Guild Wars 2

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Malkavian.4516:

Greetings, Chris

I just tried out the first few missions of Chapter 7, and I must say this: I am wholly unsatisfied with the new pacing the patch gave towards the Personal Story. I would be fine had you just consolidated certain episodes into chapters but still retained their original order. It just feels very messy to deal with to be honest with you and I would appreciate it if you would able to do the community had you can help in convincing the developers in fixing this as soon as possible. In addition to that, I already mentioned on a bug report relating to one other quest called “Romke’s Final Voyage” where I hear no voice coming from the characters in the cinematic NOR did I see any mouths opening when they were supposed to speak.

I beg of you, please help us out here in making sure that this message comes across. I am personally okay with the level gating of skills and the need to do 10 levels before proceeding to the next chapter of the story. But doing the old switcharoo on certain episodes to favor a different approach just doesn’t work unless you guys actually made serious changes to those episodes so that they can be tied together more seamlessly.

That’s all I got for now. Thanks so much.

Hi Malk,

First of all thanks very much for all of your info. We have actually been using your posts to investigate (or rather Leah and her team has).

Secondly and just to be clear in case it isn’t. I am not a customer service rep, I am a developer and thus you are talking directly to the team.

Finally I will have more info for you Monday or perhaps Leah will post. Either way we will be in touch. Thanks for your support and have a great weekend.

Chris

To Chris ( or anyone else that can answer this),

In no way am I trying to be rude here but just trying to get a better ideal of how things work. What exactly does a studio design director do? Is that the same thing as a studio game director? I ask because I figure you somehow “direct” the game, so I would think you should know what goes in to the game and for what reasons. Every time someone asks a question, you have to go get answers. Also, it seems like you guys have meetings every day. I know you can’t disclose what you discuss in those meetings but I would hope it’s about what’s going on with the game. I realize just because one dev does something, doesn’t mean everyone knows how to do it or what’s going on. For example, the people that create game models may have no idea how to write a story. Anyway, as far as I know, you are part of upper management and a director, if you don’t know what’s being added/changed in the game, maybe communication needs to be better and your daily meetings a bit more informative. Again, not trying to be rude so I apologize if it comes off that way. I thank you for taking the time to communicate with us, I really appreciate it.

Thanks,

Robert

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Malkavian.4516:

Greetings, Chris

I just tried out the first few missions of Chapter 7, and I must say this: I am wholly unsatisfied with the new pacing the patch gave towards the Personal Story. I would be fine had you just consolidated certain episodes into chapters but still retained their original order. It just feels very messy to deal with to be honest with you and I would appreciate it if you would able to do the community had you can help in convincing the developers in fixing this as soon as possible. In addition to that, I already mentioned on a bug report relating to one other quest called “Romke’s Final Voyage” where I hear no voice coming from the characters in the cinematic NOR did I see any mouths opening when they were supposed to speak.

I beg of you, please help us out here in making sure that this message comes across. I am personally okay with the level gating of skills and the need to do 10 levels before proceeding to the next chapter of the story. But doing the old switcharoo on certain episodes to favor a different approach just doesn’t work unless you guys actually made serious changes to those episodes so that they can be tied together more seamlessly.

That’s all I got for now. Thanks so much.

Hi Malk,

First of all thanks very much for all of your info. We have actually been using your posts to investigate (or rather Leah and her team has).

Secondly and just to be clear in case it isn’t. I am not a customer service rep, I am a developer and thus you are talking directly to the team.

Finally I will have more info for you Monday or perhaps Leah will post. Either way we will be in touch. Thanks for your support and have a great weekend.

Chris

Thank you so much, Chris. And yeah, I am aware that I am speaking to the team directly. I am just voicing out my concerns to you the way I know how.

ANet: I really believe you.

But the only problem is that it really feels like you’re ignoring the playerbase. Posts that have so many people posting about an issue to the game… it feels like it’s being ignored because no dev is participating.

I can understand that you can’t participate in it, for all the reasons you said… but wouldn’t be any way to flag a post as “Hey, we’re reading it and we’re talking about it back here”?

From my point of view and by now, I only see these posts as the ones that have the ANet tag in it (i.e., a dev made a reply).

edit: Or at least, when you make the decision that you won’t change a thing because all the playerbase has gone crazy… just tell it?

Stiofan.6720:

Hi Chris, Thanks for the responses, It’s really nice seeing more dev coverage on the forums, I don’t think it always has to be the main devs themselves commenting on posts all day whenever they have free time, Sort of like that other person was suggesting, that isn’t really fair. I was hoping we could see more of the community managers on the forums, I know there’s the french community manager called Stéphane Lo Presti. I’m not sure if he has counter-parts for NA etc but if he does I’ve never seen any posts from them in 2 years. I think it was Gaile Grey in gw1, what about creating one for gw2 if there is none.

Here you go: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/members/Regina-Buenaobra-6193/showposts

JonathanSharp.7094:

Apokriphos.7042:

What are your thoughts on current Class Balance in Dungeons, sPvp, and 5 man roaming WvW?

Are there any plans to make classes that lack group utility useful in these game modes? Perhaps more frequent balancing, as in GW1?

Hey Apokripho (cool name btw)!

@balance in different game types: Class balance for those 3 game types differs, based on class and the game type, obviously.

For instance, in WvW, swiftness is a very important tool, while being less crucial in Dungeons (if you’re in fights a lot of the time). What we usually talk about in balance discussions is how some class specs will be stronger in one game type than they are in others, and that’s ok.

@class group utility: I hope I’m reading your meaning correctly on this one. We try to make sure that we spread this stuff out into different “buckets” for each class. So if you have a ton of damage in a spec, you probably won’t have as many ways to dole out tons of CC as well. If a spec does have that, we try to bring down one of those aspects of the spec. For instance, the new Ranger specs we’re seeing dish out a TON of damage at range, but they are relatively squishy if you get right on them (compared to say, a defensive Guardian’s ability to tank damage), and they have no way to really deal with enemy boons effectively.

@more frequent balancing: We do 2 major “modes” of balancing – one is the feature pack balancing, which just happened this week. We try to put out a lot of new stuff for the classes, and try to spread out the changes. Once that happens, we watch the game for a while and listen to the players. This can happen in game, it can happen in VOD’s, Twitch, Youtube, the forums, etc.

After we give a patch a few weeks to settle, we then look at our second mode of course correcting, which is done by making smaller changes if we feel they’re necessary (shaving down something that feels way too powerful, or bringing something up that feels way too under powered), while also scoping out balance changes for the next feature release!

Hope that helps!

-Chap

Hi Chap, what would you consider “shaving down”?

Just recently people have discovered that the ranger’s Frost Spirit has been modified to match the tooltip(35% or 70% chance to deal 10% more damage with 10s ICD).

It has been without an ICD for a while now but with the recent change it amounts to less than a stack of vulnerability and having it traited doesn’t really make a difference (and this goes back to class balance specifically for dungeons where a staple utility like Frost Spirit has been nerfed to being almost useless).

Would you consider this change too drastic and maybe bring it back up to something less underwhelming(specially for dungeon class balance)?

1. will we face all the dragons
2.will we have further progression in the game(apart from the story)
3.will the combat improves (by all means)

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Stiofan.6720:

Hi Chris, Thanks for the responses, It’s really nice seeing more dev coverage on the forums, I don’t think it always has to be the main devs themselves commenting on posts all day whenever they have free time, Sort of like that other person was suggesting, that isn’t really fair. I was hoping we could see more of the community managers on the forums, I know there’s the french community manager called Stéphane Lo Presti. I’m not sure if he has counter-parts for NA etc but if he does I’ve never seen any posts from them in 2 years. I think it was Gaile Grey in gw1, what about creating one for gw2 if there is none.

Here you go: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/members/Regina-Buenaobra-6193/showposts

I forgot all about Regina, My bad, I think she took over from gaile she’s really nice. I noticed that her title is “community team lead” Who are the rest of the community team.

The GMs and moderators, no doubt.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Blude.6812:

Not really asking for a time frame.
Just asking for some “communication with you” in the bug forum. As I said a simple ‘yes we know’ and it’s on our to do list would be be fine. But totally ignoring it —not so fine.

Hi Blude,

We are not ignoring it all. We are aware and will update Monday.

Thanks for raising it to my attention.

Chris

FANtasitic and thank you very much!

Malkavian.4516:

The GMs and moderators, no doubt.

But who are all the GM’s, I don’t think the moderators (guys in my pic) are considered apart of the community team.

Hello Chris.
Would it be possible for someone from the team to take a look at the feedback in the Warrior forum, please?

To sum it up, many people feel that the adrenaline decay outside of combat make the warrior’s profession mechanic unusable. I believe it’s true. That’s because you end up being “out of combat” even if you are actually surrounded by foes.

One of the suggestions was to make the adrenaline decay start only if you stay out of combat for X seconds, so that you have time to get to the next enemy without an empty bar. It was also suggested to decrease the rate of decay a bit.

While I do realize that a lot of people complain when there are balance changes, I do honestly and wholeheartedly believe that the Warrior players have a point.

I’m NOT saying “omg now the [insert profession] can reset the fight it’s so unfair”, what I’m saying is “I think I understand what you guys did, but the concrete result is that burst skills now are broken”.
I am not asking to go back to the previous system, just to rework the decay rate out of combat.
I don’t believe it’s working as intended, because no profession should be locked out of their mechanic. I assume the goal was to prevent the warriors from carrying a full bar of adrenaline long outside of combat, and I agree, but we went from one extreme to another extreme.
If a Warrior is in a combat situation (which doesn’t mean “in combat”), he should be able to retain his adrenaline. The easiest way is to introduce an X seconds timer (for example 10 seconds) before the decay starts.

Thank you for your attention.

PS: I know that Mesmers have the same issue with loosing their clones; I don’t know that profession, but in the interest of fairness I think they should have a similar chance.

PPS: I’m one of those people who were very saddened about the disappearance of part of the personal story (the “greatest fear” storyline), so thank you for looking into that too.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Robert.4197:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Malkavian.4516:

Greetings, Chris

I just tried out the first few missions of Chapter 7, and I must say this: I am wholly unsatisfied with the new pacing the patch gave towards the Personal Story. I would be fine had you just consolidated certain episodes into chapters but still retained their original order. It just feels very messy to deal with to be honest with you and I would appreciate it if you would able to do the community had you can help in convincing the developers in fixing this as soon as possible. In addition to that, I already mentioned on a bug report relating to one other quest called “Romke’s Final Voyage” where I hear no voice coming from the characters in the cinematic NOR did I see any mouths opening when they were supposed to speak.

I beg of you, please help us out here in making sure that this message comes across. I am personally okay with the level gating of skills and the need to do 10 levels before proceeding to the next chapter of the story. But doing the old switcharoo on certain episodes to favor a different approach just doesn’t work unless you guys actually made serious changes to those episodes so that they can be tied together more seamlessly.

That’s all I got for now. Thanks so much.

Hi Malk,

First of all thanks very much for all of your info. We have actually been using your posts to investigate (or rather Leah and her team has).

Secondly and just to be clear in case it isn’t. I am not a customer service rep, I am a developer and thus you are talking directly to the team.

Finally I will have more info for you Monday or perhaps Leah will post. Either way we will be in touch. Thanks for your support and have a great weekend.

Chris

To Chris ( or anyone else that can answer this),

In no way am I trying to be rude here but just trying to get a better ideal of how things work. What exactly does a studio design director do? Is that the same thing as a studio game director? I ask because I figure you somehow “direct” the game, so I would think you should know what goes in to the game and for what reasons. Every time someone asks a question, you have to go get answers. Also, it seems like you guys have meetings every day. I know you can’t disclose what you discuss in those meetings but I would hope it’s about what’s going on with the game. I realize just because one dev does something, doesn’t mean everyone knows how to do it or what’s going on. For example, the people that create game models may have no idea how to write a story. Anyway, as far as I know, you are part of upper management and a director, if you don’t know what’s being added/changed in the game, maybe communication needs to be better and your daily meetings a bit more informative. Again, not trying to be rude so I apologize if it comes off that way. I thank you for taking the time to communicate with us, I really appreciate it.

Thanks,

Robert

Hi Robert,

I won’t go into all the details of my job as it could take a while and be a little boring.

As the Studio Design Director I am responsible for the health, professional growth and design acumen of the Game Design and Game Director teams. I am also responsible for the game design quality/experience of everything that comes out of the studio. As I studio director i am also responsible for long term strategy planning of the studio and its overall health as well as other areas.

I am 100% aware of any design changes that go live and up to date on most other discipline focused changes to this environment. This is because we review content right from written design phase all the way to iterative reviews to deployment.

However in regard to NPE it is not currently functioning as designed and therefore it is very hard to have a conversation about it. Thus we are working on fixes and once they are deployed I am really looking forward to a discussion.

Hope this helps,

Chris

P.S: I didn’t think you were rude at all.

Thank you for taking the time to respond:)

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Stiofan.6720:

Hi Chris, Thanks for the responses, It’s really nice seeing more dev coverage on the forums, I don’t think it always has to be the main devs themselves commenting on posts all day whenever they have free time, Sort of like that other person was suggesting, that isn’t really fair. I was hoping we could see more of the community managers on the forums, I know there’s the french community manager called Stéphane Lo Presti. I’m not sure if he has counter-parts for NA etc but if he does I’ve never seen any posts from them in 2 years. I think it was Gaile Grey in gw1, what about creating one for gw2 if there is none.

Hi Stiofan,

We are working on increased personnel to meet our goal of a better connection with the community. You should see some news soon.

Chris

Thanks Chris sounds really good

#chargers4eva

Hi,

First I want to say that I’m actually very impressed to have a thread where the devs are really answering without chosing one question out of a hundred, even taking some time off their sunday to do so, and I truly truly hope those threads are to be repeated in the future. You have built a playerbase that really care for the game as even through hate posts, even while they’re staying away for a while, players still look after the game, hoping it will grow more and in the right direction, because they care for it and know that it has a very particular potential. As such, I think listening to the fans is the best thing you can do and would make you a right sight better than the other studios.

Anyways, apologies if the exact same questions have already been answered, in which case feel free not to reply to the concerned questions ; I looked up what I could in the previous page, but it takes a lot of time and the forum search engine is kind of broken. So my questions are :

First, I’m a SAB lover, as many others. It has been pointed to me in other threads that future of SAB was unsure. The point was that it was not fitting the living story, which is not a valid point in my opinion as it could very well be bringed back as a festival or during a festival, or at any point really, people won’t care if it’s not well wrapped in a nice story, they just want to play it. ArenaNet’s hestiation about the subject makes me think World 3 is not a project for the foreseeable future ; is it true ?
Considering it does not, in any way, recquire multiple people to play it at the same time, would it appear to be doable to release it permanently, whether in Rata-Sum whether as an item (personnal instance, inventory, etc. doesn’t matter much) with the currently created worlds (1 & 2 for now and the other later on) and modes ? While disabling the rewards if that’s an issue (or maybe still allow players to gain token in tribulation mode given how hard and long it is especially for world 2 and it can only be used for soulbound stuff as far as I recall, something along the lines), just so players could play it for their own fun atleast?
And last but not least… can you tell us with more certitude than it has been done before what’s planned for SAB ? Even just the big lines. What I’d like to know, basically, is what’s gonna happen with SAB, if you guys plan on bringing it back every X months, during festivals or for it’s own festivals, or whatever I didn’t think of right now and more specifically where’s world 3 at (not started, finished, dead…) and what do you think about releasing it as proposed before a.k.a. as kitten…ble item in Rata-Sum or personnal instance, with only tribulation mode giving tokens for items that are only soulbound and can’t ever be traded for money, and are earned through time and hardship ? (which is just a proposition of course, you can adapt it in may other ways but that one would be, I think, the most satisfactoy and the least annoying to the economic market as there would be no prices drop).

I might also point out that the SAB skins were really, really earned, the few ones you could loot through RNG in normal mode set aside. Especially for world two which should honestly have been splitted in multiple parts for each level given how time consumming that one was (and how one dc due to wifi and whatever else would make you lose all the time invested). Having the time to unlock them properly wouldn’t be a shame, honestly, you can’t collect them just like that, it takes an investment, which is why I think that it would be much more healthy to do something along the lines of what I proposed rather than only release it for a few weeks every year, making it impossible to get all the skins you like, let alone all the skins, especially with more and more worlds. Once more, you can bring it back without having to include it in the LS, people just want to play their favorite (mini)game, they don’t mind it not having anything to do with slaying a dragon, just like they like the other festivals when they’re not included in the LS.

Also, could you explain more precisely what you think is a problem in NPE ?

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and thank you even more if you can actually answer some of those questions. I apologize for any mistakes I made as english isn’t my native language.

Have a nice day,

Edit : language filter didn’t appreciate us…ble.

Edit 2 : Oh, also, I feel a bit silly asking a question you’ve probable seen a hundred time, but… it was said early on, before the game was released I believe, that there will be new weapons coming out over time. Is it still a thing or has it been abandonned?, asks the cute kitty from my signature (a.k.a. me).

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi Robert,

I won’t go into all the details of my job as it could take a while and be a little boring.

As the Studio Design Director I am responsible for the health, professional growth and design acumen of the Game Design and Game Director teams. I am also responsible for the game design quality/experience of everything that comes out of the studio. As I studio director i am also responsible for long term strategy planning of the studio and its overall health as well as other areas.

I am 100% aware of any design changes that go live and up to date on most other discipline focused changes to this environment. This is because we review content right from written design phase all the way to iterative reviews to deployment.

However in regard to NPE it is not currently functioning as designed and therefore it is very hard to have a conversation about it. Thus we are working on fixes and once they are deployed I am really looking forward to a discussion.

Hope this helps,

Chris

P.S: I didn’t think you were rude at all.

by deployed, do you mean once they are ingame?
While i understand in this case, speed may be a primary goal, It seems to me, it would be better to test proposed changes on sounding board of players, before implementing it in game.

Unless of course, you feel confident that you can lose very little in terms of time/money, and will deliver the same level of player satisfaction/design goals being met in the same time frame, without any player feedback until its in game.

in the past in this forum i have found just by reading the patch notes/proposed changes, players often accurately predict possible flaws with many of the systems.
For example the kicking of players and taking of instances now happening with dungeons
trait system being very redundant on second charachters
etc.
If knowing these things ahead of time would save time/energy at all, i think it would be worth posting ahead of time. At the very least it should be useful when talking about fixing/patching/adjusting existing systems that are currently in the process of being patched.

@ Chris Whiteside
Just wanted you to know Chris…
I get excited on this thread when you or other devs reply.

I’m like… “Oh Snap! I gotta check the post and see what devs are saying”

Iol idk how to describe the feeling but it gets me exciting when I know there’s a reply. Even if it’s just something as simple as this.

Thank you for taking the time to read such long posts and answer them.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

AnAspieKitten.5732:

-snip-

Hey Kitten,

I will reply shortly if that’s ok.

Chris

Gasp! How can you speak to players like that?

Hi Chris,

It’s great that you’re engaging so much with the community here. I think a lot of the changes to the game in the last couple of feature patches I have either enjoyed or regarded neutrally, and I have also enjoyed the restructuring of the PS/LW for Season 2 (overall, it’s a vast improvement). However, I do think there’s a severe lack of polish in certain areas, such as down-scaling and XP rewards. I am hoping you guys take some time to evaluate some of these things and make iterative improvements. I would also be an advocate of a level compression (40 would have been plenty), but I assume that isn’t on the horizon so I won’t labor the point.

I am also concerned about the continuing slow pace of meaningful content additions. Even if the story is exceptionally good, people aren’t going to want to replay it over and over. What the game is sorely lacking is fresh content that augments the player’s ability to explore a diverse virtual landscape and experiment with their character in unhindered ways. New zones and new dungeons for one, but perhaps even more importantly new skills, weapon types, professions, or races. I think one of the biggest things that has “harmed” GW2 is that there is both a lack of available skills and too many restrictions on how you ‘equip’ skills, which leads to combat feeling very repetitive and leaving too little room for creative experimentation for the player, which helps contribute to disengagement. Are there any plans to address this?

Thanks!

While you answering questions. Might I ask if there is any plans or even thought for the trait system. As it stands it is either very powerful or totally useless depending on the encounter and mode. Also is there any consideration made about certain anti fun mechanics in the game namely warriors being able to be immun to cc and chain stealth. While they are not an issue balance wise they are just badly designed from a fun and dynamic standpoint. The user has fun. Everyone else not. It is rather one dimensional and it oddly different from all other stuff in the game.

What I really like about the new collection system are some really unique items as rewards in some of the collection (like the karma-converter… a quite unique idea). But then there are some rewards that leave me thinking what the intention behind it’s design was. Having rewards that aren’t comparable with the parts of the collection (worth-wise) is odd to me.

Why not just add some unique skins in there as rewards? Is it because people should see the journey as reward?
I really love the achievement-point skins you get for doing all those achievements – this really feels rewarding.

I’d be really interested in the thought-process of designing rewards. Are the designers of those rewards aware of the fact that some players might feel underwhelmed? Are there different people for different rewards or is there one person who distributes all the rewards in the game?

Thanks for your reply. I was just talking about the design dev process primarily. We do have a QA team that tests the work and an Alpha group for feedback.

The process i described above is definitely not about speed (-: It is a quality iteration process as well as a best working practice that allows us to learn and improve the quality of the experience as we go along.

I will ask Ed Hocking our QA director to comment about the QA process and Gavian (our production director) to talk about production practices on Monday.

Once we have the feature ‘as designed’ i would love to chat about the design side of the release regarding NPE.

Phys is right. Whatever role your internal QA teams play in negotiating new feature changes, it can’t be enough given how many features go live that the players would never let you get away with. I mean, clearly the internal teams approved the April Trait changes and the Fall leveling changes, where if you’d asked the community about these “features” we’d have shot them down in a heartbeat and saved you who knows how many man-hours in implementing and subsequently un-implementing them.

I know that the NGE isn’t working “as intended” yet, and some of the community complaints are related to that, but many of them seem to be related to a genuine disagreement on intended elements, and since nobody from ANet is willing to give a breakdown as to which changes are bugs and which are “features,” we’re left treading water for now.

There has been no evidence in the two years since launch that any of the changes to the game, or the waste of resources that has been Living Story, have in any way reflected the input and desires of your players.

The last two years have provided an ongoing string of changes to game systems/content and to the game’s original core philosophies that have degraded and gutted what, at launch, was the best AAA MMO produced in the last decade.

When the vast majority of your efforts would have been strangled in the crib if the ideas had actually been floated ahead of time to the community for feedback, that should be a serious warning sign for the developers.

The lack of communication could be forgiven if it was in the defense of development that might come across poorly to players in concept, but would actually prove to be beneficial in implementation. However, that is clearly not the case. The past two years have been an abject failure for the studio and the majority of the mistakes could have been prevented if the options for ongoing content and feature development had been hashed out with the community during the conceptual stages.

It’s not an issue of floating cool stuff you might not be able to deliver on. It’s clear that the current studio has completely lost touch with the player base and all sense of what makes good game design. More communication could save you from further disaster, though it would also provide less cover for incompetence if the feedback is ignored and the resulting product proves disastrous.

GW2, at launch, was a work of genius. Like anything ahead of it’s time, many consumers in the early stages may have trouble adapting to the paradigm shift. There are many ways the game could have been improved to ease the transition and make the game more comfortable to those who have been shaped by WoW and a decade of it’s clones, WITHOUT compromising on the game’s overall design.

When faced with an audience where a fair portion just were not equipped to adapt to your product with out additional guidance, you chose to make a knee jerk reversal that rejected what made the game so great and instead chose to neuter your product.

Unfortunately, it has been a butcher’s job of a surgery and the entire game is now facing a potentially fatal infection, with the strategy seeming to be to just cut off more appendages, rather than trying to restore the game to a state of health.

The road ANet chose to take in early 2013 has likely cost the game hundreds of millions of dollars and has bled the player base and the game’s reputation. Rather than look at the disaster of your own making with an eye at identifying the plethora of mistakes and finding a way to reverse course, there seems to be a pathological need to double down on failed strategies in denial of those mistakes.

In most cases, the shrinking core of loyal fans has provided just enough positive feedback to feed the self delusion, but I think it’s clearly now time for everyone to wake up to the realities and try to find some way to undo all the damage that has been done before it’s too late.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ohoni.6057:

Thanks for your reply. I was just talking about the design dev process primarily. We do have a QA team that tests the work and an Alpha group for feedback.

The process i described above is definitely not about speed (-: It is a quality iteration process as well as a best working practice that allows us to learn and improve the quality of the experience as we go along.

I will ask Ed Hocking our QA director to comment about the QA process and Gavian (our production director) to talk about production practices on Monday.

Once we have the feature ‘as designed’ i would love to chat about the design side of the release regarding NPE.

Phys is right. Whatever role your internal QA teams play in negotiating new feature changes, it can’t be enough given how many features go live that the players would never let you get away with. I mean, clearly the internal teams approved the April Trait changes and the Fall leveling changes, where if you’d asked the community about these “features” we’d have shot them down in a heartbeat and saved you who knows how many man-hours in implementing and subsequently un-implementing them.

I know that the NGE isn’t working “as intended” yet, and some of the community complaints are related to that, but many of them seem to be related to a genuine disagreement on intended elements, and since nobody from ANet is willing to give a breakdown as to which changes are bugs and which are “features,” we’re left treading water for now.

Hi Ohoni,

Still watching the game and then i am doing WvW after so sorry about the sporadic replies everyone else.

I wanted to comment on this :

‘but many of them seem to be related to a genuine disagreement on intended elements,’

I agree and that’s why i want us to get to the point where we can have a clear and focused discussion on ‘as intended design’ where we aren’t tripping over unintended issues. I feel that is the most valuable way to move forward.

Chris

Do you think a public test server could have prevented this?

Hi Chris,

Some of us have been facing stuttering/spiking FPS issues since the Sept patch. Wonder if you could look into it and let us know if it’s something on your side that can be fixed? Or if it’s a graphics card compatibility thing? Unchecking Hi-Res Textures doesnt resolve it.

• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/FPS-Issue-with-the-latest-patch/first
• http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2g9cpt/performance_issues_since_patch
• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Noticeable-stuttering-issues-since-the-patch

Thanks.

I agree and that’s why i want us to get to the point where we can have a clear and focused discussion on ‘as intended design’ where we aren’t tripping over unintended issues. I feel that is the most valuable way to move forward.

I understand, but I believe that same discussion could be had by just explaining which were which. Actually fixing it in game won’t immediately shift the discussion, because it’d take a while for players to experience those changes personally and the amount of them that each player experienced would vary. It’d be more useful to the discussion to just say, in plain English, “we intended for [features X, Y, and Z] to be level gated, but [features A, B, and C] are currently level gated and that’s a bug which we’ll fix.” The continued vague party line of “some of the changes are intended and some of them are not" is really not terribly informative when you never say which are which.

Waiting “until it’s done” doesn’t really help the discussion, what’s important is the information, and the information can exist before it’s ready to go live in the game. That’s really been the player’s point in this whole thread. I appreciate that you’re trying, but until you work your way past this stumbling block there’s almost no point to it.

It’s getting late here, I’ll head to sleep, hope you won’t forget me :p Good afternoon/night guys.

It is going to be much more efficient to have a discussion once the live environment is as designed. Much more efficient.

It will allow for less assumptions and conjecture in discussions and allow us to enter into valuable discussion with way less distraction and more focus.

Perhaps. I feel that it won’t exactly do that because for a lot of players whether it’s live or not they won’t actually experience a lot of it for themselves, so their views on the subject will still be based on conjecture. For example a lot of people complained about how weapon skills and F skills were unlocking later than they used to, but apparently it’s much faster to level to 15 than it used to be, so in practice they don’t really take that much longer to unlock those features, it’s just more boring because the low level heart quests have all been infantilized and the Personal Story is unavailable to break up the monotony.

People were worried about having to put up with several hours of “press 1” mob killing grind before they could get to the point where the game started getting fun, when in fact it’s only more like one hour of “press 1” mob killing grind before they could get to the point where the game started getting fun. But then there are things like pushing back F4 skills into the 20s, and pushing key utilities into the 40 range that just seem bonkers to anyone who’s actually played the game before. They may be bugs, but from the outside we don’t know that, and the players complaining about it aren’t likely to level a fresh character to 80 themselves before registering their complaints.

Anyways, even if you wait until the fixes are added to the game before discussing them, understand that a lot of the discussion will be based on the patch notes, not actual experience with the features, so releasing those patch notes early just speeds up when the discussion can start, which in turn speeds up when it resolves, which speeds up development on further iteration of the features. Your way may lead to results, but it leads to them far slower than getting the information out there as early and often as possible.

Hi Chris, Mike, Jon and every1 at ANet,

i know its just a game. I know its not of significant impact to humanity. But, just by watching people working together to turn things around, makes me smile.

I do not know where this is going, but im glad ANet decided to give it a shot. I was getting bored of watching TV

You guys already achieved something i didnt thought it was possible: after almost 2 years i finally changed my signature to something positive hehe.

Take care and keep up the good work.

Best regards from my family to everyone in this community.

Fiontar.4695:

There has been no evidence in the two years since launch that any of the changes to the game, or the waste of resources that has been Living Story, have in any way reflected the input and desires of your players.

The last two years has provided an ongoing string of changes to game systems/content and to the game’s original core philosophies that have degraded and gutted what, at launch, was the best AAA MMO produced in the last decade.

When the vast majority of your efforts would have been strangled in the crib if the ideas had actually been floated ahead of time to the community for feedback, that should be a serious warning sign for the developers.

The lack of communication could be forgiven if it was in the defense of development that might come across poorly to players in concept, but would actually prove to be beneficial in implementation. However, that is clearly not the case. The past two years have been an abject failure for the studio and the majority of the mistakes could have been prevented if the options for ongoing content and feature development had been hashed out with the community during the conceptual stages.

It’s not an issue of floating cool stuff you might not be able to deliver on. It’s clear that the current studio has completely lost touch with the player base and all sense of what makes good game design. More communication could save you from further disaster, though it would also provide less cover for incompetence if the feedback is ignored and the resulting product proves disastrous.

GW2, at launch, was a work of genius. Like anything ahead of it’s time, many consumers in the early stages may have trouble adapting to the paradigm shift. There are many ways the game could have been improved to ease the transition and make the game more comfortable to those who have been shaped by WoW and a decade of it’s clones, WITHOUT compromising on the game’s overall design.

When faced with an audience where a fair portion just were not equipped to adapt to your product with out additional guidance, you chose to make a knee jerk reversal that rejected what made the game so great and instead chose to neuter your product.

Unfortunately, it has been a butcher’s job of a surgery and the entire game is now facing a potentially fatal infection, with the strategy seeming to be to just cut off more appendages, rather than trying to restore the game to a state of health.

The road ANet chose to take in early 2013 has likely cost the game hundreds of millions of dollars and has bled the player base and the game’s reputation. Rather than look at the disaster of your own making with an eye at identifying the plethora of mistakes and finding a way to reverse course, there seems to be a pathological need to double down on failed strategies in denial of those mistakes.

In most cases, the shrinking core of loyal fans has provided just enough positive feedback to feed the self delusion, but I think it’s clearly now time for everyone to wake up to the realities and try to find some way to undo all the damage that has been done before it’s too late.

Having played this game since headstart and continuing to play this game to date, I completely agree with this post. The only thing that keeps my playing this game are the friends I have on it. Otherwise, I would’ve stopped playing ages ago.

Also, having come from years of WoW, I found this game quite easy to adjust to, though I did also play GW1 for a couple of years, and to me it was basically a combination of the two.

How do you tell the developers that their new roll out…9/9 is beyond horribly bad?? World of Warcraft ruined the game play by dumbing down the game, so much so that a six year old could play it…. Also, Ashron’s Call followed the same line of thinking. And, now I am seeing a game that I enjoy playing, once again, going the way of its predecessors….. going, going, idiot proof and gone.

I don’t write or post to the forums, but I did watch as Ashron’s, Everquest, and Warcraft all failed without a word to them. Not looking for a pat on the back, just trying to help those of us who enjoy playing GW2 with our minds.

Players do enjoy a challenge, figuring out where the nearest water bucket is.. it is certainly more enticing than dancing with cows, using the “E” key. To keep players with cash playing, don’t insult us, this is how it feels, insulting. Warcraft placed sparkles on everything and that was insulting and took away from the game play. But, then they took away the quest line freedom for levels 1-20, after destroying all the great terrain previous programmers worked so hard to create, just as you have already destroyed Lions Arch. If herbs start to sparkle in this game, I’m off to Elderscrolls or something else. If you wish to sell to six year olds, please, continue, dumbing down this game; I and many other players will be gone. So, the next improvement, perhaps, should be, challenging game play rather than simplifying.

The trading post is now… totally messed up.
At least, when I used to order something, I knew I was ordering the item. Now, when I attempt to purchase an item…. somehow, I end up ordering something…..this is beyond annoying. A big thanks, for the attempt… just like ferocity… no one can begin to understand it… so its better to just stay away from it all. “Beserker” is now absolutely worthless. We do understand the word “crit”, and critical hit, but not ferocity (15% to critical hit at level 80?… why bother? If you want to help, limit the charging of 1+ gold for a minor sigil, this would be a good place to start. Fix whats broken and leave it alone, unless you are adding REAL new content. PLAY IT!

I hope you all take this to heart, I enjoy the game play, but not for long with many more improvements to dumb-down (simplify) Guild Wars 2.

Very best regards

M

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Malkavian.4516:

Hi Chris, I was fortunate enough to check the instance in question that I mentioned to you about and it seems that the Greatest Fear portion of the story A Light in the Darkness is kept intact. No removals, no nothing. It was only modified on the Story Journal itself, which I still think sucks but nonetheless, I can confirm that the PS was not cut in anyway, shape or form.

Awesome Malkavian I really appreciate the info. Leah is looking into it and we will update when we have more info.

chris

As has been pointed out elsewhere, at least some of us are definitely finding that the Greatest Fear arc is completely missing. I played through the entire story from scratch myself to check and found it missing, so I can confirm that it was in fact cut for at least some people. Do we have any idea yet of whether this was intentional?

Fiontar.4695:

There has been no evidence in the two years since launch that any of the changes to the game, or the waste of resources that has been Living Story, have in any way reflected the input and desires of your players.

The last two years has provided an ongoing string of changes to game systems/content and to the game’s original core philosophies that have degraded and gutted what, at launch, was the best AAA MMO produced in the last decade.

When the vast majority of your efforts would have been strangled in the crib if the ideas had actually been floated ahead of time to the community for feedback, that should be a serious warning sign for the developers.

The lack of communication could be forgiven if it was in the defense of development that might come across poorly to players in concept, but would actually prove to be beneficial in implementation. However, that is clearly not the case. The past two years have been an abject failure for the studio and the majority of the mistakes could have been prevented if the options for ongoing content and feature development had been hashed out with the community during the conceptual stages.

It’s not an issue of floating cool stuff you might not be able to deliver on. It’s clear that the current studio has completely lost touch with the player base and all sense of what makes good game design. More communication could save you from further disaster, though it would also provide less cover for incompetence if the feedback is ignored and the resulting product proves disastrous.

GW2, at launch, was a work of genius. Like anything ahead of it’s time, many consumers in the early stages may have trouble adapting to the paradigm shift. There are many ways the game could have been improved to ease the transition and make the game more comfortable to those who have been shaped by WoW and a decade of it’s clones, WITHOUT compromising on the game’s overall design.

When faced with an audience where a fair portion just were not equipped to adapt to your product with out additional guidance, you chose to make a knee jerk reversal that rejected what made the game so great and instead chose to neuter your product.

Unfortunately, it has been a butcher’s job of a surgery and the entire game is now facing a potentially fatal infection, with the strategy seeming to be to just cut off more appendages, rather than trying to restore the game to a state of health.

The road ANet chose to take in early 2013 has likely cost the game hundreds of millions of dollars and has bled the player base and the game’s reputation. Rather than look at the disaster of your own making with an eye at identifying the plethora of mistakes and finding a way to reverse course, there seems to be a pathological need to double down on failed strategies in denial of those mistakes.

In most cases, the shrinking core of loyal fans has provided just enough positive feedback to feed the self delusion, but I think it’s clearly now time for everyone to wake up to the realities and try to find some way to undo all the damage that has been done before it’s too late.

This post is very harsh, but it does contain no small hint of truth.

Hey Chris,

I wanted to thank you as well. Thanks for communicating with everyone. The last game I played on the same scale as Guild Wars 2 was one where we got updates once a year if we were lucky.

I never really took the World vs World achievements seriously last season; while my friends who are super experience in WubWub might have some issues with the current achievements I wanted to sincerely thank you for making them so accessible.

Edge of the Mists isn’t on the same scale as WvW; but that’s what I like about it and I absolutely LOVE the art-direction. It’s an absolutely gorgeous map ‘in the clouds’.

I’ve had my doubts with regard to the new leveling/exploration & NPE changes, but, and many players won’t really understand this… I’m happy that you guys are confident to make changes moving forward and look forward to seeing the future tweaks.

I hope you had an awesome time with your family!

Clerigo.9475:

Hi Chris, Mike, Jon and every1 at ANet,

i know its just a game. I know its not of significant impact to humanity. But, just by watching people working together to turn things around, makes me smile.

I do not know where this is going, but im glad ANet decided to give it a shot. I was getting bored of watching TV

You guys already achieved something i didnt thought it was possible: after almost 2 years i finally changed my signature to something positive hehe.

Take care and keep up the good work.

Best regards from my family to everyone in this community.

Robin Williams RIP

Since about a month ago, there seems to be a dramatic change in the way you (Arenanet) communicates with the players. Although mostly seen only in the english forum, there are now many more developer posts that actually contain answers and directly adressing players’ concerns instead of giving universal answers.

In the past, there were waves of communication every few months, but in retrospect they were only waves of public relation broadcasts to calm down players in specific points. I never had the feeling that you were actually communicating with your players in both ways, I felt it was always some kind of broadcast directed to an audience. No feedback from your side.

This time, I hope it is not only a wave but a change that will last, since for the first time I see messages with more than “that’s great, continue discussing this”. It’s actually this time also feedback to the players with hints about what the studio thinks of the discussed topics. This is exactly what I expect if someone says ’I’m communicating".

I appreciate the posts that contain “about topic x, what do you thing about it? We’re interested, but don’t take it for granted that this will result in an actual game update”. You are interested in topic x – yes, this is great. Now I know what topic is worth discussing. In the past, the community was in the dark and wasn’t able to tell if it rode a dead horse or touched a hot topic. Now we know which horses are alive.

I hope this change will last and is really a change and not a temporary initiative.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

blackoil.2673:

ANet: I really believe you.

But the only problem is that it really feels like you’re ignoring the playerbase. Posts that have so many people posting about an issue to the game… it feels like it’s being ignored because no dev is participating.

I can understand that you can’t participate in it, for all the reasons you said… but wouldn’t be any way to flag a post as “Hey, we’re reading it and we’re talking about it back here”?

From my point of view and by now, I only see these posts as the ones that have the ANet tag in it (i.e., a dev made a reply).

edit: Or at least, when you make the decision that you won’t change a thing because all the playerbase has gone crazy… just tell it?

This has been put forward many times and i think it could be useful. i will bring it up again with the community team.

Thanks,

Chris

I put forward this suggestion on the last page. Thanks blackoil for stealing my thunder.