Guild Wars 2

Chris Whiteside.6102:

IvanTheGrey.2941:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

IvanTheGrey.2941:

Mr. Whiteside, sorry to bring it up again, but can you clarify the changes in instance ownership? I believe that there’s a genuine concern for griefing, and I was hoping that you could put our legitimate worries at ease.

Thanks again for replying!

We have been discussing this for a very long time. Can you PM me so i remember to get back to this point when it is appropriate to do so please?

Chris

Will do sir, as soon as you empty your inbox :-)

Ah lol ok. Actually I am going to ask Izzy to chat about it.

Thanks Palador.

Chris

Note: he is busy today so it will either be tonight or tomorrow.

Totally off-topic to what you were talking about but it’s awesome to see these type of responses (in regards to, he’s busy he’ll get to talk to you in xxx timeframe).
For instance, you’ve got this well sorted in the support department withe Gaile handling the tickets that’ve been open for more than 3 days

Sometimes when you don’t have the time to reply to something, letting people know you will reply within reasonable time is awesome to hear rather than losing interest in the discussion and letting it slip through your fingers.

Not only is communication lacking, but the quality of it seems to be very low.. judging by the last few sept feature pack announcements..

Seeing the headlines “IMPROVEMENTS GALORE” got my hyped until I actually read the article…I don’t think I’ve ever facepalmed so hard… seriously why would you put “GALORE” when you just announce very few changes??

TIL galore means 3.

These improvements just seem so over hyped

vague performance updates? ya that made a whole lot of sense…

Dungeon owner fix..cool i guess? that doesn’t change the fact most ppl don’t want to run dungeons lol… how about actually you know, giving the community a reason to even do dungs outside of a simple daily gold reward? I’d rather the devs worked on improving the actual dungs the past 5-6 months instead of working on dungeon owner changes lol..but hey, not my call

Crafting update is nice, but again QoL update,

Tomorrow will be the china backpacks (as if we don’t have enough back peice choices….) guaranteed so another meh article

The overhyping really does need to stop though.. was no reason at all to put “GALORE”..now you just mislead the community

Gamers in general are an irrational bunch, this fact can easily be observed by taking a look at the official forums of pretty much any game out there.

That is why game developers are very vague when talking about possible additions to their games. No matter how hard you stress the point that ideas aren’t set in stone, you’ll end up with a crowd raving about “broken promises” if something ends up getting changed or scrapped even.

It’s our fault it’s gotten like this, not the developers.

Having said that, I wish game devs everywhere would grow some balls and just ignore the irrational crybabies.

Exactly. I have no doubt that if they “promise” something and then go back on it that there will be numerous loud complaints about it. That’s ok though. It will happen. I think that what is worse though is the current state of confusion and malaise, where we want something big for the game’s future, but have no idea what is coming in the big picture. I think that this current state represents more upset players than some “missed promise” would, it’s just a quieter upset because we don’t really understand what we’re missing.

WP talked about wanting an expansion because those are typically hyped six months or more in advance with all sorts of trailers and interviews and blog posts, and you can get a lot of expectation about it coming. We don’t need an expansion but we do need an expansion-like element. The “feature patch previews” hit some of these notes, but we only get them a month or so before they go live.

It’s like how Christmas is great because you are anticipating it for months in advance. Imagine if Christmas is just something that happened randomly on some day of the year and you wouldn’t know it was coming it until it happened. Some random Thursday in August comes along and you wake up to Christmas. It’d still be kinda fun, but you’d lose all that anticipation!

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I think polls wouldn’t have valuable results because of this:

Q: How important is SAB for you?
A: Very important —> tons of people
B: Neutral
C: I can’t stand it

Anet: Ok, you voted for SAB, our map-designers will now stop working on new maps and focus on SAB only. You’ll get world 3 in 3 months, no new maps in the near future.
Us: O______o noooooo

As long as we have no idea how ressources are managed and what needs to be sacrificed in order to make something else happen, polls would make little sense imho.

I LOL’d so hard at this, it SOO reminds Me of another place where the same question was asked and the answer was " Well…… you could have that, OR another Raid tier ! "

Hi Chris, firstly just wanted to say much appreciated that your replying to many comments on this post, much more than has been done previously.

Its clear that you’ve finally recognised we don’t feel Anet have replied and responded to requests and suggestions from players enough. I would be keen to ask, what do Anet think the player base has issues with?

As someone with over 2k hours of gameplay, i have a decent overview, and would agree with the majority of comments on here. However, i never remember GW1 experiencing this kind of negativity. In many ways GW2 is far superior to GW1. Both to me are brilliant games, and have given great pleasure to myself and many others. However, GW2 isn’t perfect. But if we take how far the game as come in many aspects, it has changed vastly. Yet certain elements still have yet to be corrected and modified (think Zhaitan end fight – press 2)

My question would be do you feel the difference between GW1, an expansion based MMO which evolved drastically (think heroes, number of Elite skills, weapons, professions) and GW2, a more events driven game, living world (no henchmen, 5 man limits, WvW) has influenced the strong opinions regarding the game at this time? Do you believe that the success of GW1 has actually led to problems with GW2 due to the high expectations despite the fact both are different games?

Many thanks and appreciate the responses you’ve given so far

Lol so everyone at ANet stop working on game maps to work on SAB, geez what a small team.

Kohlteth.3715:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I think polls wouldn’t have valuable results because of this:

Q: How important is SAB for you?
A: Very important —> tons of people
B: Neutral
C: I can’t stand it

Anet: Ok, you voted for SAB, our map-designers will now stop working on new maps and focus on SAB only. You’ll get world 3 in 3 months, no new maps in the near future.
Us: O______o noooooo

As long as we have no idea how ressources are managed and what needs to be sacrificed in order to make something else happen, polls would make little sense imho.

I LOL’d so hard at this, it SOO reminds Me of another place where the same question was asked and the answer was " Well…… you could have that, OR another Raid tier ! "

“Or you can go for what’s in the box that Hiro-san is bringing down the aisle!”

I think a (major) part of the communication problems anet has can be seen from how the announcement of this feature pack was handled. I would also argue that it has something (a lot) to do with the PR mess of the recent days.

Firstly it was announced at a time of anniversary, for which many people were expecting something big. Secondly it was announced to span over 3 weeks, which is a huge amount of time further inflating the idea of a big change (and by big I mean expansion size).

With that in mind lets consider an interested player who is keeping up with the announcements as they come out. First day it’s just a pvp tournament, exciting for hard core pvp players, for anyone else not so much, “I’m sure they have something better in store for tomorrow.”

PvP visual and rewards – “This looks neat, I might even start to play more pvp, I’m getting exicited”

next day

Balance – “Nothing I already knew/to vague. Just a filler post and my wait is in vain”

next day

Big changes to commander system – “Omg I can’t wait to read that, this might be the blog post I was waiting for. Oh no wait new colours and account bound. BIG changes indeed. Are they mocking me?”

I could go on but it is beyond the point since it just repeats it self , up to Improvements Galore, of whole 3 changes.

So in short what I am trying to say is that this update seems quite substantial but they way anet is releasing details about it is simply horrible. If there were 1 (or 2) huge blog posts where everyone could find something to get excited about there would be far less fuss about it. Instead players are sent on an emotional roller-coaster which results in being disappointed to a varying degree for 90% of the time.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Well, I talk about it because it seems to me that the community-reaction on the delay of pc-crafting is the reason why we haven’t seen roadmaps for 2014 anymore.

Oh, sorry, now I understood your post. You are pinpointing the most likely reason/contributor why they stopped sharing plans with the community. Very on topic, my bad :P .

Yoda.2839:

So in short what I am trying to say is that this update seems quite substantial but they way anet is releasing details about it is simply horrible. If there were 1 (or 2) huge blog posts where everyone could find something to get excited about there would be far less fuss about it. Instead players are sent on an emotional roller-coaster which results in being disappointed to a varying degree for 90% of the time.

I agree. Compared to last pack, this one seems to have much less user-facing changes. Last one had some big changes (wardrobe, megaserver, traits change, PvP tracks) and some smaller changes (account bound dyes and armor, no more repair costs).

The only change I saw in this patch that seems to be big as the previous big ones is the MegaGuilds one, and even this one may not change the game for 90% of the playerbase (but is probably very difficult to do it right for those affected).

Maybe it’s the comparison, but it would help to consolidate the announcement so it fits the size of the feature pack.

I hope they don’t dedicate a post next week to announce they will include Backpieces as a searchable TP armor category.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

I could answer this! It is true two people could be invited and then boot out everyone else to “take over” the instance where as before two people could only kick the instance owner out closing the instance destroying it for everyone. While this isn’t ideal and something we need to look more into, the goal of this change was to reduce the more common case of the instance owner leaving. For now Ryan is looking into adding some logging (see post here) so people can report people abusing this.

If you guys can get that pushed through, that would be awesome! And thank you all for getting us a quick answer on it.

DDCarvalho.2071:

I hope they don’t dedicate a post next week to announce they will include Backpieces as a searchable TP armor category.

If they make it so you can search the trading post by armor weight, I will GLADLY state it’s worth an entire announcement all on its own.

Palador.2170:

If they make it so you can search the trading post by armor weight, I will GLADLY state it’s worth an entire announcement all on its own.

Aim higher!

Search by slot type and armor weight.

Palador.2170:

DDCarvalho.2071:

I hope they don’t dedicate a post next week to announce they will include Backpieces as a searchable TP armor category.

If they make it so you can search the trading post by armor weight, I will GLADLY state it’s worth an entire announcement all on its own.

Absolutely!

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

IvanTheGrey.2941:

Mr. Whiteside, sorry to bring it up again, but can you clarify the changes in instance ownership? I believe that there’s a genuine concern for griefing, and I was hoping that you could put our legitimate worries at ease.

Thanks again for replying!

We have been discussing this for a very long time. Can you PM me so i remember to get back to this point when it is appropriate to do so please?

Chris

I could answer this! It is true two people could be invited and then boot out everyone else to “take over” the instance where as before two people could only kick the instance owner out closing the instance destroying it for everyone. While this isn’t ideal and something we need to look more into, the goal of this change was to reduce the more common case of the instance owner leaving. For now Ryan is looking into adding some logging (see post here) so people can report people abusing this.

Wow required 4 people’s votes in order to kick someone preventing people from abusing the system so much.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

IvanTheGrey.2941:

Mr. Whiteside, sorry to bring it up again, but can you clarify the changes in instance ownership? I believe that there’s a genuine concern for griefing, and I was hoping that you could put our legitimate worries at ease.

Thanks again for replying!

We have been discussing this for a very long time. Can you PM me so i remember to get back to this point when it is appropriate to do so please?

Chris

I could answer this! It is true two people could be invited and then boot out everyone else to “take over” the instance where as before two people could only kick the instance owner out closing the instance destroying it for everyone. While this isn’t ideal and something we need to look more into, the goal of this change was to reduce the more common case of the instance owner leaving. For now Ryan is looking into adding some logging (see post here) so people can report people abusing this.

Not trying to be rude. But, could you please explain why this has been such a long lingering issue? Is it just that there weren’t enough feedback posts about it? So it got shelved?

Maybe go into a bit about the whys for this decision to include it in the game to being with? (i.e. too difficult to change prior to release, or not seen as a major issue)

I also wonder, does QA deal with D/C issues, meaning is that part of your testing structure? Do you D/C the machine intentionally to see what sort of problems are introduced? I ask this since it’s kind of a thorn for the megaserver at the moment (getting D/C’d at Teq or wurm or world events and not getting the reward, type of thing).

I guess i might be asking too much about the inside stuff, but i think it would at least help us understand some of the layers, and some of the issues you all face, beyond the corporate hierarchy.

I just got an Idea how you could solve this. (I don’t know if it’s possible to code this though :/ )

When a party starts a dungeon the new system I suggest will save this party. If the whole group is replaced by new players the instance will close.

Example:

• Players A, B, C, D and E open a dungeon.
  The game saves the instance openers.
  Players A-D leave.
  Player E invites new players (A²-D²) // still fine because we have at least player E who was in the party when the dungeon was opened
  Dungeon finished -> everyone is happy.
• Players A, B, C, D and E open a dungeon.
  The game saves the instance openers.
  Players A-D leave.
  Player E invites new players (A²-D²)
  Players A² and B² kick player E. // last member of the original group is kicked
  Instance will be closed.

That means that you cannot replace the whole party.

Advantages:

• players won’t be able to completly steal dungeons
• solo dungeons will still be possible to sell because the system only saved a single name that keeps the instance open.

We are derailing here.

Behellagh.1468:

We are derailing here.

Me? Just curious. As i was trying to keep in theme of Communicating with you. Maybe i’m out of line?

The topic is shifting from establishing a communication process and is starting to ask about very specific things to be looked at. All we are doing here is giving him enough rope to allow his masters to shut him down by asking him to discuss specific scenarios. Or he’s going to have to include “This is my opinion” on all his posts so it won’t be used as an ANet “promise”.

Behellagh.1468:

The topic is shifting from establishing a communication process and is starting to ask about very specific things to be looked at. All we are doing here is giving him enough rope to allow his masters to shut him down by asking him to discuss specific scenarios. Or he’s going to have to include “This is my opinion” on all his posts so it won’t be used as an ANet “promise”.

Hmmm, i’ll have to give this some thought. But, in the spirit of some communication (which they’ve now proven to some extent is OK). I wouldn’t mind seeing some (I’m a fanboi) transparency into the thought process behind some of these changes/improvements that have already been released as “features”. I guess i thought that would be a good stepping off point. However, calling it a feature is something i’m interested in knowing about the idea behind that as well.

It would be better to open a new thread, or post in a thread dealing with that topic, than derailing the topic of this thread.

Else, you may receive responses such as: “I can’t address that here”, “I will try to speak to those versed in that topic, and get back to you” (which might be unintentionally forgotten), or even moderation.

If such things happen, it could be seen as non-communicative, and add tinder to the already blazing fire. Let’s try to avoid sabotaging the process as much as possible on both sides. =)

I would love transparency too but as long as they have their " we don’t talk speculatively about future development" in place, devs can only talk about generalities, what they have done or do the forum version of going “hmm, interesting argument”. They may be able to state an opinion but it would have to be clearly marked as one so it’s not thrown back into ANet’s face.

That’s the point of CDI club. We can discuss things under the auspice that there isn’t any kind of promise involved. It’s opinions on possibilities.

Yoda.2839:

I think a (major) part of the communication problems anet has can be seen from how the announcement of this feature pack was handled. I would also argue that it has something (a lot) to do with the PR mess of the recent days.

Firstly it was announced at a time of anniversary, for which many people were expecting something big. Secondly it was announced to span over 3 weeks, which is a huge amount of time further inflating the idea of a big change (and by big I mean expansion size).

With that in mind lets consider an interested player who is keeping up with the announcements as they come out. First day it’s just a pvp tournament, exciting for hard core pvp players, for anyone else not so much, “I’m sure they have something better in store for tomorrow.”

PvP visual and rewards – “This looks neat, I might even start to play more pvp, I’m getting exicited”

next day

Balance – “Nothing I already knew/to vague. Just a filler post and my wait is in vain”

next day

Big changes to commander system – “Omg I can’t wait to read that, this might be the blog post I was waiting for. Oh no wait new colours and account bound. BIG changes indeed. Are they mocking me?”

I could go on but it is beyond the point since it just repeats it self , up to Improvements Galore, of whole 3 changes.

So in short what I am trying to say is that this update seems quite substantial but they way anet is releasing details about it is simply horrible. If there were 1 (or 2) huge blog posts where everyone could find something to get excited about there would be far less fuss about it. Instead players are sent on an emotional roller-coaster which results in being disappointed to a varying degree for 90% of the time.

There is no way to deliver the news that many/most (matter of opinion) of the features are minor or not impactful to you, in such a way that you are going to feel less disappointment. It’s a matter of either being disappointed during the actual announcement, or during the ‘announcement of the announcement’ that you are asking for.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

It would be better to open a new thread, or post in a thread dealing with that topic, than derailing the topic of this thread.

Else, you may receive responses such as: “I can’t address that here”, “I will try to speak to those versed in that topic, and get back to you” (which might be unintentionally forgotten), or even moderation.

If such things happen, it could be seen as non-communicative, and add tinder to the already blazing fire. Let’s try to avoid sabotaging the process as much as possible on both sides. =)

Understood, it still feels like on open dialog on communication. But thanks for the feedback. I really don’t want to open a thread, nor am i worried about an answer or lack of, i was just going off the responses Chris left in what i felt were off-topic discussion and the attempt at open communication about the various things, slapping down rumors and the like. I probably misinterpreted the intent.

I’m no stranger to these things, i do a lot of complex scripting and the like for my job, so i guess my thought process is a slightly off-kilter deal. I apologize.

I can’t find the post anymore, when will the new CDI begin? And it’s about changing the policy/communication?

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I can’t find the post anymore, when will the new CDI begin? And it’s about changing the policy/communication?

Don’t know and no.

The Great Al.2546:

There is no way to deliver the news that many/most (matter of opinion) of the features are minor or not impactful to you, in such a way that you are going to feel less disappointment. It’s a matter of either being disappointed during the actual announcement, or during the ‘announcement of the announcement’ that you are asking for.

I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear. I don’t want announcment of the announcement. I want 1 big blog post instead of many small ones spanned over 3 weeks, with silly titles.

Yoda.2839:

I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear. I don’t want announcment of the announcement. I want 1 big blog post instead of many small ones spanned over 3 weeks, with silly titles.

I agree with this. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with such an information rollout, I think the current climate in regards to communication doesn’t really support such a marketing strategy. Many people are simply flat-out tired of ANet dragging its heels in regards to releasing information.

If they were generally more forthcoming with information, such a teaser-type rollout might be fun, but as it is, it just comes off as being more annoying and frustrating than anything else.

My opinion, of course. Your mileage may vary.

After catching up with the discussion for the MOST part I am so glad to see the way the forum community is heading. People are coming together for a common goal in giving CONSTRUCTIVE and RESPECTFUL criticism and in return we get more and more developers joining in the conversations. You don’t have to be a “whiteknight” to be respectful and it seems we as a community are starting to understand. (my personal view, obviously I can’t talk for everyone) Just want to say thank you to everyone involved both developers and my brothers and sisters in game!

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

If I tried to make posts like this to solve my relationships ruined by playing too many video games… well, I guess I can’t knock it ’til I try it.

Steve Fowler.1498:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Kiwicharr.8051:

Hey Chris, thanks so much for all the posts and attention this thread is getting now! Really great to see some more Arenanet interaction with the players, its something that is really needed at the moment i think.

In the interests of transparency could you please explain why the atlas was removed from the website without anyone from Arenanet mentioning it? Also why do we get a lot of big changes not listed in the patch notes? Communicating things like these would really go a long way i think. People would really like to see why you make the choices you make with how you develop the game moving forward.

Hope you enjoyed your weekend!

I will speak to Steve Fowler about this who is our Head of Marketing and an all ground great guy.

Chris

So the question is why we brought down the Atlas? The reason is that this website was a promotion in celebration to the season 1 finale. It was used to build up suspense, speculation and excitement as to what the final ending would be to the Scarlet story-line, and ultimately showcasing how she was responsible for the destruction of Lions Arch.

As to the patch notes thing I am not the right person to comment

Steve

Hey, well, that’s cool. But….

I don’t think anyone knew that was the purpose of the Atlas. I know I didn’t. I thought it was a permanent feature/tool/information-source that would be updated throughout the life of the game. Even if, rather sporadically.

Thanks for the information regarding its true purpose, though. Perhaps, a bit of information about what things like the Atlas’ purpose was might be useful, in the future. =)

DDCarvalho.2071:

I hope they don’t dedicate a post next week to announce they will include Backpieces as a searchable TP armor category.

There is actually already a backpiece category, it’s just not in the drop down list for whatever reason. It’s fully functional and has been since the beginning.

I wish they would confirm if they were actually going to upgrade the trading post or leave it as is – for 3rd party development reasons. (it’s moddable)

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Steve Fowler.1498:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Kiwicharr.8051:

Hey Chris, thanks so much for all the posts and attention this thread is getting now! Really great to see some more Arenanet interaction with the players, its something that is really needed at the moment i think.

In the interests of transparency could you please explain why the atlas was removed from the website without anyone from Arenanet mentioning it? Also why do we get a lot of big changes not listed in the patch notes? Communicating things like these would really go a long way i think. People would really like to see why you make the choices you make with how you develop the game moving forward.

Hope you enjoyed your weekend!

I will speak to Steve Fowler about this who is our Head of Marketing and an all ground great guy.

Chris

So the question is why we brought down the Atlas? The reason is that this website was a promotion in celebration to the season 1 finale. It was used to build up suspense, speculation and excitement as to what the final ending would be to the Scarlet story-line, and ultimately showcasing how she was responsible for the destruction of Lions Arch.

As to the patch notes thing I am not the right person to comment

Steve

Hey, well, that’s cool. But….

I don’t think anyone knew that was the purpose of the Atlas. I know I didn’t. I thought it was a permanent feature/tool/information-source that would be updated throughout the life of the game. Even if, rather sporadically.

Thanks for the information regarding its true purpose, though. Perhaps, a bit of information about what things like the Atlas’ purpose was might be useful, in the future. =)

i think its usefulness as a record tracker went out the window the moment we got the (glorious) story journal.

Record-tracker? Was that it’s purpose? I certainly didn’t use it as such; I’m not sure how one would.

If you mean something that referenced what happened in Living Story Season One, I’m not sure the Journal was any help with that. Maybe I missed that part, though.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

cesmode.4257:

Im not sure what 19 pages are about here…All Mr Obrien was stating was their reasoning for being hush hush about certain things. Don’t think we need to discuss it.

The only thing Id like to discuss that abstractly relates to this, is the discussion and/or development effort of things that we do not ask for VS things that we ask for over and over and over again. Id like a little more transparency on that.

No one asked for Ascended gear. We got it.
No one asked for Living Story. We got it.

We did ask for precursor crafting/scav hunts, and still don’t have it.
We still ask for expansions.

Things like that. I know Im over-generalizing here in terms of the scope of my opinion. However, in and out of game these are the things I see most popping up on fansite forums, official forums, in game chat…

Crumbs there are a lot of assumptions here specifically in terms of who wants what to be in GW2 and not.

Chris

Well, then, just to be clear, here’s what I want and/or don’t want.

Content:

I would prefer an actual expansion to pretty much everything you guys have added since launch. I’d like new zones, including new starting zones for new races. And new professions (or old ones revived). And new skills not bound to specific weapons, and hey, some new weapons, too. And mass quantities of simple meat and potatoes things like quests. I’d like to be able to level new characters from 1 to 80 without repeating any of the quests/missions my old characters experienced.

I want new characters to have something that my old characters wanted, but were denied: more stuff to do with the people they meet along the way. A krewe or a warband, for example, the members of which I can hand pick from a wide selection of NPC characters, who will be with my character all the way. Not abandoned, like the people my current characters once knew, way back when. What a waste.

Precursors, Ascended Gear, and Grind:

I don’t care about precursors because I will never do the grind for a legendary. In fact, if there’s grind involved, to hell with it, whatever it is. I’m too old for that nonsense. I’ve done it too many times in too many games. It’s not fun. I’ll say it again: grind is not fun. Please lay off the grind.

Legendary Sidebar: a weapon should be ‘legendary’ because of who wielded it and what they did while they were wielding it, not because they bought it off the trading post or jumped through a bunch of ridiculous hoops to get the parts to make it.

I did not want ascended gear. I do, of course, have some ascended trinkets on one of my guys, and I took a stab at getting to 500 on a couple of the crafts but ultimately decided it would be pointless to keep going, and because I hate time gating almost as much as I hate grind. I’ve pretty much stopped bothering with crafting altogether.

Living Story:

As for living story, once I saw what it was going to be, I did not want it. I thought it was awful, and I thought you guys were intellectually challenged for thinking that non-seasonal temporary content was viable. The first go round of living story prompted me to take a 5 month or so break from this game, during which I played STO and LOTRO. Had so much fun in LOTRO I subbed again, for a while. Still don’t have a max level character there, though. They keep raising the level cap.

Speaking of which, I hope you guys don’t ever do that. I hate that. Which means you’ll probably do it, as you always seem to do exactly the things I don’t want you to do. I’d really rather you just make 80 better. Add more stuff for 80. Don’t be Nigel Tufnel: “This one goes to 85.”

Thanks.

Steve Fowler.1498:

So the question is why we brought down the Atlas? The reason is that this website was a promotion in celebration to the season 1 finale. It was used to build up suspense, speculation and excitement as to what the final ending would be to the Scarlet story-line, and ultimately showcasing how she was responsible for the destruction of Lions Arch.

As to the patch notes thing I am not the right person to comment

Steve

But it was also a nice way to show someone new to the game what happened during the LS S1.

Steve Fowler.1498:

It was used to build up suspense, speculation and excitement as to what the final ending would be to the Scarlet story-line

really? suspense, speculation and excitement? Not sure about anyone else but I can tell you right now it did none of those things. More like a strange tool that in theory sounded good but was executed poorly.

I think I used it once and thought “this is messy, what’s its purpose? waste of time… back into the game”

that may of sounded harsh, and I like that Anet are looking into different ideas/options to deliver the content. But the Atlas could of easily been replaced with a good trailer that would of given people excitement, suspense and speculation.

Thobek.1730:

Steve Fowler.1498:

It was used to build up suspense, speculation and excitement as to what the final ending would be to the Scarlet story-line

really? suspense, speculation and excitement? Not sure about anyone else but I can tell you right now it did none of those things. More like a strange tool that in theory sounded good but was executed poorly.

I think I used it once and thought “this is messy, what’s its purpose? waste of time… back into the game”

that may of sounded harsh, and I like that Anet are looking into different ideas/options to deliver the content. But the Atlas could of easily been replaced with a good trailer that would of given people excitement, suspense and speculation.

Which is probably what made them decide not to pour effort and time into keeping it.

Kiwicharr.8051:

Also why do we get a lot of big changes not listed in the patch notes? Communicating things like these would really go a long way i think. People would really like to see why you make the choices you make with how you develop the game moving forward.

I second that, I don’t know why but most game companies seem to think the reasons behind changes are either always obvious or entirely irrelevant. Putting the reasoning behind some major changes out there, especially if the system changed a lot as it was being iterated on would be extremely insightful and help in users realizing what kind of things you already considered when implementing a particular system when suggesting future improvements.

Go figure. Even their freaking Atlas was temporary. lol.

Wow we get a reason for why it was take down (atlas) and people complain… Sometimes I feel people jump on the “hate train” to make friends rather then give constructive criticism.

nexxe.7081:

Go figure. Even their freaking Atlas was temporary. lol.

:O, maybe they are improving it? like they want to give a full round planet via LS map releases? wouldn’t that be cool?

Aeolus.3615:

nexxe.7081:

Go figure. Even their freaking Atlas was temporary. lol.

:O, maybe they are improving it? like they want to give a full round planet via LS map releases? wouldn’t that be cool?

I think it will go back up either as the break is about to end for the Living Story or after LS2 wraps. Since it was intended to help people coming in fresh grasp what went on before they got into the LS this season.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Hey, well, that’s cool. But….

I don’t think anyone knew that was the purpose of the Atlas. I know I didn’t. I thought it was a permanent feature/tool/information-source that would be updated throughout the life of the game. Even if, rather sporadically.

Thanks for the information regarding its true purpose, though. Perhaps, a bit of information about what things like the Atlas’ purpose was might be useful, in the future. =)

Agreed. If a feature (either in-game or on the website) is only going to be available for a limited time, it should be clearly identified as such. Just another one of those pesky communication details that are fortunately easy enough to fix going forward. :-)

Or maybe it was supposed to be permanent, but people simply didn’t care about it enough to warrant continued development?

lordkrall.7241:

Or maybe it was supposed to be permanent, but people simply didn’t care about it enough to warrant continued development?

Yea, imagine the atlas made as an in-game feature. Like a collectible feature in your home instance where you could go to get a summary of events leading up to S1 finale; maybe it could even have been interactive so you could put up pins as you explored the world and came across locations you wanted to remember, that then got stored in your home atlas.

Probably a lot of other uses too, a world of possibilities as they say… instead it became an out-of-game fad like the side stories they put up on the website for background lore; stuff that really would’ve complemented the game if they had but existed in-game.

The level of communication we’re seeing from Chris Cleary, Steve Fowler and Ryan Diederich is about the right level of communication for areas of the game where trust hasn’t completely eroded, I think. Ryan in particular was good; gave a reason, had a look, might be able to do a little more to help out.

Had a quick thought:

Devs are limited in what they’re allowed to talk about, especially on something in development.

But are they limited in expressing opinions or statements of liking?

Forum: “I have X idea on how to Y.”
Dev: “Oh, I like that idea. We’ll look into it.”

Forum: “X is just the answer we’re looking for!”
Dev: “I’ll hand that forward to the dev team. Thanks!”

The acknowledgement is a simple way to show us that our ideas are getting heard. It might hedge down some of the repeat threads, too. =P

It could even been a code word. >.>
“Like” = I’ll forward to the team
“Really like” = That might be something we’re already working on!