Does ANet Have a Middle Ground?
Over the years, I’ve noticed that ANet often handles things in graduated increments, rather than aiming for extremes. This can be seen with how they originally tried to handle silk and then leather, with how they originally tried to handle the zerker’s+scholar’s meta, how they originally tried to handle condi, and balancing in general.
Of course they’ve also gone too far at times, failed to hit the sweet spot and taken extreme measures. Worse, in my opinion, sometimes they’ve been too slow at making any changes at all, unless shortly after a patch.
All in all, I’d say that running a popular MMO is a nearly-impossible task and it’s all-too-easy to second guess decisions afterward. I think that if we really want to evaluate how well they’ve done, we need to be more thorough and not cherry-pick the examples that support our impressions: make a list of hundreds of issues at stake during a fixed time period and narrow it down to at least 50-100. Was the issue addressed? Was the solution ‘extreme’? Did it solve the problem substantial? Were there major unintended consequences? Did they make appropriate adjustments after the fact?
My guess is that we won’t find a specific pattern; it will be a mixed bag, just like it is for every other major MMO.
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
While “small adjustments” were ANet’s announced approach to balance changes, according to complaining players, their adjustments are heavy-handed and extreme. My take is that sometimes the players are right, and sometimes it’s just the, “My favorite X is no longer top of the heap.” angst.
Perhaps the most extreme change in my mind was inviting (via the NPE) players who found it too hard to click 2-3 times to progress a heart, then offering them HoT.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that ANet often handles things in graduated increments, rather than aiming for extremes. This can be seen with how they originally tried to handle silk and then leather, with how they originally tried to handle the zerker’s+scholar’s meta, how they originally tried to handle condi, and balancing in general.
Of course they’ve also gone too far at times, failed to hit the sweet spot and taken extreme measures. Worse, in my opinion, sometimes they’ve been too slow at making any changes at all, unless shortly after a patch.
All in all, I’d say that running a popular MMO is a nearly-impossible task and it’s all-too-easy to second guess decisions afterward. I think that if we really want to evaluate how well they’ve done, we need to be more thorough and not cherry-pick the examples that support our impressions: make a list of hundreds of issues at stake during a fixed time period and narrow it down to at least 50-100. Was the issue addressed? Was the solution ‘extreme’? Did it solve the problem substantial? Were there major unintended consequences? Did they make appropriate adjustments after the fact?
My guess is that we won’t find a specific pattern; it will be a mixed bag, just like it is for every other major MMO.
The post was just a means of offering my thoughts on the direction concerning certain issues in the game, don’t understand the need for a satirical reply. If you need more examples of what I mean just look at the changes done to certain classes/builds that completely remove them from the meta or ANet’s handling of dungeons by removing all incentive to run them before they adjusted this later on.
An opposing opinion may not be satire; rather, just an opposing opinion. I don’t think ArenaNet often handles the game with a heavy-handed touch. But, then, ‘balance changes’ don’t seem to affect my play, either. /shrug
Good luck.
I think a lot of their more “extreme” things are the little reworks people forget about. Like how certain builds were completely lost when Traits became Specializations and certain major traits were cut, moved, or merged. Or how some runes were reworked and their uses altered. In a few cases it might have been warranted, but for those of us with silly fringe synergies, it feels pretty bad.
Other “extreme” measures might be the change to the leveling system, or how Heart of Thorns and Living Story kind of defies the original manifesto of the game (“no end game” being one of these major points).
Or going free to play and kittening new players. But that’s more opinion now, given how many MMOs have similar policies these days.
I do agree that ArenaNet needs to try to remember some of the leftovers and things that haven’t been addressed in years, like cleaning up areas with useless Living Story content, fixing skills that have had poor performance or reliability since launch, and other areas where it feels like they’ve moved on too quickly. There’s still tons of polish that keeps getting overlooked because a new content patch went out or we’re back in the eSports cycle of “must balance everything for PvP.”
But overall, I think the most extreme change is the new direction of the game as a whole. It’s not what the vanilla 2012 Guild Wars 2 used to be and is becoming more and more of a generic MMO full of farming, grinding, unlocks, raids, end-game, loot progressions, and abandoned side-content that feels the need to hold our hand rather than let us have fun and learn and explore at our own pace.
Don’t get me wrong, though; a lot of the quality of life updates up until about 2014 were fantastic and I think Q1~Q2 of that year were some of the highlights of Guild Wars 2. It’s just a shame that everything has changed so much that, from a perspective reaching back all the way to the head start, it does feel like a very “extreme” change from where we started.
(Oh, and Seaworld Tyria.)
I completely agree @fluffdragon they seem to be in the habit of starting something then dropping it for something completely new or they just stop updating it like stronghold.
Not bashing ANet cause they do a lot of things right but there’s definitely room for improvement in this area.
I believe that every creator/artist loses their objectiveness for their creation over time (it’s easy to get tangled up in ideas and lose yourself in them). That’s why it’s important to have quality control from a team not directly involved into the development of the product.
Apparently, ArenaNet does not have such a thing.
It’s a lot worse in other MMOs. They’ll just shove the slider all the way to one end, leave it, then when people complain they’ll shove the slider all the way to the other side. I think you know the MMOs I am talking about. Foresight + gradual adjustments is what should happen.
Isn’t it a middle ground when you provide easy open world content for more casual play while at the same providing more “difficult/hardcore” content with raids ? I feel like they reached this middle ground only with HoT release, whereas before it was way too much tuned to easy/casual.
Truth unlike other MMO’s GW2 has gone through very distinct phases and each shift they’ve taken has come with a bang.
Look at their focus during launch, pushing for esports, and again when they went for raids. It’s not a light touch because they’d uplift other aspects of the game along with it. The very reason for this upcoming competitive patch is because they’ve been neglecting WVW and has a laser like focus on other aspects of the game. A rising tide raises all ships but this obviously isn’t how Anet has decided to run this game.
I suppose they could release all (kinds of ) content at the same time; but, of course, that would be a very long wait while every team finished all projects.
The studio probably thinks, and, I believe, has stated, that they release content when it’s ready.
While “small adjustments” were ANet’s announced approach to balance changes, according to complaining players, their adjustments are heavy-handed and extreme. My take is that sometimes the players are right, and sometimes it’s just the, “My favorite X is no longer top of the heap.” angst.
Perhaps the most extreme change in my mind was inviting (via the NPE) players who found it too hard to click 2-3 times to progress a heart, then offering them HoT.
Okay usually I agree with most of what you say, but this is way out of whack. What they did with the click 2-3 times thing, it was removed from level 1-10 areas. That means people had 70 levels to come to terms with clicking 3 times. The NPE affected a whole lot less than people claim it did.
There are usually three bottlenecks in game uptake that most games go through. First it has to be simple enough up front for enough people to understand. And even with the changes made, I still speak with people quite frequently who have no idea what to do. The idea of slowing down the rate at which people get new info is a sound one.
Second barrier is when people actually level and how fast they level and how interesting that process is. Again they sped up leveling to 15 to get you past the easy area faster, still without throwing too much at your too quickly. I think this is well done, even if not everyone needs it. Now obviously there are people who find the whole leveling process boring, but I don’t think that’s a problem for most of us.
The biggest hurdle in my opinion is getting people who come to a game for free to actually spend money. A lot of changes are going to be geared toward that end, because this is, after all, a business.
Before or after the NPE, the journey from Orr difficulty to HoT difficulty still has to pass through Dry Top, Silverwastes and Season 2. That’s the real issue. Not the NPE.
As for does Anet have a middle ground? Well that’s the thing. Anet tends to react very strongly to strong criticism. The stronger the criticism, the stronger they tend to react.
People complained for years about jumping in Guild Wars 1 and look what they did to us. lol
Over the years, I’ve noticed that ANet often handles things in graduated increments, rather than aiming for extremes. This can be seen with how they originally tried to handle silk and then leather, with how they originally tried to handle the zerker’s+scholar’s meta, how they originally tried to handle condi, and balancing in general.
Of course they’ve also gone too far at times, failed to hit the sweet spot and taken extreme measures. Worse, in my opinion, sometimes they’ve been too slow at making any changes at all, unless shortly after a patch.
All in all, I’d say that running a popular MMO is a nearly-impossible task and it’s all-too-easy to second guess decisions afterward. I think that if we really want to evaluate how well they’ve done, we need to be more thorough and not cherry-pick the examples that support our impressions: make a list of hundreds of issues at stake during a fixed time period and narrow it down to at least 50-100. Was the issue addressed? Was the solution ‘extreme’? Did it solve the problem substantial? Were there major unintended consequences? Did they make appropriate adjustments after the fact?
My guess is that we won’t find a specific pattern; it will be a mixed bag, just like it is for every other major MMO.
The post was just a means of offering my thoughts on the direction concerning certain issues in the game, don’t understand the need for a satirical reply. If you need more examples of what I mean just look at the changes done to certain classes/builds that completely remove them from the meta or ANet’s handling of dungeons by removing all incentive to run them before they adjusted this later on.
It’s not a satirical reply — it’s a serious reply. You’ve cherry picked the examples that suit your point of view, so I cherry picked related examples that show a different point of view.
My main goal was to suggest that it’s more nuanced and that if we really want to see if ANet takes a middle ground, we need to look at the big picture, not a few examples.
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
While “small adjustments” were ANet’s announced approach to balance changes, according to complaining players, their adjustments are heavy-handed and extreme. My take is that sometimes the players are right, and sometimes it’s just the, “My favorite X is no longer top of the heap.” angst.
Perhaps the most extreme change in my mind was inviting (via the NPE) players who found it too hard to click 2-3 times to progress a heart, then offering them HoT.
Okay usually I agree with most of what you say, but this is way out of whack. What they did with the click 2-3 times thing, it was removed from level 1-10 areas. That means people had 70 levels to come to terms with clicking 3 times. The NPE affected a whole lot less than people claim it did.
There are usually three bottlenecks in game uptake that most games go through. First it has to be simple enough up front for enough people to understand. And even with the changes made, I still speak with people quite frequently who have no idea what to do. The idea of slowing down the rate at which people get new info is a sound one.
Second barrier is when people actually level and how fast they level and how interesting that process is. Again they sped up leveling to 15 to get you past the easy area faster, still without throwing too much at your too quickly. I think this is well done, even if not everyone needs it. Now obviously there are people who find the whole leveling process boring, but I don’t think that’s a problem for most of us.
The biggest hurdle in my opinion is getting people who come to a game for free to actually spend money. A lot of changes are going to be geared toward that end, because this is, after all, a business.
Before or after the NPE, the journey from Orr difficulty to HoT difficulty still has to pass through Dry Top, Silverwastes and Season 2. That’s the real issue. Not the NPE.
As for does Anet have a middle ground? Well that’s the thing. Anet tends to react very strongly to strong criticism. The stronger the criticism, the stronger they tend to react.
People complained for years about jumping in Guild Wars 1 and look what they did to us. lol
Yeah, what can I say, I liked opening the fish trap, picking up the fish and feeding it to the little bear. The NPE is one of my pet peeves, even if it might make more sense if I wasn’t biased. However, I’ll retract the statement about it being an extreme case.
Short Answer: No
Long Answer: Lol
Also RIP Queensdale.
To be fair, this kind of nuance is a fine art, and very rare. Failure in these cases is not really a symptom of being bad, but being unable to be exceptional in that regards. Though they may be exceptional in other regards. Nobody’s perfect.
For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards,
for there you have been and there you will long to return.
for there you have been and there you will long to return.
(edited by ArchonWing.9480)
As for does Anet have a middle ground? Well that’s the thing. Anet tends to react very strongly to strong criticism. The stronger the criticism, the stronger they tend to react.
I absolutely agree with this statement, I mean look at the criticism about HoT being over-hyped which caused them to shift to a policy where they will only talk about things like a week before release. There is some merit to this method but it also causes the community to have a lack of commitment to the game when they have no idea what’s coming next.
My main goal was to suggest that it’s more nuanced and that if we really want to see if ANet takes a middle ground, we need to look at the big picture, not a few examples.
I’ll agree with you on that point that in some instances it is more nuanced, but if you look at the hype example I mentioned above, it’s more obvious in that case.
I’m pretty sure they didn’t shift to the less communication policy because of Heart of Thorns. Pretty sure there were plenty of complaints on the forum about that policy long before HoT launched, and received criticism.
Thus, not really a great example.
I’m pretty sure they didn’t shift to the less communication policy because of Heart of Thorns. Pretty sure there were plenty of complaints on the forum about that policy long before HoT launched, and received criticism.
Thus, not really a great example.
Yes their communication in general needs improvement, but if we look at how long they hyped HoT for compared to the new upcoming expansion (basically no hype at all, unless you count the leaks) there definitely was a shift.
Perhaps, they will ‘hype’ it after they announce it, much like with the previous expansion. I don’t really remember much ‘hype’ about HoT before it was announced. /shrug
It’s not a satirical reply — it’s a serious reply. You’ve cherry picked the examples that suit your point of view, so I cherry picked related examples that show a different point of view.
It’s interesting, then, that some of the examples you brought up (leather and silk, for one) support OP’s point really well. Other points are more arguable, but not even one clearly holds up your point, while some could easily be also used for OP.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
Remember, remember, 15th of November