’ll announce it.

A lot of the questions I’ve seen posted this week are as simple as this: does ArenaNet have an agenda to never do something? That’s almost never the case, and if it is the case you deserve to know and we’ll make sure we get more clear. In general the simple truth is this: when we’re not currently working on something, it’s because we’re working on something else instead that we think is more important for the game and community.

Our developers post on these forums on a voluntary basis, and in addition to developers, we have a community team who can clarify and be the bridge between players and developers. They’re ready to engage you on these topics. And I know it’s hard for the community team to engage players across all the forums and sites where these questions are being discussed, so I’m going to support the team in consolidating and focusing as necessary, so that we can be clear to the community where you can go to get a response.

See you in-game,
Mike O’Brien

Precursor scavenger hunt…

Tell me again how you don’t talk speculatively?

Please know I do appreciate the time and effort put in to making this post. One long overdue but at least it is now here… Just please don’t make statements that are blatantly untrue…

There are many other instances of features being said that they are being developed some even given a preliminary time table… all to be lost to oblivion never to be spoken of again… I just used precursor scavenger hunt as the most obvious example.

Just keep doin’ what you gals and guys are doin’. People just get antsy.

hugs

thanks!

THANK YOU! All we want is a little more communication!

We don’t get mad/angry/frustrated because we don’t care. We do all that because we do care.

All we ask is that we are not ignored!

Devs posting is rare but appreciated,

Community team is ABSENT most of the time, example being the 39 page Trait thread that has zero response since it was Merged to get feedback, That could be why people are puppied off thinking Anet are not listening along with the ONLY flow of info being anywhere BUT your own official forums , ex Twitter etc etc …

This is why most companies employ Community Managers…. which I do believe you have. It’s understandable that many devs don’t have the time or desire to post on the forums. That’s where someone specifically hired to manage and talk with the community comes in, to be a liaison. So maybe actually start utilising yours?

I too am hoping for the CDIs return, because it DID make us feel more part of the game. And while some cdi stuff came to pass, now that we see it in action, as a community we can help make it better.

I know you have designs set in place and policy, but remember we are here to give you FREE advice! In, the form of feedback, yes, but it feels when we do that, we are talking to air. If anything, if you guys see a good feedback or idea thread, you don’t have to come in and say ‘we are listening’. No, just come in and ask a question of the idea or give YOUR feedback on it, so the conversation doesn’t seem one sided or the community starts to chomp at itself.

That’s really all I’m asking for at least.

I think as a community we should see if it’s feasible to implement a bi-weekly or weekly talk to the dev thread. Also maybe would like a post about how Anet is addressing the Ddos and what they are doing to mitigate further attacks. Just my 2 copper.

Does this mean the CDI will be starting back up? It looks like this feature pack will bring some of the things discussed in the last CDI.

Can we get some update on long promised features as well? Precursor crafting, new legendary weapons, legendary trinkets, 500 cooking, 500 jewelcrafting?

Thanks for dropping in, Mike. Not all of us need Daddy Anet to hold our hands but its nice to see you guys pop in for a chat sometimes as fellow players.

I appreciate your post, and the thought, and what effort you folks do put in, but for me, it isn’t enough. I’ve seen better now, and this is disappointing.

I like the game, still enjoy it very much, but for me, it’s just one of those games where I do ‘not’ feel listened to, I do ‘not’ feel like I can ask a simple question and get an ‘honest’ answer to my question. I don’t have many, I’m actually pretty easy. I just have 3 things that bother me now and have never been answered adequately. I tried asking my questions via support tickets, and got close once, but then that person inexplicably backed down, probably because they were told not to tell me things like that, or whatever. I’d love to ask my questions again and get answers to them.

But until that time, I’ll enjoy it while I can, but I will always feel ‘completely’ disconnected from you folks, and not feel like I matter. I hate having that disconnect between a game I love and the people that run it.

But, thank you all the same.

Yeah. The Trait thread. Seriously, it’s ok to admit you made a horrible miscalculation. It doesn’t make you less of a man or a woman or a whatever. Just bite the bullet, and fix it.

Thank you but … the communication issues are still there. I can’t say how you need to manage to get it better, but I can show an example of someone doing it better.

We all should know by now that there have been a few connectivity issues in the last day, yes? Here is Wildstar telling me what I need to know about my GW2 connection in a timely manner:

https://twitter.com/Cougardc

Now maybe your OPS people don’t want to. Lord knows I’ve also worked in OPS and often we are usually the “antisocial – just throw pizza and snack food under the door at regular intervals and things will stay up” people. How do you bridge that so players aren’t left making up their own paranoid tin-foil explanations?

Substitue OPS for any area where players feel they don’t have feedback in that last paragraph and make some plan.

This post is, as has already been said, overdue – but it is still greatly appreciated. Hopefully your hand won’t get bitten by some angry ranter while you’re trying to reach out to us.

However, there is one thing I do just have to bring up. I’m not demanding a reply or anything, I just hope that it’s noted.

Mike O Brien.4613:

In general the simple truth is this: when we’re not currently working on something, it’s because we’re working on something else instead that we think is more important for the game and community.

I appreciate that everyone’s opinions differ, but I think the community has made it very clear exactly which areas they are interested in being developed. A little communication in regards to these subjects (I won’t name them, I don’t want to derail a communication-related thread into discussion about them) would be nice, perhaps a little more than something along the lines of “We’re not working on [insert content/feature here] at this time.” If the playerbase knew why something was on the backburner, maybe they would quieten down about it for a while?

Thanks again for daring to visit these forums at such a time; but saying that you are working on “more important” things is really raising the bar – especially considering how passionate some players are about things that aren’t being worked on.

Thanks for this, it’s much appreciated. I’d suggest revisiting the clear policy and speculative discussion though, as I think that it may have been implemented too strongly. With some topics, like the traits thread, not responding has done more damage than speculation would.

Moreover, while I concede that not every player has behaved rationally or calmly, it does seem reasonable to treat the community as intelligent adults. Therefore qualifying a statement with “we haven’t decided exactly what to do, but here’s what we’re thinking” should be taken as something that players are capable of understanding.

If the recent SAB event shows anything, its that not saying anything will result in a very big backlash if people eventually get bad news. There was no warning, just a year of sitting and waiting and getting silence, then bang. Even if there is eventually good news, the amount of resentment built up won’t simply go away.

Thanks again for this, and for the change to commander tags. This helps a lot.

Thank you for this response.
I think communication is very important.
If one side ever loses the faith in communication with the other side, then simply said have both sides lost.
So I can only say, without questioning for a next one, that I always appreciated very much the CDI threads, especially those lead by Chris Whiteside, so thats a praise to give towards him hehe just to say that he did a well job basically introducing the format.

However, there are things, where I’m sure, that I can speak for the community, that it would be nice, if the communication with us would work sometimes better, that we would get “included” more into certain decisions that you make.
Maybe more stuff in the way of Cutthroat Politics that decide over it, if we rather make a break of the Living Story for now in favor of other fun stuff that the community likes alot, like the Super Adventure Box and other game optimizations with Feature Packs and the like (Balance Updates, Bug Fixings ect.), or if we focus on more Story Content and general opmimizations there, like getting it quicker done that LS1 gets reimplemented into the current Living Story System together with new Achievement,s making Personal Story replayable and such things that have to do with the Game Story Content, more, rather than with adding new Features or polishing the game here and there.

I know you can’t please everyone. One side wants this, the other side wants that and ANet stands in the golden middle and would love to please everyone as best as possible, but just can’t do that due to various limitations and many other reasons alot of us may not understand or know in general.
But especially due to this, that alot of people don’t know or can understand these things, it’s alot more important, that you talk with us about such things, why something isn’t maybe right now possible, or out of which priorities a decision has been made, how it has been made, so that we can better understand you and the route you are taking us on with GW2.

You know, we all are maybe wonderful wannabe game developers at heart with all our suggestions and desires that you like so much as inspirations, but we are still in the end only simple players, which lack in the comprehension of how Anet works, what their plans are with the game, the schedule and this makes it very hard for us to understand many decisions that you make, especially when they aren’t really communicated with us as like we would wish you would do, so that we could maybe understand better.

I think the current situation around the Super Adventure Box and those “Anet is out of touch-Threads” show this situation clearly at its best.
Nonetheless, I still think, that you know what you do and its so far absolutely understandable, that you will announce only things, when they are deadsure ready to be implemented, as I can clearly also see the desaster what happens, when somethign got announced like Precursor Crafting and then it doesn’t get delivered.

Such things hang then from that moment on permanently like a curse, the so called sword of damocles, over your head for basically forever, until you deliver what has been promised.
So its clearly understandable, why you changed alot of things in the ways of how you announce things and the ways of how you communicate with us.
From that standpoint seen I’m clearly with you.

I know you developers are reading our threads as often as you can.
What I want to give with you as a last little suggestion for improvement of general communication would be a little forum improvement, that would clearly help uss all in a kind of recognition way.
I’d like to see a forum improvement, that shows us, when a developer has read our threads Not just only the typical red posting that we all know, that requires of the developer to post something – no, just a visual sign of the developer, that he has read the posting and maybe a sign, that will show us, that the developer maybe will prepare something to post there perhaps later, but just hasn’t the time to post something right now.

Example:

Developer has read the Thread = Thread Title becomes italized.
Developer marks the Thread for a personal answer postign later = A little Star Symbol will appear at the Thread Title.

Visualization can help alot in communication, without that something must have been communicated at all

Mike O Brien.4613:

I know some are concerned about whether ArenaNet is communicating with you and listening and responding to your feedback. As you saw with yesterday’s announcement, we do. All of us at ArenaNet play the game with you, chat with you and read your forum posts, and work on the things that we think will most delight and entertain you.

We’ve set a clear policy in the past year: we don’t talk speculatively about future development. We don’t want to string you along. Creating fun is an uncertain business: sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t; sometimes we go back to the drawing board over and over before we get something right. If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers. So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.

Don’t read that as meaning that we don’t want to talk with you about the longer-term roadmap. The intention of the CDI threads is to talk with you about the roadmap. We want to talk design philosophy with you and hear how you want to see the game evolve. When those discussions trigger development, we’ll work internally until we have something we’re proud of before we’ll announce it.

A lot of the questions I’ve seen posted this week are as simple as this: does ArenaNet have an agenda to never do something? That’s almost never the case, and if it is the case you deserve to know and we’ll make sure we get more clear. In general the simple truth is this: when we’re not currently working on something, it’s because we’re working on something else instead that we think is more important for the game and community.

Our developers post on these forums on a voluntary basis, and in addition to developers, we have a community team who can clarify and be the bridge between players and developers. They’re ready to engage you on these topics. And I know it’s hard for the community team to engage players across all the forums and sites where these questions are being discussed, so I’m going to support the team in consolidating and focusing as necessary, so that we can be clear to the community where you can go to get a response.

See you in-game,
Mike O’Brien

i hear you, and your the boss, so you can do what you want. But, i dont think its a good strategy to say nothing until you are ready to ship. Not only do you not get feedback early, but you have long periods of time where no one knows what the future holds.
If you can deliver constantly, it may work, but since you have long development cycles, it seems that this course will lead to people not really knowing what direction/what to expect at any given moment. Not only that, but you increase the chance that what you develop as a finished product is well intentioned but features a critical flaw. We have seen this happen with many of the releases, where something was almost great, but just off in some key way that could have been predicted early.

If you make CDI type projects more focused on specific thing you actually are working on or trying to develop, it is possible to walk this line.

Anyhow, thats my opinion, take it or leave it.

Solomon Darkfury.3729:

Mike O Brien.4613:

I know some are concerned about whether ArenaNet is communicating with you and listening and responding to your feedback. As you saw with yesterday’s announcement, we do. All of us at ArenaNet play the game with you, chat with you and read your forum posts, and work on the things that we think will most delight and entertain you.

We’ve set a clear policy in the past year: we don’t talk speculatively about future development. We don’t want to string you along. Creating fun is an uncertain business: sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t; sometimes we go back to the drawing board over and over before we get something right. If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers. So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.

Don’t read that as meaning that we don’t want to talk with you about the longer-term roadmap. The intention of the CDI threads is to talk with you about the roadmap. We want to talk design philosophy with you and hear how you want to see the game evolve. When those discussions trigger development, we’ll work internally until we have something we’re proud of before we’ll announce it.

A lot of the questions I’ve seen posted this week are as simple as this: does ArenaNet have an agenda to never do something? That’s almost never the case, and if it is the case you deserve to know and we’ll make sure we get more clear. In general the simple truth is this: when we’re not currently working on something, it’s because we’re working on something else instead that we think is more important for the game and community.

Our developers post on these forums on a voluntary basis, and in addition to developers, we have a community team who can clarify and be the bridge between players and developers. They’re ready to engage you on these topics. And I know it’s hard for the community team to engage players across all the forums and sites where these questions are being discussed, so I’m going to support the team in consolidating and focusing as necessary, so that we can be clear to the community where you can go to get a response.

See you in-game,
Mike O’Brien

Precursor scavenger hunt…

Tell me again how you don’t talk speculatively?

Please know I do appreciate the time and effort put in to making this post. One long overdue but at least it is now here… Just please don’t make statements that are blatantly untrue…

There are many other instances of features being said that they are being developed some even given a preliminary time table… all to be lost to oblivion never to be spoken of again… I just used precursor scavenger hunt as the most obvious example.

Was the scavenger hunt promised “in the last year”?

I don’t believe it was, therefore his point stands.

i just still cant understand why you dont want to add more permanent content

Thanks for taking the time to communicate with your fans

when we’re not currently working on something, it’s because we’re working on something else instead that we think is more important for the game and community.

This is the key statement. Many times you’re not working on what players are asking for. Then, when you release whatever you’ve designed that you believe is better for the game or community, it’s something nobody asked for, or doesn’t improve the game how players wanted. This is why Charr armor still sucks, the Zerk meta still exists, Roleplayers are still screwed, and why we have no new races or skills or weapons.

These are things that players want but you have some data point that says ’they’re not as good as thing X we’re working on instead’. In many cases X is probably some function of revenue or player retention. So you’re trying to balance what you think will keep the game alive and what the players want, but the reality is that players aren’t getting what they want nearly as much as you’d think. Sure, players are happy when we do get something, because it’s better than nothing, but it’s illogical to assume that something that players didn’t ask for will make them happier or even as happy as something they did ask for. If we wanted feature X more than feature Y, we would ask for feature X.

I understand that you can’t give us everything, and that some changes and additions have to be more broad, but where it needs improvement is that you need to give us more than what you currently do, and when you can’t, you need to make it clear why (why haven’t there been improvements to Charr armor? What are you doing to change the Zerk meta? Why haven’t Megaservers and Roleplayers been addressed? Does the scope of the Living Story still encompass races and weapons and skills?).

That’s not to say you guys don’t have any idea what’s good for you game, or that you don’t have good ideas for content and updates. You do. You just need to take more from the community.

Great post, thanks for your time with the post

maha.7902:

Solomon Darkfury.3729:

Mike O Brien.4613:

I know some are concerned about whether ArenaNet is communicating with you and listening and responding to your feedback. As you saw with yesterday’s announcement, we do. All of us at ArenaNet play the game with you, chat with you and read your forum posts, and work on the things that we think will most delight and entertain you.

We’ve set a clear policy in the past year: we don’t talk speculatively about future development. We don’t want to string you along. Creating fun is an uncertain business: sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t; sometimes we go back to the drawing board over and over before we get something right. If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers. So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.

Don’t read that as meaning that we don’t want to talk with you about the longer-term roadmap. The intention of the CDI threads is to talk with you about the roadmap. We want to talk design philosophy with you and hear how you want to see the game evolve. When those discussions trigger development, we’ll work internally until we have something we’re proud of before we’ll announce it.

A lot of the questions I’ve seen posted this week are as simple as this: does ArenaNet have an agenda to never do something? That’s almost never the case, and if it is the case you deserve to know and we’ll make sure we get more clear. In general the simple truth is this: when we’re not currently working on something, it’s because we’re working on something else instead that we think is more important for the game and community.

Our developers post on these forums on a voluntary basis, and in addition to developers, we have a community team who can clarify and be the bridge between players and developers. They’re ready to engage you on these topics. And I know it’s hard for the community team to engage players across all the forums and sites where these questions are being discussed, so I’m going to support the team in consolidating and focusing as necessary, so that we can be clear to the community where you can go to get a response.

See you in-game,
Mike O’Brien

Precursor scavenger hunt…

Tell me again how you don’t talk speculatively?

Please know I do appreciate the time and effort put in to making this post. One long overdue but at least it is now here… Just please don’t make statements that are blatantly untrue…

There are many other instances of features being said that they are being developed some even given a preliminary time table… all to be lost to oblivion never to be spoken of again… I just used precursor scavenger hunt as the most obvious example.

Was the scavenger hunt promised “in the last year”?

I don’t believe it was, therefore his point stands.

you are right, it seems that officially, at as a top level descion, probably based somewhat on that occurence, they have decided not to release long term plans. Overall i would say this year does not seem better for it in terms of releases, or how much players understand and anticipate the product.

I understand the reasoning, we dont want to make promises we dont fulfill, but the reality of that strategy is all around worse as far as i can see. However, he does run the company and he will do what he wants. I just dont think it will be successful at keeping people interested/aware and keeping a strong bead on what the players are looking for.

This is such a dangerous precedent you are walking Mike, fans will now expect that for everything they are not happy about, that they will be expecting an “explanation” from you. Though you did mention that both the developers (voluntary) and your Community Manager Teams are spending time to communicate to the players, they won’t see this and they will only throw even more questions, blames and even more “misunderstanding”.

So, thanks for braving the current storm. I, for one, and several of my friends, are still very happy with the game. Sure it is not perfect, but it’s perfect for how we want to spend our gaming time.

Great job again!

On the subject of communication, the “Community team” seem to pick and choose, another example being the “Mesmer bug” thread where it lists 40 issues and nothing from anyone about any progress, that is a whole profession basically unplayable the way it is supposed to be right there and no communication on an important subject yet someone jumped right on the Fix for the Orr fail champ train !

That didn’t really tell us anything we didn’t know already.

Before we get too mushy here, folks, lets be clear about what Mike just said. He basically just reiterated what thier policy on communicating with their customer base. If that’s all you need, then good for you. But what I really want is a broad understanding of their current and long term goals.
Lack of communication only leaves for speculation. Speculation mostly leads to built up hopes, which cannot be achieved.
Everyone loses with their current policy. The only reason they have it is to have something to fall back on and avoid blame if they can’t meet their goals, which to me, is a cowardly way to run a company.
It certainly isn’t innovative

Please provide employees enough rope to talk about high level details about things their trying, without saying what they intend to implement. For example when you’re trying different game modes you can obscure what the future implementation will be by providing all the game modes you’ve been trying, some of the game modes you’ve been trying, or point out elements of game modes you think would be cool to implement.

When the community interacts with the devs and other reps, it can feel like they are afraid to talk, and scared to interact back with us. That could be because the community itself is somewhat scary, but given the body of interactions it feels like it’s also, because they can’t interact back with us without facing reprecussions.

Thank you for showing up on the forums, however, it is long overdue and should be the norm instead of the exception. I feel like I just witnessed a pink bird flying overhead in downtown S.A.

We haven’t asked of promises – we have asked for your community team to be more of an obvious bridge than what they are doing now, not for your developers to show up. Leave your developers where they do the most good. Community team does the most good here. With us. That’s what most, I believe, are asking for.

Nice to see a red post, especially from you Mike, been wondering where have you been, hopefully Colin is doing good too.

That being said, actions speak louder than words.
9 Months of gathering feedback on WvW CDI threads and nothing ever came of it, except for a tag, which I doubt took months to implement.

I’ve already tried to compose this five different ways to remove any hint of combativeness. This is the best I can hope to do:

I (and I think most people here), understand why the current gunshy communication policy exists. We know you tried to be open and cordial with your game plans, and a handful of entitled little kittens decided your statements of intent were actually promises, and were hellbent on making the following year absolute hell on anyone trying to engage in discourse.

The problem, and I continue to believe this, is that your company responded in the worst possible way. You gave EVERYONE the silent treatment because of the trolls. Your company let the Ranger CDI thread (for example) go for roughly 30 pages because of the echo chamber. Same with the WvW thread. Mesmer bug threads go on for months without a peep.

We CAN understand if you don’t have an answer. You CAN let us know this. IGNORE the trolls that can’t.

Going silent is the worst possible thing to do. You folks can control the discourse if you want to. If you are willing to invest in this community, and not let yourself get run off by the perennially kitten, the community WILL respond.

But it’s going to take a lot of time now. The pool is very, very acidic, and a lot of the people who would have normally given you the benefit of the doubt have been poisoned by the legitimacy you gave the trolls when you walked away from the table.

Simply put… this CAN’T be your last word on the matter if you HONESTLY want the forums to represent the respectful environment the policies here claim you want.

I hope you guys realize who this is. If he posts this, it means all the ‘does Anet care?’ threads, have ring a bell up at Anet.

And tbh i understand them. Clearly (from data mining) they have something in the works for scavenger hunt. But i think it needs something big around it, to make it truly shine. First of all the economy must be prepared for the new items, the old items, and the market shift. Secondly, perhaps new legendaries are in order. Thirdly, owners of current legendaries might be ultra kittened (say precursor then may cost only 100g, hypothetical, removing all the ‘i did something great’ feel, of the current ppl paying 1300g for precursor. Thirdly, ‘Legendary’ is a big word. It’s a word, that has to be earned. Perhaps a deep story (seperate or living story part), has to be made around it.

If only ONE of these things fail, the setup of scavenger hunt might fail (because otherwise they would release a half baked cookie and kitten of ppl anyway). So the ultra silence about ‘thing in progress’, i totally understand. It’s to prevent ‘you promised precursor, but you didn’t do it’ comments.

However I feel the balance team sits to much on a throne. They listen to mass QQ (whine), but they don’t listen to ‘this could use a boost, this is underpowered’ kind of stuff. I also feel no matter what we say, they nerf what they want. So imo, balance team, communication (or just player data gathering) has to be increased. A pvp dev mentioned, with his job + hobbies + familie, he has only 20 hours a week personal time to play gw2. All ok in my book. But that restricts his vision of gw2 quite a lot. some ppl like me (6k hours in gw2) have lot of experience of all professions in all game modes. The cumulative of having played all professions in all gamemodes, in a lot of situations, gives you a certain feel of the game, that cannot be reproduced. And a such, i think Anet devs rely to few on it. I’m not saying my opinion matters more then others. Casual players matter also. If you play necro shortly or casually, it feels fine cause it has some strong skills. If you play it a lot, next to other professions, you know it misses something. Auto attacks (except elites nr 1 and Deathshroud, maybe dagger 1) are not engaging. Other professions auto attacks are way more satisfactory. Knowing you spam them all day, they are important. But i got the feeling, because anet devs play necro shortly, they don’t think it’s a problem. And here lies the problem: veteren players identify a problem Anet doesn’t, and as such doesn’t arrive on their radar. I hope this improves.

But ty for this message. And gw2 is still the best mmo out their for me. Especially price/fun you get. But also small things like loot share, heart quest over text balloon quests, dynamic events, karma, etc, just better worked out in gw2 imo. When i play other games im like ‘omg this is boring, i miss gw2’. So the game is an achievement. Keep going for new achievements please! That’s why most complaints threads appear: people care about the game.

Signs like ‘Allie murdock’ not being replaced is a bit dissapointing also. It seems like Mark Katzback (sorrie if backname is written wrong), is doing a lot of work now. And no offence, but he’s a pretty serious guy. Wich means, he writes what is needed to be written (like in wvw tournement ticket thread), but he rarely engages in threads, like Josh davis does, or Allie did. And i miss that. I’m sure he has other qualities (all people do, and he definitely works hard), but I think we need a vocal community coordinator to replace Allie.

Whilst I appreciate you saying this, it is more a matter of putting your money where your mouth is. The biggest thread right now is the Trait system. And you, as a company, are conspicuously absent from it. Many other very controversial subjects, you, as a company, are very conspicuously absent from. If you want us to believe you, you need to consistently and fairly do this.

Even if you feel you cannot comment on the content of a thread, a comment stating you are reading and discussing it with others on the team, or saying an occasional ‘good point’, or ‘no, that won’t work, because’ would show interaction, that you are reading, that you are processing, and that you care. But to have a long dry spell, with little to no interaction except in a few select threads, and then post something like this, is almost condescending.

Your player base is not stupid. We know what we see, and it is diametrically opposite what you are saying. We are not children, to get a pat on the head and be told ‘everything is fine, we are doing what we should, now go play and let the adults do what they are doing.’ Yet it sounds like that.

Please, either be consistent in paying attention to us, or don’t. But do us the favor of not thinking we are stupid enough to let your words override what we see and experience. It doesn’t work that way.

Mike O Brien.4613:

We’ve set a clear policy in the past year: we don’t talk speculatively about future development. We don’t want to string you along. Creating fun is an uncertain business: sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t; sometimes we go back to the drawing board over and over before we get something right. If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers. So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.

The big problem I see with this policy is that it isolates the development team from meaningful external feedback during the phase in development where that feedback can actually do some good. There’s a difference between promising something and then not delivering, and saying, “Hey, we think this might be a good idea in the future, what do you think?”

Under the current policy, development appears to occur in a black box, and you don’t find out whether players like the idea until it’s already finished, in which case you have to scramble to backpedal if they hate it (see the commander tag system changes). Luckily, the commander tag change only took two people a single weekend to put right. If it had required much more significant investment to fix, I can only the imagine the response would have been something closer to, “Sorry, we can’t afford to totally rework this feature we already built from scratch, so you’re stuck with it.”

Why not test the community waters with ideas during the concept phase, before investing significant resources in them, so they can be done right the first time? I’m not talking about a vague, open-ended CDI thread asking the community what they want to see, I’m talking about sharing what YOU want to see, and asking the community if they share that vision or not.

Mighty Favazz.1546:

Before we get too mushy here, folks, lets be clear about what Mike just said. He basically just reiterated what thier policy on communicating with their customer base. If that’s all you need, then good for you. But what I really want is a broad understanding of their current and long term goals.
Lack of communication only leaves for speculation. Speculation mostly leads to built up hopes, which cannot be achieved.
Everyone loses with their current policy. The only reason they have it is to have something to fall back on and avoid blame if they can’t meet their goals, which to me, is a cowardly way to run a company.
It certainly isn’t innovative

I wish more people understood this…

I think just seeing a couple new red posts on the forums has people believing that Anet is going to actually start communicating, but we had just as much back before the first Feature Update, and we all know how quickly that dried up afterwards right? Right? Well we already have the half dozen or so “white knights” going after anyone with criticism in these threads already so it’s time to get off the forums for the day already.

The problems with this is when it creates a big disconnect between what perceived and actual desires of the community. Take the colored commander tags as a case in poin, a feature was developed and announced where the major point of what the community wanted had been completely misinterpreted. The community wanted the ability to split up big groups and organize on the fly in an easy way, arenanet thought we wanted some sort of bling-bling cosmetic colored tags. And alot of anger ensued from that. The lack of communication creates these massive backlashes.

And even when it’s not discussing future features, the lack of communication in parts of the game (such as WvW) where there is already a general thought that arenanet does not care just serves to confirm that assumption. Lack of communication is bad for the community most of the time. It doesn’t have to be “we are going to implement feature X, Y and Z” but it also definitely can’t just be complete radio silence.

Please note I have 7 legendaries so I am only doing this on behalf of others…

This was almost 2 years ago now…

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/linsey-murdock-unveils-new-high-end-ascended-gear/

After this we heard NOTHING… literally NOTHING from anyone regarding precursor scavenger hunt or crafting…

Thank you! This sort of thing is exactly what the community is asking for. I know that it’s not easy dealing with us on these forums. For every post that is mature, thoughtful, and respectful, there are two are three that are the opposite. With that, your workload, and the “no discussing the future” policy, I understand why many devs choose not to interact with the forums. So thank you for this.

But there’s something in your post that I just have to call out. This right here:

Mike O Brien.4613:

we have a community team who can clarify and be the bridge between players and developers. They’re ready to engage you on these topics.

This is very clearly not true. The Megaserver feedback thread is evidence of that. The trait feedback thread is evidence of that. Your community team is not engaging us on these topics. I miss the days when Gaile Gray was a community manager. She does a fantastic job on the customer support team. But I miss those GW1 days…

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

I hope you guys realize who this is. If he posts this, it means all the ‘does Anet care?’ threads, have ring a bell up at Anet.

I believe that’s a community wide win where the argument against us was “Anet doesn’t care about us” type of thing. Well, as a community, we definitely are able to ring bells and make changes. Or at least make a ruckus enough to provoke.

Kohlteth.3715:

On the subject of communication, the “Community team” seem to pick and choose, another example being the “Mesmer bug” thread where it lists 40 issues and nothing from anyone about any progress, that is a whole profession basically unplayable the way it is supposed to be right there and no communication on an important subject yet someone jumped right on the Fix for the Orr fail champ train !

In fairness I am pretty sure most MMO’s jump on exploits and issues creating toxicity pretty quickly regardless, certainly the ones I actively spend time playing.

I agree though, the Mesmer thread is well overdue some response and actions

Mike O Brien.4613:

I know some are concerned about whether ArenaNet is communicating with you and listening and responding to your feedback. As you saw with yesterday’s announcement, we do. All of us at ArenaNet play the game with you, chat with you and read your forum posts, and work on the things that we think will most delight and entertain you.

We’ve set a clear policy in the past year: we don’t talk speculatively about future development. We don’t want to string you along. Creating fun is an uncertain business: sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t; sometimes we go back to the drawing board over and over before we get something right. If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers. So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.

Don’t read that as meaning that we don’t want to talk with you about the longer-term roadmap. The intention of the CDI threads is to talk with you about the roadmap. We want to talk design philosophy with you and hear how you want to see the game evolve. When those discussions trigger development, we’ll work internally until we have something we’re proud of before we’ll announce it.

A lot of the questions I’ve seen posted this week are as simple as this: does ArenaNet have an agenda to never do something? That’s almost never the case, and if it is the case you deserve to know and we’ll make sure we get more clear. In general the simple truth is this: when we’re not currently working on something, it’s because we’re working on something else instead that we think is more important for the game and community.

Our developers post on these forums on a voluntary basis, and in addition to developers, we have a community team who can clarify and be the bridge between players and developers. They’re ready to engage you on these topics. And I know it’s hard for the community team to engage players across all the forums and sites where these questions are being discussed, so I’m going to support the team in consolidating and focusing as necessary, so that we can be clear to the community where you can go to get a response.

See you in-game,
Mike O’Brien

do you even hear the WvW community of Guild vs Guild ?, at least NA, im from a server where guild do raids and are top of the NA groups, but now they all disbandind and the guilds are getting bored from this, alot of players are trying to hold on this making tournaments to trying to revive this, but with so low support, they cant… from the game who u create ( —-GUILD-- wars? the name game almost no represent the game itself) you big improve is helping ZERGS with tag colors and golem…the only help u make to the gvg community is making an arena on OS to make unofficial guilds vs guilds….so big help coming from arenanet

Nothing more than a Public PR response, nothing will change.

How about talking about in game events or issues. When you get players conflicting over petty things such as exploits, botting, things that may provide advantage over other players.

The reason why you get many trolls at farm like blixx, Cowflang, Lyssa, or others places is because there are some players who considered this to be an exploit while others dont. “That we are abusing the way the game was intended” and so forth. This had made the community “toxic” but since you guys do not SPEAK OR CLARIFY this then what do you expect happen? I understand that there is a chain of command at work and you cant say stuff that may be contradicting but at least speaking on issueswill help it get resolved faster

Be more transparent. Be part of the community. Be more Active in game. When you have devs in games that are part of the farm or events. Allow them to converse with the players when it comes to these things.

Thanks, Mike.

Stay in touch

Kohlteth.3715:

On the subject of communication, the “Community team” seem to pick and choose, another example being the “Mesmer bug” thread where it lists 40 issues and nothing from anyone about any progress, that is a whole profession basically unplayable the way it is supposed to be right there and no communication on an important subject yet someone jumped right on the Fix for the Orr fail champ train !

I think the problem lies in the fact, they tried to identify mesmer bugs, but it takes so huge amount of time, and no road to victory in sight yet, that they delayed it. You can question if that’s a good thing, but hard to solve bugs are a pain in the kitten for any developper. And there comes the (wich is in Mikes post btw): "we don’t announce before we are ready to say it is’. If they say ANYTHING at all about mesmer now, you only gonna be more mad. Cause the fix is not closely underway at all, but they are working as best as they can on this. There is ofc the possibility they don’t care at all for mesmer bugs atm, but I highly doubt it. It’s probably more like, the bugs are so painfully hard to solve, they don’t have the resources to fix it, and saying that up front, would cause uproar even more then the silence now. So they choose silence. Look at the scavenger hunt, QQ thread (that is is to late). Filled with lots of complaints, but if they never promised that, and they come, like it would have been destinied, with it in 2015, few people would have complained. The problem is, mmo community coordinators have a hard job. Not communicating is frustrating, IT IS. But is communicating better? The answer is not as simple as it sounds. Cause complaint-storms easely arrise, when negative news arrives. And by not talking about it, fewer complaints are loaded on the forums and more people keep busy. I’m not saying it’s the best way to go.

For pve content (stories) i understand total confidance, players cant help making it, or it would be spoiled. It’s their product, that we can’t interrupt. We can only make suggestions for the next one. For pvp/wvw content (and balancing for sure!) We need an early stage ‘product’ that’s not ready, but great enough to be shown. Alpha stage kinda. Show it to us, we communicate. You improve, go to beta stage, improve more, fix bugs, etc, then release it. Atm though it’s more like ‘alpha stage: sorry top secret’, ‘beta stage: ’sorrie top secret’, almost complete stage ‘maybe we relaese something to you now (eotm beta). It’s to late to fix, big things, for the community when things are at stage 2,5 (after beta, stage 3,0 is complete, ready for release). Like balance updates, should be discussed like NOW before patch. And if needed they should be change accordingly (wich won’t happen this time i’m afraid.)- Same for pvp maps. I’m sure you are working on new things other then conquest. But hiding the alpha stage of us, prevents us to improve it. Like i remember working 80 hours on something, but because of complaints afterwards i had to change stuff. Because it was complex document, i needed 20-30 hours to change the stuff again. Imo 30 hours wasted. If i talked earlier about it, in alpha stage, i could have included the wanted changes already, and cut of 10-20 hours time. Wouldn’t this benefit Anet too? Or is the scare for to much complaints and ‘they showed it and it still sucks’-threads, to big?

Don’t worry Mike, we hear you loud and clear already. Every week when we see more gem store items being churned out from the ArenaNet HQ instead of the bug fixes and improvements to the game that we have desperately been asking for since release.

I know I should be thankful that this red post exists at all. I know that I should appreciate it. But I’m sorry, Mark, I can’t thank you, and I can’t be appreciative.

It’s unfair of me, and I apologize for that, but it’s not going to change, for a long, long time, because of how poor the communication has been even -after- better communication was promised by Colin.

The best interaction I ever saw, the best communication I ever saw, occurred during SAB World 2. The creator of SAB took an active stance in the forums, spoke with everyone, and most importantly, continued to speak with everyone, even when people were tying his noose. And do you know what happened because of it?

The noose loosened, and people payed attention. But then, from what we’ve been lead to believe, he got in trouble for it. He got in trouble for actually being active and talking with us. He got in trouble for being good at customer service and public relations. Because apparently he set “too high” of a standard.

Regardless of what the truth of that actually is, there is one fact: He set a standard that should have been the norm to begin with. He did a good thing that day. A kitten good thing.

But overall, the communication has been horrible, and you guys have -a lot- of work to do. So don’t make this the last red post. If we look at this as a “restart” to the communication, then you have to keep it going, regardless of community toxicity. Otherwise what you’ve posted is just talk. And talk is cheap. ANet talk is even cheaper at this point, sad to say.

Another example: I doubt much devs farm Legendaries. The 20 hours a week, from the pvp dev is a good example. I doubt most Anet ppl have more playtime. With that amount of time, and the current prices, you would to purely hardcore farm legendary (mostly the t6 mats) and do nothing else in game. I doubt it’s anyones goal atm. So they just ignore it and play the game casual. That makes the devs have lower awareness of how huge the step to a legendary is these days with 1400g precursors, and 50 silver t6 mats (2000 needed). Perhaps they are working on solutoin. Or not. Like from economical point of view i finally understand why John smith doenst interferre the precursor market with a change. And as economist, he did a good job. As a player he did a bad job. The end result should be more a coordination between players and Anet. I’m also not saying these improvements are needed now. I can wait, i got patience. But we need a sign of this cooperation, and not ’it’s my view, and that’s the only law’ kind of personality.