Guild Wars 2

Hello all, Ezendor of Synapse [SYN] here. I’ve seen a log of negativity on the forums, especially the WvW and class forums (especially the Ranger forum).

ANet is a great company, they created GW1, a game I loved before I moved on to WoW many many years back. There have been a few “big-name” releases this year, most notably ME3, D3 and of course GW2.

The trend seems to be that all were disappointing for various reasons and I do agree to some of them. ME3’s ending needed more closure, D3 needed an endgame, and GW2 needs more developer response.

I see 2 things that are different between Bioware/Blizzard and ANet. Firstly Bioware and Blizzard noted what their fan base was saying and wanting and communicated to them their intentions. D3 had SERIOUS flaming going on and Blizzard stepped up to the challenge to provide a game their players wanted. It may not be there yet but you can see their effort in doing so.

Secondly, Bioware/Blizzard actually did something to address the issues in their game with new endings and end game respectively. It may not have been much but the effort was shown and was appreciated.

Now, what I would like to see from my beloved ANet team is to be more communicative to their loyal player base, to provide patch previews and to have developer blogs more often to provide information to us players. D3 did a fantastic job with this, as does WoW who have been doing this for ages. Patch previews for any upcoming content/fixes, developer blogs about individual classes (a la D3) and any known issues that are currently being investigated as well as your vision of the game in much more specific terms.

The developer blogs so far have been a little lackluster as they are never specific about anything and thus provide no information whatsoever for issues that players are currently experiencing.

I believe ANet can make this game the game I was looking forward since the official announcement of GW2, and I believe that ANet wants this as well.

ANet, I’ve said my part and now it’s your turn We just need info, that’s all.

I think it’s important to have feedback from them on what they think are valuable suggestions, and what parts of the game are hardwired and will never change. For instance, if they say certain parts of the combat will not change – it will help streamline suggestions to improve the combat system.

If they want better feedback from us, we need it from them first.

MMO communities talk too much for their own good, and they have a toxic effect on players who are otherwise fine with what they have.

It’s kinda like whipping a crowd of otherwise reasonable and even content people into a frenzy.

Over the past few days, I’ve been scanning the forums occasionally and it seems like a lot of people are giving A-Net flak for communication/feedback. Maybe they aren’t doing as well as they could but at the same time everyone needs to remember that the game hasn’t even been out for 2 months yet. The developers are still ironing outs tons of kinks to make it more enjoyable. Therefore, as we continue to move away from the release date, I believe we will continue more communication and just more advances made within and outside the game in general.

Anymore, games development doesn’t stop after release, but continues on afterwards. I know this will be the case with GW2. Relax, enjoy what you can, and watch the game continue to improve.

ANet holds the industry standard for community management. If that’s not enough, no other studio has what you believe is enough. Sorry, but as someone in the general field, it just isn’t very reasonable. ANet is doing extremely well.

I believe A-Net is doing well myself. All I meant was to say that the people who are complaining about a lack of attention being paid to or anything being done about ‘x’ problem needs to give it time. Not all problems are fixed over night.

@Fozee, I believe WoW and even D3 are doing much more in terms of communicating with their player base with patch previews, their goals for the game going forward and thoughtful blog posts from their lead game designers like Ghostcrawler. Everyone can improve, and I believe ANet can too.

@Streyiken, I don’t want things fixed overnight, I just want to know what options they are considering to fix certain issues, as well as their thoughts on the matter.

Samfisher.7942:

@Fozee, I believe WoW and even D3 are doing much more in terms of communicating with their player base with patch previews, their goals for the game going forward and thoughtful blog posts from their lead game designers like Ghostcrawler. Everyone can improve, and I believe ANet can too.

@Streyiken, I don’t want things fixed overnight, I just want to know what options they are considering to fix certain issues, as well as their thoughts on the matter.

You’re talking about games in vastly different stages of development. GW2 has just launched and is now starting to roll into post-launch development. There simply won’t be much to talk about until things start to exist. We already had a patch preview BTW.

In terms of Blizzard, you’re talking about a company that did very poorly at that before ~2011.

Samfisher.7942:

@Fozee, I believe WoW and even D3 are doing much more in terms of communicating with their player base with patch previews, their goals for the game going forward and thoughtful blog posts from their lead game designers like Ghostcrawler. Everyone can improve, and I believe ANet can too.

@Streyiken, I don’t want things fixed overnight, I just want to know what options they are considering to fix certain issues, as well as their thoughts on the matter.

Valid point. I do hope they keep us updated on what actions are being taken to address particular issues when they’ve decided upon an action.

I guess my post was more directed at some of the more negative criticism of how A-Net does things and the quality of the game they have produced.

Fozee.1083:

ANet holds the industry standard for community management. If that’s not enough, no other studio has what you believe is enough. Sorry, but as someone in the general field, it just isn’t very reasonable. ANet is doing extremely well.

I would see CCP Dev’s and GM’s on the EvE forums all the time communicating like real people, not like they were reading prepared statements. They would also, typically, give some kind of sneak peek at what was in an upcoming update. They didn’t just dump it on people out of the blue.

negativity is pretty normal on any forums, even on the wow forums you get like, 90% of the topics being created being complaints

i just think the people who enjoy the game actually play the game, and the people who rage hard on the forums because they don’t like the game and either…

a. try to convince everyone that the game is not worth buying and that everything is broken
b. insult the company developing the game, telling them that the game is low quality
or c. demand refunds

some of these posts are made up of complete nonsense and some are actually really well thought out posts that do make sense, but generally i’ve just been finding that people who don’t like mmos end up turning the forums into a sort of blog stating why they don’t like the game

i do agree that they should post patch previews though so that the playerbase knows what kind of things they’re working on and what we can kind of expect from the next patches

@Fozee Yeah, I like how they managed us at launch. Keep the forums closed and force us to tweet them or use some other forum. It’s world-class!

Halo.1064:

@Fozee Yeah, I like how they managed us at launch. Keep the forums closed and force us to tweet them or use some other forum. It’s world-class!

No need for such sarcasm. This thread was made to convey my feelings, as well as many others that I know of and what they have come to expect from a AAA company

I don’t know where you get this AAA/“world class” stuff. That’s meaningless marketing-speek. Most of us only know what we see and experience for ourselves. Many of us had to wait 2-3 weeks to be able to communicate meaningful posts to them because they wouldn’t put the forum up. That did not feel like a step toward good communcation.

Halo.1064:

I don’t know where you get this AAA/“world class” stuff. That’s meaningless marketing-speek. Most of us only know what we see and experience for ourselves.

ANet IS an AAA development studio. I hugely enjoyed all their well made games from GW1 including all the expansions. To me, AAA = studio that can consistently create fun games to a higher than usual polish. ANet is that studio. Would you consider Blizz to not be an AAA studio cos of the mess D3 was?

All I’m asking is for more insight into the development process, what’s going on with the game we all love etc etc

Bottom line is they communicated fantastically during the beta period and before that, we had a sense of their purpose and direction. Compared to now where generally all we’re hearing is more PR and purposefully vague statements. It simply isn’t good enough by modern standards for a global MMO to have such bad communication.

Other games have systems in place to deal with issues, things like live GM’s or reasonably accessible test servers, what exactly does ArenaNet have in place? Saying the game has only been out for two months is not a valid excuse, they’ve had Guild Wars 1 to draw experience from and have had massive public participation since the first beta weekend.

For those of you stating that ArenaNet is doing a fantastic job could you please qualify that statement with a few examples besides Reddit?

@Substance E: I agree, though Eve is a prime example of how a developer can get too close to the player. I am talking about the schmoozing with certain player factions.

More communicative than a.net already is? Which is already vastly more than Blizzard ever was? You must be joking right?

@Marnick I don’t think you’ve played any Blizzard game in the past 2-3 years have you? WoW and D3 have fantastic developer feedback. WoW since before Cataclysm, D3 since 1.0.3

They’ve got in-depth patch previews, State of the Profession/Class, upcoming changes, developer Q&A etc etc.