Guild Wars 2

1. What many people have noticed about Dev (Reds) responses/feedback on the forums:

Its rare, and you’re lucky if you get it at all.

2. Reasons that we don’t receive responses/feedback:

a) The Devs just don’t see our posts

b) The Devs see our posts, but are WAY too busy to say anything

c) The Devs see our posts and decide to ignore them because its not important

3. Reasons why Dev response/feedback is important:

a) Provides realistic answers to questions

b) Can clear up mass confusion

c) Shows that they care about our interest in the game

4. The current experience on the forums:

Step 1) Player creates a thread with a question about current/upcoming content

Step 2) Player waits for a response

Step 3) Other players respond with speculative answers that are mostly just their “2 cents”

Step 4) The speculation grows wildly out of control

Step 5) Players start to feel that a simple reply by a dev could clear things up

Step 6) Other players jokingly reply “too bad Anet will never comment on this”

Step 7) The thread dies off because its filled with useless speculation and nothing conclusive

5. What i’m NOT expecting out of the Devs:

I’m NOT expecting them to respond to EVERY thread and EVERY question

I’d like to go back to topic # 2 and talk a bit about it. Both points A and B are highly unlikely to be true. If you take a quick visit to the forum subsection titled “Dev Tracker” it shows Dev activity on these forums. Also, there a few posts here and there which did get Dev attention. So clearly at least the thread titles are being read given the fact that certain threads DO get attention. This brings me to point C. If Anet puts up a future patch release page, with minimal details, then there is probably going to be a population of players interested enough in the new content to create threads about it. These threads will most often contain questions that can be quickly cleared up by most Devs. The problem is that they aren’t. If a teacher says “next week we have a midterm” and a student replies “on what chapters?” i would expect the teach to reward that students interest with a valuable answer. As for the students who didn’t show up or ask any questions i think they got what they deserved. It would be pretty disrespectful of the teacher to just look that student dead in the face, decide that that question isn’t worth answering, and just completely ignore that student. Thats what i feel that these Devs are doing. There are threads which have thousands of views and hundreds of replies yet they get 0 attention by the Devs. If you take a look at any post either generated by a Dev or commented on by a Dev you’ll quickly see that it has an enormous amount of views and replies. The reason for that is because we WANT DEV INTERACTIONS ON THE FORUM when we have questions. Why are we being ignored?

*probably won’t get a Dev response on this…

There was a thread just opened today that was dealing with this topic….

Where did it go?

I’ve noticed that hot-button issue like gear treadmills and such rarely, if ever, get a dev response. I have a feeling that there are orders from within the company to avoid commenting on many topics, especially ones they know they can’t win.

Tequatl content? No response at all to the complaints. Gear treadmill opinions? No dev responses. Posts on how the dev team’s philosophy in creating GW2 has changed? No dev responses.

There are far too many cases where this has happened to simply disregard it as sheer coincidence. Frankly, it’s depressing – the devs need to communicate with the playerbase better, because they’re beginning to get a reputation as negligent, evasive, quite-often untruthful, and completely opaque. No matter what you think of the issues above, you can’t deny that their communication NEEDS to be better.

They used to respond pretty often on the forums. I think a mix of everybody constnatly taking every single word as gospel and claiming outright betrayal when it didn’t happen the very next day and the fact that Anet is a fairly small company has lead them to not respond much.

What benefit is it for a dev to respond to a simple question and then get unreasonably bashed and criticized?

If I were a dev I wouldn’t dare post here on these forums. I’d rather just communicate through 3rd party press releases and blog previews.

want a dev response? don’t even think about posting in the wvw section, it’s like a land mine field over there for the devs

The ridiculous vitriol of fan feedback has been a hot topic in the gaming blogosphere this year.

Anet isn’t a new company, it’s been around a few years and has a few games under their belt. Once upon a time a great idea they had (GW1) was to have a Community Relations position, filled by Gaile Gray. She was a sort of go between the GW1 community and the Anet GW1 team.

The reason I mention this is that over the years I believe Anet has had enough experience to have made a decision to go with their current approach. They have learned how best to handle forums such as this, the input, feedback, and responses they decide to make.

I don’t think it’s just random what and when an official employee makes a response.

I think they’re just intimidated by all the vitriol and I honestly can’t blame them.

But just because we’re on here critiquing your work doesn’t mean we want to bite your heads off. We, like you, just want a better game. And some things aren’t working out at the moment.

Meili Ying.3820:

There was a thread just opened today that was dealing with this topic….

Where did it go?

It was removed, just like the previous version of it was. Just like this one likely will be.

Meili Ying.3820:

There was a thread just opened today that was dealing with this topic….

Where did it go?

Threads around here have a way of just vanishing into thin air, leaving you wondering if your memory is playing tricks on you…

Fungalfoot.7213:

I think they’re just intimidated by all the vitriol and I honestly can’t blame them.

But just because we’re on here critiquing your work doesn’t mean we want to bite your heads off. We, like you, just want a better game. And some things aren’t working out at the moment.

Some want that. Most of them, I’m sure.

There’s others that simply want to see the world burn. A dev response in most of these threads would do nothing but incite more hate and venom.

Chuo.4238:

Meili Ying.3820:

There was a thread just opened today that was dealing with this topic….

Where did it go?

Threads around here have a way of just vanishing into thin air, leaving you wondering if your memory is playing tricks on you…

Gods, it’s even gone from my post history. They should at least note when they close it to stop playing mindgames on me

With regards to 2, I guess it’s a mixture of “they see the posts (or at least someone sees them and forwards the concerns to the devs) but are too busy to say anything” and “they just don’t have anything to say”.

With the probable exception of Colin and other high ups in the company, I doubt any dev has the whole picture when it comes to the game. Maybe a requested feature was done on one dev’s side, but something else is holding it out (maybe the art isn’t ready), or maybe bugs were found and are holding them out, or even if they’re just working on other stuff.

Which also leads us to the other side of the coin… us. Devs work is taken as gospel, so they must be VERY careful about what they say… a dev saying something like “we have that on the list but we feel X or Y has higher priority right now” suddenly turns into “ANET DOESN’T CARE ABOUT X!!!”, a “we’re looking at it” (which goes with the bigger picture part, maybe it was something talked about in a meeting but a technical or logistical issue made them discard it, for example, or save it for future patches) turns a few weeks (or even days) later into “ANET LIED TO US, THEY PROMIXED X AND NOTHING YET!!!”.

BTW, it’s not only the mods and devs that delete threads and topics, if someone opens a topic and later decides to delete the first post, the entire threads ends up deleted.