Guild Wars 2

Part 1
Let me start by saying this isn’t a “I know better than you, do it my way” thread. I would like to discuss some problems currently with the relationship between Customers, Arenanet, Marketing, and NCsoft.

There seems to be a large disconnect between all 4 sections of the business. In order to keep things clear and legible I will attempt to address them one by one.

Customer>Arenanet: As customers we value a business that serves us well, supports us and is open about their actions. Most times as a customer we generally receive good feedback, some examples:

Devs/designers/leads posting directly to us one on one.
Customer service fixing errors in accounts, fixing many bugs, and improving the game.
Devs and designers continually pushing out content.
There is much more.

The disconnect here is when Arenanet has patches, updates, changes, and they are not clearly written in patch notes. Either information is missing, or information in patches can be wrong at times. Now we are smart enough to know not everyone is perfect, but we expect a certain degree of integrity and clarity when it comes to changing a product. We also understand there is no perfect game or service, and unintended bugs will happen. But what we truly need here is a check, a double check, and for someone/some group to read off the notes back to those who affected the changes. When devs and designers have lists of things they changed, they deserve getting credit for such.

By leaving out this information its almost discounting their efforts, which we as customers greatly appreciate. If it is a negative effect on many players we would rather know the truth than have to do extensive testing to ensure our game provider is on the level. Ignoring marketing and parent companies, we are the first group of people to experience your product. We deserve the full information, an open dialogue between us, as we are the most vital part of the company. (Some may read that sentence wrong, I am speaking financially and as the core of the game. Obviously the company itself is very important.)

Next I’d like to address Arenanet>Marketing. For some time now there has been many slip ups when Arenanet staff are told to say something by marketing or even perhaps NCsoft. Often times it was a poorly worded, poorly constructed form of advertising. We know not everything said comes from the minds of devs and designers and leads. We know marketing is a vital aspect of any company. But when people who are not gamers, do not have experience as gamers do, make claims they do not understand it makes Arenanet and by proxy NCsoft sound bad. We know it is an unintended affect, but there needs to be a fix before more credibility is lost. An example is “expansion worth of content”, this has been discussed largely and I won’t go into it. Secondly, you may have heard the recent “dungeon” was even discredited by those who created it.

Calling it “more of a boss instance” which is far more accurate. i don’t mean to be blunt but sometimes you need to turn off your marketing/advertising peoples voice. Let the devs talk among each other and call it what they feel we will be comfortable with. Don’t call a small update an expansion. All of you at Arenanet are gamers, you love games just as we do. And you deserve to call things what they are, not be foot in mouthed by a marketing team. It takes away credibility, our trust in you as a gaming company when marketing or a parent company tells you what to say or do. You know how to be successful, you don’t need a marketing department to tell us gamers what a dungeon is or is not. You don’t need to let them put words in your mouth that you later have to retract and apologize for. We are far more understanding if Colin says “I made a mistake, I apologize, this is what we meant”, than if he says “marketing told us to say it, we were wrong, sorry”. It is pointing blame, and even if it is rightfully so, we would rather you all could make your own mistakes than take our complaints directly as a result of a 3rd party interfering.

Part 2
Finally, to keep this post under 10 pages :P I will address Arenanet>Marketing>NCsoft. There is a clear disconnect here when many players are complaining about RNG boxes, about expansions coming then not coming, then maybe coming, then we don’t know? It is understandable that NCsoft does own Arenanet, and that they do have say in what happens. But for them to “bully” out an expansion by tossing marketing at you seems very low. It only makes us the customers more wary of our dealings with Arenanet and NCsoft. Those at Arenanet have built a game, it has been widely enjoyed and praised by many people and companies. NCsoft needs to realize this and let you do your thing. They DO have failing games, and GW2 is not one of them. I find it appalling that the large sums of money I have spent in GW2 goes to games I directly disapprove of. You deserve every penny, and though I know that’s not possible in a business sense, it is still my wish. Marketing and advertising should never run a game. The developers at Arenanet know what is good for GW2, they know what innovations can make the game better. They don’t need to be bullied into pushing out content that simply isn’t ready. Again it comes down to credibility.

To sum it up, players would like more clarification on what “general” statements truly mean in patches. Players would like news from the horses mouth, not from a firm or from a parent company. Arenanet needs to be allowed to do what they do best, and that is design GW2. Patch notes need to be clear and complete every time, slip ups happen, but there shouldn’t be a page of missing notes added weeks later. I use the term “we” many times in this post and I want to clarify I do not speak for every gamer here. But I feel “we” is a good representation of a majority of players who would agree with what I have explained. I hope we can see a more clear, more focused, less confusing game/community/company once the lesson is learned that this current random direction is not the best for the game. Thank you for your time and sorry the post dragged on so long.

On topic: Nice post, well written and thought out

Off topic: Hope you have flame resistant undergarments on.

Actually marketing and choice of words are perfect, it’s called misleading.

Sovta.4719:

Actually marketing and choice of words are perfect, it’s called misleading.

Misleading marketing is only good for so long, and usually only for a small one time product. In a long term, long goal company journey 1 misleading step after another turns into ::Aion:: cough.. I mean a bad direction.

If I would sum up Geotherma’s Posts, in two words it would be MANAGE EXPECTATIONS. Marketing is playing with fire: You absolutely need it, but you can’t let it go out of control. Hype something up too much and it is bound to disappoint, even if what you’re offering is genuinely good. Promise us a fun time, not a dramatic world altering event. If it weren’t for the occasional sonic periscope, I would not have realized the flame and frost stuff even occured.

Having devs and other non-PR folk talk to us helps humanize the entire company. People are a little more sympathetic when they can have a casual conversation about something and not just feel like they’re being fed a carefully constructed line from a faceless corporation. That’s something that has been done well. Getting a dev to give their honest assessment of when something is or isn’t a reasonable request will quell a great deal of stuff. Getting a generic “your suggestion has been noted” is basically the same as being ignored.

I probably seem to complain quite often on the forum. But as someone who has to develop stuff for a living that sometimes I do not agree with from a design perspective, I have the utmost sympathy and appreciation for what the devs do. They do a great job with the limited time they have to implement new features and content and fix bugs. So give them the credit they deserve and make sure the patch notes are thorough. Sloppy patch notes give the impression that the work being done is sloppy, which is unfair to the people doing the work.

There is nothing but rumors going around about what current monetization choices for the game are Anet’s doing or were edicts handed down by NCSoft. Not that it would make much of a difference to the conspiracy theorists, but I think people would genuinely like to know who is ultimately holding the reigns.

The Talcmaster.7391:

Not that it would make much of a difference to the conspiracy theorists, but I think people would genuinely like to know who is ultimately holding the reigns.

Check the Cantha topic/story for answer.

All I have to say is:

/signed.

I forgot to add that there is a large amount of people who would enjoy having a test server for updates and a survey option in game. Those two things could be part of the change for the better. We don’t mind being the QA team :P

I have to add to your post here bud. As an engineer who once again saw a bug that was claimed to be fixed in a previous patch that still is not fixed but they claimed it was fixed a second time in their last patch to balance, that we’re told things are done in their patch notes only to find when we login that they haven’t done what they said they did AND they broke something else by making an unnecessary change to something that was working before they touched it (mines)

So not only do we need more clear communication directly from the devs it absolutely needs to be professional, ie their bugs really do need to be fixed when they claim they are.

There’s also the aspect of the balance team not prioritizing their bug fixes (because there’s quite a few that haven’t been touched that would help eleviate the struggle to find a working build for engineers if they’d only look at those first. (scopes)

If you want to see a disconnect how about them selling a Mac Beta Client, stating in the Mac Client Faq that there is a ‘Mac Beta Client Tech Support Forum’ and then seeing that the forum has been abandoned by staff. If you use the Mac client and want any news on progress or lack there of good luck.

I don’t really think it’s a problem with marketing but a problem with one audience, the gaming press, interpreting what is said to Korean investors and analysts. Now in Korea, NCSOFT’s MMOs are essentially subscription based. Either by hours a month or even by the minute. Cash shops supplement income from the subscriptions, not be the sole source after initial game sale.

Now Guild Wars kept the income flowing with additional box sets while the cash shop didn’t really feature traditional F2P cash shop items like XP and other various boosters as well as small miscellaneous items. So obviously the analysts and investors are concerned with a game that relies on a cash shop to pay the bills. It doesn’t help that their MMOs (Lineage II and Aion) in the west are marketed as F2P and their income in the west isn’t all that impressive. But for those MMOs that’s OK because the sales in Asia is the bulk of those games overall sales. Guild Wars 2 isn’t in Asia yet and until it is, those on the other end of the conference call will keep asking about additional box sales as oppose to depending on the cash shop.

So is it NCSOFT’s fault to keep their CC attendees satisfied by suggesting that the game is obviously doing well enough to support an expansion. Then that gets relayed by the western gaming press as confirmation of an expansion and ArenaNet then is forced to walk that assumption back without sounding to contradictory.

At least that’s my take on it.

Great post OP, agree.

But i must say its a bit like getting blood from a stone, information that is.

Nice post, i don’t know who makes the patch notes, but i find it so wierd that they mess up their notes so many times. It’s one of the most important things and it’s really easy to do. If you can’t make patch notes, then you don’t even know what your company is doing, or atleast the person that writes the patch notes doesn’t. Tip 4 anet: instead of those long stream videos on your youtube channel, put up patch previews where you tell about the next upcoming patch (see patch previews for league of legends as perfect example)(doesn’t even matter if it’s a small patch, like balances, people like those verry much)

Patch notes are always difficult. It’s easy to list all the big scheduled changes as well as the official bug fixes but inevitably fixes will be done simply because a dev was changing that block of code for something else and it got fixed (or something else getting broken). This means they don’t get tested extensively because it was an unscheduled fix.

City of Heroes had a terrible time with that as well. They tried to get better at it but stuff still snuck through unannounced.

As for overzealous marketing firms. It’s well know that marketing folk are one step beneath tabloid journalists because they don’t even have to acknowledge facts at all. Frequently that just gets in their way. Then we get the reinterpretation and amplification from the international gaming press about a buzzword, overhyped press release and we end up with “more content than an expansion’s worth” comment bouncing around the forum.

You say all that, OP, but then when you have people screaming “Patch notes naooo!” and people that expect major updates every month, it is obvious that some things are missing and some things are not important enough to point out.

Also NCsoft pays the bills, they have the right to say what they want and take game in direction they want. We got GW2 pretty much because GW1 was successful largely due to the way NCsoft pulled out the right financial cards with no sub for example.

Gaidax.7835:

You say all that, OP, but then when you have people screaming “Patch notes naooo!” and people that expect major updates every month, it is obvious that some things are missing and some things are not important enough to point out.

Also NCsoft pays the bills, they have the right to say what they want and take game in direction they want. We got GW2 pretty much because GW1 was successful largely due to the way NCsoft pulled out the right financial cards with no sub for example.

Actually we pay the bills lol And whether or not someone says “we want this now” is besides the point. Just because they are successful doesn’t mean they can handle the business anyway they like. the same holds true for any business. Imo everything is important to put into patch notes, it shows integrity, it shows thoroughness. There is a lot more to my post than this.

Concur with OP, Talcmaster, and most of the comments here.

Trust comes from expectations set and met. Why would I invest time (and cash shop) in a game whose devs I no longer trust to continue providing a game I want to play?

…and rage is the emotion of unmet expectations… it’s too easy for a dev team to start treating all the player input as noise, not realizing that in many cases that “noise” is the direct result of mismanaged expectations.

Would be curious to find out what segmentation of the player base ArenaNet uses to prioritize features. There are at least 20 different segments of players; any feature can simultaneously delight players in some segments, be interesting to others, a non event for another group of people, and downright offensive to yet another. So it’s a marketing basic to know your customers and have a sense of how many people will fall into each bucket before spending the resources, not reactively after release.

This makes a major release something like getting a bill through the U.S. Congress: there needs to be something in there that every group of players wants or values enough to eclipse the things they find useless or offensive.

RIFT pretty much died when it put out 3 content releases in a row which managed to alienate just about every customer segment that had stuck with the game after release.

WoW lost what, half its U.S. players (millions) early on over “raid or quit”, a strong message favoring a small segment of the player base but off-putting to the majority. Also investment choices which put a lot of resources into the few raiders at the expense of content the majority of players would ever see (much less enjoy).

Marketing — real marketing, which is knowing your customers, segmenting them well, choosing the segments you want to serve, and serving them well — is a crucial skill for any business. The outbound messaging / advertising to customers at the very end must be done well, but unless you’re selling pet rocks to a fad audience it’s by far the least important.

bump – agree. Hard not to, I think GW2 is lead in direction I don’t like, by people who don’t want to go there either. So I really would like to know if this ship is sinking (slowly but still) and I need to jump off, or is there something to do and change this situation.

This thread will be locked, mainly because of its name and the sensitive use of “NCSoft”.

arena net sayd its still in full control of the game.

Moreover if you look at how they change the game (see stealth nerf, “balancing” and stuff) you can clearly see that anet changed and its not NCsoft fault.

Players are not a priority for them…
Nor is money……

Geotherma.2395:

I forgot to add that there is a large amount of people who would enjoy having a test server for updates and a survey option in game. Those two things could be part of the change for the better. We don’t mind being the QA team :P

Correction: Most players will take the chance to be QA if given it, but few like being forced into it unawares.

I think it’s important to talk about what players can do to help foster more direct communication and avoid becoming “background noise” as mentioned above.

1) Be patient: We all want to know if our suggestions will be implemented. The main reason that we don’t hear anything at all is because a “we’ll do that” is interpreted as “It will be ready immediately” which will almost never be the case. From the looks of it, most of the teams are on a monthly development cycle, so unless they happened to be working on your suggestion before you suggested it (unlikely but possible), It will not be out with the next release, and probably not the one immediately after. So if we have some patience and don’t get mad if our many excellent ideas don’t show up immediately, we may start to get better feedback from developers

2) Be reasonable: There are heaps of very obvious bugs in the game, and the devs know that as well as we do. Fixing bugs takes time away from adding new content, and there is a player for every spot in the spectrum of “fix ALL the bugs” to “screw the bugs, just give me new stuff.” And then you get into the question of which bugs to fix and what content to add. The things that should get the first priority are the things that fixing/adding will have the maximum benefit to the general player population, tempered with the difficulty in implementing it. Often enough you can’t judge these things until you start doing them either, so if you recognize at least in part how difficult it is to implement it, and that a time estimate is just a guess, the devs might be willing to share their estimates.

3) Be grateful: Even if you don’t fully agree with a design decision or an aesthetic, you can still appreciate the workmanship that went into it. We all have our personal feelings on what priority things should be taken care of, but we can recognize the effort put into the things that were done. And for heaven’s sake, when you do get something you have been waiting for DO NOT SAY “it’s about time!”

4) Be considerate: Devs are people, but unlike the rest of us here, they have their real names plastered all over the forums with a big red logo next to it. They can’t even post in a thread without that thread turning into a giant glowing beacon for the rest of us to home in on. If what they say gets torn to pieces constantly, they will be much more reluctant to keep posting. Also keep in mind that this is ultimately their job, and no matter how much they may enjoy their work talking about the game still counts as work. If they’re taking the time to actually talk with you about the game, it’s kinda above and beyond what many of them need to fulfill their job description. So treat them nicely.