Guild Wars 2

I figured it was high time I took the time to explain why I am no longer playing GW2, and I seriously don’t expect that I will be back anytime soon.
It’s the responsible thing to do I think, since most players that leave simple go silent without saying anything. So take this for what little it’s worth.

I used to be a tremendous fan of Arenanet’s, since Guild Wars built up a large amount of good will with me. Sure it had a few missteps and wasn’t a perfect game by any stretch, but it did good by it’s player base, and had a fair bit of depth to it’s mechanics.

-
And as excited by Guild Wars 2 as I was, and as good as it was at launch, it has since then just become a continuing source of disappointment. It squandered all of my good will, to the point where I simply just don’t bloody care anymore.

I could list off my considerable list of issues I have with the game, but I will restrain myself to only my two biggest bug bears.

-
Direction of Content Creation
First is how Anet go about their content creation, or rather how they don’t.
Anet seem far, far more preoccupied with polish and temporary content ala the Living Story then permanent content to the world or professions.

As small as the world is, is a small as it will continue to be. And your stuck with the same old content between LS content, which is take it or leave it at best. And any innovation or improvements to content, such as better telegraphing never makes it’s way to the rest of the game. It’s like an entirely different game that’s be cut off, it’s very odd.
And there is only so long you can play the same content before it’s no longer interesting, assuming it was interesting from the beginning.
The pace in which actual new permanent content is added to the game is lethargic at best.

-
What’s worse I for me is what has been done with professions, which is next to nothing. They occasional get tweaks and balance changes, which is expected, but half the time they when they fix something they break something else or don’t actually fix it.
Many bugs and dead skills/traits have been so for at least 6-12 months, sometimes longer. This might not have been as much of an issue if Anet continuously added content to the professions, since they did go out of their way to future proof it.
But of course they haven’t.

The amount of content that has been added to professions coming on two years now has been absolutely laughable…. if it wasn’t so pathetically sad.
And coming from Guild Wars which had a great deal of content to this poultry amount is jarring to say the least, I don’t even recognize them as the same company at this point.

Needless to say, but I’m going to say anyway, I am not a fan of this approach. It’s going nowhere fast, and I can’t expect it to improve. And no amount of polish is going to rectify this.

Meaningless Multiplayer
And this is the second and exceedingly jarring issue I have, how utterly meaningless and trivial multiplayer is in this game. Which as far as MMO’s goes I consider this to be a cardinal sin. If your multipler gameplay in a massively ‘multiplayer’ online game is poor, then you’ve kind of missed the bloody point haven’t you?

Which is exceedingly bazaar, since in many respects Anet actually did a wonderful job of making it easier then ever to actual play with people without silly little hurdles or contrivances getting in the way, which is fantastic. And yet when you actually do play together, nothing of note ever actually happens.

It’s like everyone is in a bubble roll-a-ball, you can see each other and occasionally bump into each other, but you can’t interact in any meaningful sense. You have no roles, you can’t rely on anyone to do anything specific, nor be relied upon.
You can’t effect anybody in any meaningful way.

Everyone is designed to only ever care about themselves and only themselves, screw everyone else around you. Even if you wanted to help others, you can’t. Not in any direct, or effective ways. At best you have entirely indirect, impersonally, and often trivial means.
The only direct help you can offer is rezzing their sorry backside. Which naturally takes no skill or effort whatsoever.

And what is maddening is that the game is so bloody close to actually pulling off a new and innovative way to have support/cooperative multiplayer interactions, in a way that could be tremendously fun. And yet it just doesn’t. It has everything it needs to work, the door is wide open, and yet it refuses to take the steps to go through.
It seems Anet are so scared of making mistakes that they instead opt to do nothing at all.

Overall I think multiplayer is a few steps forward, and a few steps to the side and off a cliff. You undermined the entire point of multiplayer, and that is bloody disgraceful.
I never thought you could screw it up this badly, but apparently I was mistaken in giving you entirely too much credit.

I’ve had a much more involved and enjoyable multiplayer experience in Dark Souls 2 kitten .

My final thoughts are ones of bitterness and a growing sense of disappointment. I’m actually a little mad at myself for playing it a long as I did seeing it go absolutely no where, and for spending as much as I did in the cash shop. I feel I invested in a dead end project that doesn’t really have a future to speak off, or at least not one I have any interest in being a part of.

And going from a position of absolute praise and joy to bitterness and resentment, is just staggering. I don’t think I’ve ever been so let down in my life…. thou that has more to do with me never really expecting anything, as wise policy it seems.

While it is conceivable that I might, and I stress ‘might’ with a bag full of salt, play GW2 again in the future, as I will try and keep up to date with it’s on goings and such, it’s going to take something pretty significant for me to get over my lump of disappointment. And since I have massive doubts that Anet will do this anytime soon, it’ll probably be a long time.

While I still respect many Arenanet employees, esp Chris Whiteside, I have however lost a great deal of respect for Anet as a company.
I don’t know where they are trying to take this game, but I honestly don’t care anymore.

~ Kind Regards

Yoh

I read your complaint that they havent “added” to professions and stopped reading. One of the chief problems with GW1 was that they continually added skills, it was a balancing nightmare and they were doing MASSIVE balance patches 5 years into the game. They aren’t going wild with additions to professions because their focus is on getting them into a good place where they don’t have huge problems.

Also, bye bye to your thread – there’s no way a mod isn’t going to lock/delete this.

Thanks OP for writing this out. While some people (read: fanboys) prefer trolling and calling out hate messages, I will not do so. Most of what you say is true.

• Content IS not really content, it’s just item progression.
• Multiplayer in this game is the biggest trash I’ve ever seen: spam 1 skill with 50 or more other people and you win.

I agree, and it saddens me, but that’s the way it is. I actually still play the game, but only PvP though. I find that SPvP serves for a lot of interesting situations IF you ignore the meta and IF you are an opportunist. xD I for my part am not mad for the amount of hours I played because the most of them were in WvW/SPvP and I enjoyed them.

Your multiplayer experience is wrong. in dungeons you DO need to work togther and think about more then personal dps. Look at the flavor of the month dungeon ranger build, it generally brings redmoa/spotter/frost spirit to work together with other popular meta builds, it brings aoe buffs that are important to improving party dps and scale exponentially the more people you have.

I play an engi, and nothing is more satisfing then blasting 18 might stacks onto my party for 30 seconds and watching bosses melt. I think the multiplayer is AMAZING, you just are prolly zerging over world content which is as you said, mindless and not really meaningful, get in a dungeon and its a diffrent world where you need diffrent ideas and gameplay to win.

Not you Yoh :/ This saddens me.

PS: Do you have some spare cash? I supported a bunch of your ideas in random CDIs as I recall

D I V A

Sirendor.1394:

• Multiplayer in this game is the biggest trash I’ve ever seen: spam 1 skill with 50 or more other people and you win.

I should really make this my signature:

This mentality is exactly why Anet’s ‘multiplayer’ content doesn’t work in this game. Not because the mechanics are stupid, but because you got everyone thinking like this.

‘Oh, did that guy Xaei just spend 30 mins explaining why I shouldn’t just zerg and 11111 on Boss Blitz? Oh, he so silly!’

- This is why the QP is a mess
- This is why PUGs fail Teq
- This is why Wurm is unthinkable to do without a guild alliance backing you up

If you want to help a group, start listening to advice and instructions, if you want a meaningful multiplayer experience which doesn’t make everyone pull their hairs out, start having more organisational capabilities than sheep.

If people can get away from this mentality, maybe Anet can actually make open world raids actually a thing, until then, you can stop complaining about 111111 to win because that’s all that the playerbase is capable of at the moment.

(At least in the open world, Anet seems to be against instances for whatever reason I cannot imagine)

I agree with everything you said OP. You have my 100% support. Don’t listen to all the fanboys and such.
You should give your items and gold to me so I can spread the word for you.

Freeelancer.2860:

I agree with everything you said OP. You have my 100% support. Don’t listen to all the fanboys and such.
You should give your items and gold to me so I can spread the word for you.

sneaky, I mean, I will too!

I do want to elaborate on a point I don’t think I made myself entirely clear. I don’t have that much of a problems with faults in the game, well I do, but I am willing to look past them if I think the game overall is going in a positive direction.
And I don’t think it is. I sat here and watched it go off in a direction I have little to no interest in, giving it the benefit of the doubt and hoped something would come of it.
Alas not much did, and it didn’t even begin to alleviate the major issues I have with it, so what’s the point in wasting good time and money.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

I read your complaint that they havent “added” to professions and stopped reading. One of the chief problems with GW1 was that they continually added skills, it was a balancing nightmare and they were doing MASSIVE balance patches 5 years into the game. They aren’t going wild with additions to professions because their focus is on getting them into a good place where they don’t have huge problems.

Also, bye bye to your thread – there’s no way a mod isn’t going to lock/delete this.

TBH, while that was alot of work for the devs and balance team, it was also the main reason that made me, and probably 80% of my guild stick to gw1 pvp for 5 years.

Every time new skills were added, or nerfed/buffed the whole meta shifted, cookie-cutter builds fell out of favor and new builds started to shine. Sure, there were moments of total imbalance, but those didnt last too long due to how dynamic and frequent the balancing was.

I still remember how after each patch it was like a gold rush, everyone in my guild gathering in TS to discuss how the meta would change in each of the pvp modes, and what we could do to stay one step ahead. Creativity and theorycrafting were king.

While i don’t hate gw2 skill system, i do feel it sacrificed alot of that excitement just to be more accessibile and easy to manage, for both players and devs.
The result is a more stable but stale and grey meta, where most classes have the same couple viable builds (that everyone runs) for a MUCH longer time.

So the whole drama thing is perfectly fine then?

While your post does have some merit, and I do agree with you on something. However posting these types of threads is fruitless. It’ll just get lock, and a bunch of can I have your stuff comments.

Best thing to do is just leave, when Anet sees their population keep slipping maybe they’ll do something about it.

Sirendor.1394:

Thanks OP for writing this out. While some people (read: fanboys) prefer trolling and calling out hate messages, I will not do so. Most of what you say is true.

Actually, the real troll is likely this thread. I mean, honestly, who would really care when someone’s quitting the game? Aside from people that the person may call “friend,” and would have spoken with ingame or via guild, I really cant think of anyone. Making this sort of thread just comes off as the player being self-important about themselves, always has regardless of whatever game it is. Most of the time such people dont even leave the game entirely, and instead choose to creep the forums bashing anything and everyone like an addict being deprived of a fix.

So here’s to the OP actually leaving the game entirely: bye.

Yoh.8469:

Which is exceedingly bazaar

I personally would say it is more swapmeet or mall than bazaar.

Enough joking aside, I think the lack of super-meaningful multiplayer interaction is partly because of the community. The community in this game is quite timid. I fear this may ultimately be Anets fault, though, since they follow a social darwinistic method of teaching players.

Devata.6589:

lordkrall.7241:

Can I have your stuff?

Why You don’t like the game enough to play (sorry, grind gold to buy) the stuff for yourself?

Well in my case it’s just that if I were to get his stuff I’d have even more stuff to have fun with.
So can I have some?

Yoh.8469:

I don’t know where they are trying to take this game, but I honestly don’t care anymore.

~ Kind Regards

Yoh

You cared enough to write three lengthy posts on it though, and still found room for more when the vultures swooped in.

We get it, you’re leaving and like every other flouncer before you, you felt the need to make a big deal about it.

OP you should just do what I do and stop playing until you feel like it again. I got the game at launch and after my friends left in the great exodus 2-3 months after the game launched I stopped playing for 10 months and came back for a little while and left again.
The only thing I know is this is the last game I play that has anything to do with ncsoft which I say to anyone who dislikes this game or the direction it seems to be going to also do. Hope you find another game maybe I’ll be playing it also.

I didn’t bother to read, since 3 long posts are probably one of those “game isn’t developing the way I want”.

But it’s nice to see that there are people in GW2 who feel a need to announce their “I quit” thingie.

The OP is right. The game is only good to play till you get one lvl 80 or a few more if you are an altoholic then it is good to be quit or only played occasionally.
There is nothing to make you dedicate more time to it.

OP, your post is very non-constructive and filled with superlatives that lack any form of decently argued backing. This alone simply makes it very hard to take it seriously, or even to read from front to back. You have a couple of points that are worth arguing, but the scatter-attack form you’ve chosen doesn’t bring it out

Sorry man, gl.

Aegis.9724:

FlamingFoxx.1305:

I read your complaint that they havent “added” to professions and stopped reading. One of the chief problems with GW1 was that they continually added skills, it was a balancing nightmare and they were doing MASSIVE balance patches 5 years into the game. They aren’t going wild with additions to professions because their focus is on getting them into a good place where they don’t have huge problems.

Also, bye bye to your thread – there’s no way a mod isn’t going to lock/delete this.

TBH, while that was alot of work for the devs and balance team, it was also the main reason that made me, and probably 80% of my guild stick to gw1 pvp for 5 years.

Every time new skills were added, or nerfed/buffed the whole meta shifted, cookie-cutter builds fell out of favor and new builds started to shine. Sure, there were moments of total imbalance, but those didnt last too long due to how dynamic and frequent the balancing was.

I still remember how after each patch it was like a gold rush, everyone in my guild gathering in TS to discuss how the meta would change in each of the pvp modes, and what we could do to stay one step ahead. Creativity and theorycrafting were king.

While i don’t hate gw2 skill system, i do feel it sacrificed alot of that excitement just to be more accessibile and easy to manage, for both players and devs.
The result is a more stable but stale and grey meta, where most classes have the same couple viable builds (that everyone runs) for a MUCH longer time.

For me, I think it actually might be easier to balance a game with a butt-load of skills. I havn’t played GW1 enough to know how that went but I’ve played TSW inside out, and in terms of how skill-setting works, those two seem to be in the same ball-park.

TSW was a flop, Funcom has a very small crew working on it and balance updates come once a year at best. Yet TSW’s PvP is extremely balanced and diverse and unless you’re a dungeon DPS, PvE has a lot of top-tier builds as well.

The reason behind it is that in a ‘chaotic’ and open system, there’s a lot more different possible combinations of set-ups so:

1. It’s harder to determine what are the best builds and you only need to change something slightly to trigger a domino effect and keep players guessing again.

2. There’s simply a lot more builds possible, so there are a lot of ‘overpowered’ metabuilds competing with each other instead of a few dominating everything.

3. The players have a lot more tools at their disposal to counter each and every build. With a limited and restricted system like ours, there’s a lot of builds that are simply very overpowered because there’s very little or sometimes nothing you can do to counter it.

In other words, in a very complex system, its players who set the metabuilds, not the developers, you simply need to give them the tools to do it instead of do all the work yourself.

Sorry guys, but any customer-centered business must care about what causes customers to quit buying (or playing) their product. Anet does care when a player posts that he/she is quitting because each player that posts represents roughly TEN THOUSAND players that do not take the time and effort required to post.

You may poke fun at him/her, ask for his/her stuff (thinking its funny), but in the end every player that quits hurts the game and the company’s bottom-line. I know because business retention is my line of work (and I’m good at it).

Finding NEW customers is a thousand times harder than retaining present customers. Any business that “beats” people for leaving will see an ever increasing exodus.

Social media (like forums) are becoming increasingly important. Comments that ridicule players for leaving only exacerbate the problem and hurt the company. If I worked at Anet, you can be sure I would be watching the forum for negative comments made by employees (I do it every day for a much larger corporation). Believe me, they never do it again.

Comments like “Can I have your stuff?” should be deleted, and candid discussion should be had both on and off line.

Where I work, we keep track of every type of posting. We record positive and negative feedback. We tabulate the results and are therefore able to estimate monthly customer satisfaction levels, population movements, and future trends. We never punish customers that complain, but listen to them. While we can’t retain every customer, our retention rate is constantly improving, and that’s why we’re making money, hiring more people, and giving salary increases.

Of course, this post opens me up for an onslaught of criticism and “Quit if you don’t like the game” kinds of postings. It’s juvenile, but probably inevitable. So, as a fellow GW2 player, I’d like to say,

“Thank you Yoh, for caring about the game and having the integrity and desire to help point Anet in the direction you think will improve the game. We do want you to stay and hope to run into you somewhere in Tyria some day soon.”

Sincerely,
Stevizard

Xae Isareth.1364:

Aegis.9724:

FlamingFoxx.1305:

I read your complaint that they havent “added” to professions and stopped reading. One of the chief problems with GW1 was that they continually added skills, it was a balancing nightmare and they were doing MASSIVE balance patches 5 years into the game. They aren’t going wild with additions to professions because their focus is on getting them into a good place where they don’t have huge problems.

Also, bye bye to your thread – there’s no way a mod isn’t going to lock/delete this.

TBH, while that was alot of work for the devs and balance team, it was also the main reason that made me, and probably 80% of my guild stick to gw1 pvp for 5 years.

Every time new skills were added, or nerfed/buffed the whole meta shifted, cookie-cutter builds fell out of favor and new builds started to shine. Sure, there were moments of total imbalance, but those didnt last too long due to how dynamic and frequent the balancing was.

I still remember how after each patch it was like a gold rush, everyone in my guild gathering in TS to discuss how the meta would change in each of the pvp modes, and what we could do to stay one step ahead. Creativity and theorycrafting were king.

While i don’t hate gw2 skill system, i do feel it sacrificed alot of that excitement just to be more accessibile and easy to manage, for both players and devs.
The result is a more stable but stale and grey meta, where most classes have the same couple viable builds (that everyone runs) for a MUCH longer time.

For me, I think it actually might be easier to balance a game with a butt-load of skills. I havn’t played GW1 enough to know how that went but I’ve played TSW inside out, and in terms of how skill-setting works, those two seem to be in the same ball-park.

TSW was a flop, Funcom has a very small crew working on it and balance updates come once a year at best. Yet TSW’s PvP is extremely balanced and diverse and unless you’re a dungeon DPS, PvE has a lot of top-tier builds as well.

The reason behind it is that in a ‘chaotic’ and open system, there’s a lot more different possible combinations of set-ups so:

1. It’s harder to determine what are the best builds and you only need to change something slightly to trigger a domino effect and keep players guessing again.

2. There’s simply a lot more builds possible, so there are a lot of ‘overpowered’ metabuilds competing with each other instead of a few dominating everything.

3. The players have a lot more tools at their disposal to counter each and every build. With a limited and restricted system like ours, there’s a lot of builds that are simply very overpowered because there’s very little or sometimes nothing you can do to counter it.

In other words, in a very complex system, its players who set the metabuilds, not the developers, you simply need to give them the tools to do it instead of do all the work yourself.

GW1 was impossible to balance. The reason being you could have two professions and sometimes the synergies between skills was unintended and made it hard to fix right. Some of the skills were so useless that they never were used, Keystone Signet anyone?

Nice post OP. I do agree with most of it although I continue to play the game.

I feel it is important for Anet to receive this kind of feedback. If customers just leave without saying why, then how are Anet to know what they did wrong? (at least in the case of that customer).

Not surprised to see people trying to sweep this issue under the carpet and have the thread locked though, with" just leave" and “can i has ur stuff?” comments. Some people are happy to only care about themselves and spam 1 to win and dont want the game to change is any meaningful way. These will be the first people to flood the forum with their tears if the difficulty level of the game was ever increased.

Good luck to you in your future endevours.

The OP really struck a chord with me. I would sign any of his claims.
Sadly I still feel invested in this game. Too much to let it go.

Well said, OP.

Yoh.8469:

I do want to elaborate on a point I don’t think I made myself entirely clear. I don’t have that much of a problems with faults in the game, well I do, but I am willing to look past them if I think the game overall is going in a positive direction.
And I don’t think it is. I sat here and watched it go off in a direction I have little to no interest in, giving it the benefit of the doubt and hoped something would come of it.
Alas not much did, and it didn’t even begin to alleviate the major issues I have with it, so what’s the point in wasting good time and money.

In what direction is it going then? I ask this question myself but for me, it just seems like Anet is all over the place, having no direction whatsoever.

See I can’t sympathize with these threads. Unfortunately Yoh, you are not one of the “few” people who make threads like this. If anything you are the 132546th person to do so. I understand you are dissatisfied with the game and I’m quite sad you are leaving, but there is no reason to make a thread like this.

The thing with these threads is that they never contribute to anything. Someone makes a thread stating what they think went wrong and then the thread just becomes a cesspool for negativity and/or complaints.

Notice how I emphasized the word “they”? Well, that’s because I’ve seen other threads complain about completely different things than yours Yoh. Some complained about dungeons and loot, others praised the multiplayer but shunned the “endgame”, others just flat out complained. Overall these threads are just people stating what they think went wrong, which is fine because you are all entitled to your own opinion.

But in all honesty these threads don’t do anything. If you REALLY wanted to voice your opinion on the “disappointments” of the game then you would either: A) make a constructive topic about it. Or b) contribute to a thread of it that already exists. There are no points to threads like these. It just ends up becoming a flame war. If you’re leaving then farewell, I hope you find a game you can enjoy as much as you want, but there’s no need to act like you just said a dramatic speech in front of the whole world.

It’s as contributive as anything. The devs don’t read these forums for tips on how to improve the game. They read the posts in a statistical manner.

X ammount of posts about quitting the game.
Y ammount of posts requesting mounts.
Z ammount of posts reporting a bug.

There’s a threshold for each after which the devs become semi-responsive. Yoh’s post contribtes to the statistics of people quitting the game because of disappointment. The devs look at his post and compare his complaints to other complaints. The complains that reach a certain treshold get considered.

It’s about as contributive any anything else here.

Mac.3872:

Nice post OP. I do agree with most of it although I continue to play the game.

I feel it is important for Anet to receive this kind of feedback. If customers just leave without saying why, then how are Anet to know what they did wrong? (at least in the case of that customer).

Not surprised to see people trying to sweep this issue under the carpet and have the thread locked though, with" just leave" and “can i has ur stuff?” comments. Some people are happy to only care about themselves and spam 1 to win and dont want the game to change is any meaningful way. These will be the first people to flood the forum with their tears if the difficulty level of the game was ever increased.

Good luck to you in your future endevours.

It is not constructive or objective feedback, which is useful. The thread title is a troll and shows self-importance like A.Net will die w/o this player- that is what sets up the bad connotation for the rest of the OP posts.

I still love this game. I wish ANet added an expansion/more permanent content, or at least another profession to level, though. I think they are sitting on their laurels (pardon the pun) a bit in not adding permanent content. They should add content expansions on the same level as the original game.

I also think that the game should be available on Steam. I know it hurts a game’s profit margins to be integrated with Steam; however, the players that would come into the game that otherwise may not I believe would be significant. It’s advertising targeted at millions of players worldwide. The revenue can hopefully be reinvested into permanent content updates.

Ultimately, GW2 is still the only MMO since WoW which has done anything noteworthy, still has a ton of potential, and now needs to capitalise on it and shift direction in its content strategy to keep growing and evolving. I sympathise with the feeling of not knowing what to do, or feeling there isn’t much to do, at certain points, particularly at endgame, which has no true ‘raids’ of any sort. But there’s still plenty that can be done, and it seems to me that the current perspective is too narrow to take advantage of the great foundation that was built.

I logged onto WoW the other week and it feels so empty now. On the other hand, I had a ton of fun running the large events in Orr last night with hundreds of players. I even think the dungeons have improved somewhat, although maybe that’s just me.

GW2 needs Steam in my opinion. After the break into the Chinese market , it’s guaranteed long-term exposure to target markets. Never underestimate the power of Steam. Anyhow, waffle over.

cygnus.8913:

GW2 needs Steam in my opinion. After the break into the Chinese market , it’s guaranteed long-term exposure to target markets. Never underestimate the power of Steam. Anyhow, waffle over.

I a curious about what Steam would give? They would take a cut of the profit. They would slow down releases since it would need to go through steam. They would not be exposed to any bigger market than they are already exposed to. Where is there any up side to going through Steam?

Stevizard.4926:

Sorry guys, but any customer-centered business must care about what causes customers to quit buying (or playing) their product.

[…]

Sincerely,
Stevizard

+1

When I was working for another MMO running studio, that company was ignorant for insights light these.
They basically didnt care about what anyone said if he wasnt a high paid suit, where most of them hadnt even a clue about the product itself, but had some fancy job titles and nice boards in theirs offices with some monetization statistics on it.

Trying to explain or convince them to listen to what their customers had to say even it wasnt a lawsuit was, despite all the internal and external smoke screen PR (where most of the revenue vanished in to anyway), like talking to a brick wall.
It was really weird because to me it seemed most of them just didnt want to understand whats going on, because they would have to step ‘out of line’.
They preferred to stay in their office ‘doing their job’, watching the ship sink and grabbing on what they can get.
I dont know, but thats the impression I got. And I saw the numbers, every working day.

Well, the best description about what happened next would be….a crash landing with many casualties beginning of course on the “lower end”….poor buggers.

If a company reaches a certain size, loosing touch with the basics is its biggest treat.

Anet seems to have reached that tipping point somewhere in between GW and GW2 with an integrated accelerator it seems.

To be fair, I probably should swap Anet with NCsoft.

Yargesh.4965:

cygnus.8913:

GW2 needs Steam in my opinion. After the break into the Chinese market , it’s guaranteed long-term exposure to target markets. Never underestimate the power of Steam. Anyhow, waffle over.

I a curious about what Steam would give? They would take a cut of the profit. They would slow down releases since it would need to go through steam. They would not be exposed to any bigger market than they are already exposed to. Where is there any up side to going through Steam?

It would force you to use Valve’s annoying game portal which acts all like a medium to spam adverts on your screen, make payments for gems awkward, and also cause insane lag at the worst times through updating itself without even telling you.

It’s a great asset (to lose hair).

Each time some dude decideds to leave, they go full dramatic on us.
It’s just a game.
A great one in my opinion , but still, a game.
It’s not that bad, it has a lot of cool content to play in like jumping puzzles and, (yes, there are some of us who actually ENJOY) WvW/PVP, and just meeting people and exploring the game.

The pvp is not that bad either. They can make it better, but it’s pretty good as is.
You just probably got board of it because u played it a lot.
Find a new game, play it and enjoy it
And we’ll see you some place else.

saikodan.6721:

Each time some dude decideds to leave, they go full dramatic on us.
It’s just a game.
A great one in my opinion , but still, a game.
It’s not that bad, it has a lot of cool content to play in like jumping puzzles and, (yes, there are some of us who actually ENJOY) WvW/PVP, and just meeting people and exploring the game.

The pvp is not that bad either. They can make it better, but it’s pretty good as is.
You just probably got board of it because u played it a lot.
Find a new game, play it and enjoy it
And we’ll see you some place else.

I think it’s good to have such kinds of threads. It shows that the ones are really caring for GW2. Or atleast they have been caring. I would agree with you if it would be any other game. I’ve stopped playing so many games now and never told anyone about it. But I would if I would stop playing GW2 because it’s based upon a great concept. Yet I’m not satisfied with the way this game is evolving.

Dafomen.7892:

Stevizard.4926:

Sorry guys, but any customer-centered business must care about what causes customers to quit buying (or playing) their product.

[…]

Sincerely,
Stevizard

+1

When I was working for another MMO running studio, that company was ignorant for insights light these.
They basically didnt care about what anyone said if he wasnt a high paid suit, where most of them hadnt even a clue about the product itself, but had some fancy job titles and nice boards in theirs offices with some monetization statistics on it.

Trying to explain or convince them to listen to what their customers had to say even it wasnt a lawsuit was, despite all the internal and external smoke screen PR (where most of the revenue vanished in to anyway), like talking to a brick wall.
It was really weird because to me it seemed most of them just didnt want to understand whats going on, because they would have to step ‘out of line’.
They preferred to stay in their office ‘doing their job’, watching the ship sink and grabbing on what they can get.
I dont know, but thats the impression I got. And I saw the numbers, every working day.

Well, the best description about what happened next would be….a crash landing with many casualties beginning of course on the “lower end”….poor buggers.

If a company reaches a certain size, loosing touch with the basics is its biggest treat.

Anet seems to have reached that tipping point somewhere in between GW and GW2 with an integrated accelerator it seems.

To be fair, I probably should swap Anet with NCsoft.

Basically the same thing can be read at the Glassdoor page of ArenaNet too, which is what makes me so indifferent.

I’ve never seen a company come out of this. The world is changing. Customers are more self-aware, the smoke screens are becoming smaller and smaller relative to the size of the internet. There isn’t really enough money out there to lie so effectively anymore. For a while, maybe, but its becoming increasingly inefficient. Maybe that’s why a lot of companies just don’t care anymore and just want to grab as much money as they can while they still can. Nobody actually wants to provide a service anymore. It’s too much of a hassle.

I read lately a quote from somewhere, I don’t know what it was. It was that the first company which comes out and starts behaving like a normal person will become incredibly rich and well received.

Customers are growing tired of BS.
They see the BS better, and that sight isn’t going anywhere. And their mouths are not as open yet as they could be, but their wallets are closing sooner.

The first person who realizes that and gambles on honesty becomes incredibly rich.

First dev who comes here and says “You know what? You are right. Here’s what’s going on in the company now:” and lay out everything will be revered by the community and everyone will fight for him. The gamer community would kickstarter fund a guy like that up to buying up the entire company. And that’s probably not even a joke.

zenleto.6179:

OP, I don’t know who you are and I don’t care what your reasons are. If you don’t like the game then just leave, if you have better things to do then just leave. If you want to tell Anet then send them an email or write them a letter. This sort of crap is nearly as bad as gold seller spam.

And threads about gold seller spam.

Actually these “Goodbye” threads carry weight and have meaning. Though I imagine you and ArenaNet would rather sweep them under the rug and hide the fact that players are leaving the game for good reasons.

Players speaking to ArenaNet:
“You have been weighed,
You have been measured,
and you have been found wanting.”

Azhure.1857:

zenleto.6179:

OP, I don’t know who you are and I don’t care what your reasons are. If you don’t like the game then just leave, if you have better things to do then just leave. If you want to tell Anet then send them an email or write them a letter. This sort of crap is nearly as bad as gold seller spam.

And threads about gold seller spam.

Actually these “Goodbye” threads carry weight and have meaning. Though I imagine you and ArenaNet would rather sweep them under the rug and hide the fact that players are leaving the game for good reasons.

Players speaking to ArenaNet:
“You have been weighed,
You have been measured,
and you have been found wanting.”

Sadly the players lack a Chaucer to back them up.

Yargesh.4965:

cygnus.8913:

GW2 needs Steam in my opinion. After the break into the Chinese market , it’s guaranteed long-term exposure to target markets. Never underestimate the power of Steam. Anyhow, waffle over.

I a curious about what Steam would give? They would take a cut of the profit. They would slow down releases since it would need to go through steam. They would not be exposed to any bigger market than they are already exposed to. Where is there any up side to going through Steam?

I don’t know anyone who uses Steam who doesn’t use it to inform their gaming purchases (that and review sites of course). I have bought several games I otherwise would not have done via Steam sales, steam reviews, and such. I consider it the Facebook of the gaming world. At this point in GW2’s lifespan, getting fresh blood into the game is always going to be more difficult than it was when it launched. Steam, absent the niggles, is a large advertising platform as well as a delivery platform – if it didn’t provide the kind of exposure that offsets Valve’s cut, publishers wouldn’t use it. They use it because it grants mass exposure and hence generates better sales. I really think ANet should use it.

I don’t understand why some people are so hostile. I mean, sure, it’s just a game for some people but for me (and likely for OP) this is(was) THE game. Or at least GW1 was. It’s hard to say goodbye to a game you played for the last 5-10 year. It’s not the same and it never will be, and it is hard to accept that. I never could connect to any other game world than tyria, and yet nowadays I feel like we are getting nowhere. Perhaps my day for leaving the game is approaching too, but I still have some hope for the future, but when that day comes I won’t need to write everything down, because OP just did it way better than I could and for that I’m thankful. I can only hope you will find what you’re looking for elsewhere, perhaps here in the future.

chronus.1326:

Dafomen.7892:

Stevizard.4926:

Sorry guys, but any customer-centered business must care about what causes customers to quit buying (or playing) their product.

[…]

Sincerely,
Stevizard

+1

When I was working for another MMO running studio, that company was ignorant for insights light these.
They basically didnt care about what anyone said if he wasnt a high paid suit, where most of them hadnt even a clue about the product itself, but had some fancy job titles and nice boards in theirs offices with some monetization statistics on it.

Trying to explain or convince them to listen to what their customers had to say even it wasnt a lawsuit was, despite all the internal and external smoke screen PR (where most of the revenue vanished in to anyway), like talking to a brick wall.
It was really weird because to me it seemed most of them just didnt want to understand whats going on, because they would have to step ‘out of line’.
They preferred to stay in their office ‘doing their job’, watching the ship sink and grabbing on what they can get.
I dont know, but thats the impression I got. And I saw the numbers, every working day.

Well, the best description about what happened next would be….a crash landing with many casualties beginning of course on the “lower end”….poor buggers.

If a company reaches a certain size, loosing touch with the basics is its biggest treat.

Anet seems to have reached that tipping point somewhere in between GW and GW2 with an integrated accelerator it seems.

To be fair, I probably should swap Anet with NCsoft.

Basically the same thing can be read at the Glassdoor page of ArenaNet too, which is what makes me so indifferent.

I’ve never seen a company come out of this. The world is changing. Customers are more self-aware, the smoke screens are becoming smaller and smaller relative to the size of the internet. There isn’t really enough money out there to lie so effectively anymore. For a while, maybe, but its becoming increasingly inefficient. Maybe that’s why a lot of companies just don’t care anymore and just want to grab as much money as they can while they still can. Nobody actually wants to provide a service anymore. It’s too much of a hassle.

I read lately a quote from somewhere, I don’t know what it was. It was that the first company which comes out and starts behaving like a normal person will become incredibly rich and well received.

Customers are growing tired of BS.
They see the BS better, and that sight isn’t going anywhere. And their mouths are not as open yet as they could be, but their wallets are closing sooner.

The first person who realizes that and gambles on honesty becomes incredibly rich.

First dev who comes here and says “You know what? You are right. Here’s what’s going on in the company now:” and lay out everything will be revered by the community and everyone will fight for him. The gamer community would kickstarter fund a guy like that up to buying up the entire company. And that’s probably not even a joke.

First of all. I don’t know what’s happening inside ANet, but you’re talking about GlassDoor. That site is to be taken with a huge grain of salt. I go read stuff on there about the company I work for sometimes, and it’s just hilarious.

Kickstarter? Buying up an entire company? To buy up companies like ArenaNet, even if you could grab them off NCSoft, would take tens of millions, if not hundreds.

That dev would lose his job for a start. No one will do that unless they plan to quit the company, and even if they quit, burning bridges in the games industry is not a wise choice. In other words, no one will do that.

And what do you mean behaving like a normal person? Do I tell you everything about myself? Do you know everything about all your friends? No, you don’t.

What do they gain by telling you if something is wrong? Let;s say Chris one day goes on the forums and says ‘Guys, we’re screwed. Financial guys form NCSoft is in the office glaring at us all day, development plans are in a mess, we really don’t know what to do anymore and frankly, I think the game’s gonna shut down very soon.’

What has he accomplished? He would simply make most players quit and destroy any hopes in saving the game if it was like that.

You heard of what happened in the background of LA Noir? That was a class-A mess, but the game was a success. If they told you about all that stuff that we know about it now, a lot of people would not have bought the game.

The bottom line is, information is a dangerous thing, you don;t just give it away.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

I read your complaint that they havent “added” to professions and stopped reading. One of the chief problems with GW1 was that they continually added skills, it was a balancing nightmare and they were doing MASSIVE balance patches 5 years into the game.

That is solely because guild wars 1 had a system where it was completely free to choose the skills and you could even multiclass.

GW2 is a lot more straightforward to balance since devs can easily test all weapon combinations of a class.

CureForLiving.5360:

Devata.6589:

lordkrall.7241:

Can I have your stuff?

Why You don’t like the game enough to play (sorry, grind gold to buy) the stuff for yourself?

Well in my case it’s just that if I were to get his stuff I’d have even more stuff to have fun with.
So can I have some?

‘Playing’ to get the stuff is supposed to be the fun part.

So in a way everybody who is asking for OP’s stuff is agreeing with him.

Whenever I see a thread like this, I think of a child desperately trying to get their parent’s attention by threatening to withdraw their love. It’s narcissistic, it’s indulgent. It’s boring. Every MMO in existence has a flood of these threads. GW1 certainly had them. At first I found them baffling. Now they’re just sad.

Of course there are problems with GW2. There are places it can be expanded or changed for the better. The forums are an appropriate place to have them brought to light, talked about and debated. But by framing it like this, as a spoiled rant threatening to leave unless someone listens to you, is the height of arrogance and self-absorption. And we’ve all seen many people who make these pronouncements in a month’s time still posting on the forums and still playing the game. Honestly I don’t think the OP’s intention is to improve the game but to indulge in their need to be recognized and heard. There are more constructive and less annoying ways to do that.

Yoh.8469:

It’s the responsible thing to do I think, since most players that leave simple go silent without saying anything. So take this for what little it’s worth.

I left over a month ago. I saw the whole world, and the only thing that kept me playing was making all the professions. I’m not big on skins, dies and all the shiny stuff. Long story short is its not fun to level alts anymore. So I check back every week or so to see if anything has changed to make it fun again.

funkylovemonkey.3097:

Whenever I see a thread like this, I think of a child desperately trying to get their parent’s attention by threatening to withdraw their love. It’s narcissistic, it’s indulgent. It’s boring. Every MMO in existence has a flood of these threads. GW1 certainly had them. At first I found them baffling. Now they’re just sad.

As a game developer, everytime I see one of these threads I think “someone tried to enjoy my game and had hopes for it, but he didn’t like it in the end and is letting me know why he quit. I should read what he said to get feedback and determine whether the person is really not the target audience of my game, or it was I who failed him.”

Hopefully anet is like me.

Xae Isareth.1364:

Aegis.9724:

FlamingFoxx.1305:

I read your complaint that they havent “added” to professions and stopped reading. One of the chief problems with GW1 was that they continually added skills, it was a balancing nightmare and they were doing MASSIVE balance patches 5 years into the game. They aren’t going wild with additions to professions because their focus is on getting them into a good place where they don’t have huge problems.

Also, bye bye to your thread – there’s no way a mod isn’t going to lock/delete this.

TBH, while that was alot of work for the devs and balance team, it was also the main reason that made me, and probably 80% of my guild stick to gw1 pvp for 5 years.

Every time new skills were added, or nerfed/buffed the whole meta shifted, cookie-cutter builds fell out of favor and new builds started to shine. Sure, there were moments of total imbalance, but those didnt last too long due to how dynamic and frequent the balancing was.

I still remember how after each patch it was like a gold rush, everyone in my guild gathering in TS to discuss how the meta would change in each of the pvp modes, and what we could do to stay one step ahead. Creativity and theorycrafting were king.

While i don’t hate gw2 skill system, i do feel it sacrificed alot of that excitement just to be more accessibile and easy to manage, for both players and devs.
The result is a more stable but stale and grey meta, where most classes have the same couple viable builds (that everyone runs) for a MUCH longer time.

For me, I think it actually might be easier to balance a game with a butt-load of skills. I havn’t played GW1 enough to know how that went but I’ve played TSW inside out, and in terms of how skill-setting works, those two seem to be in the same ball-park.

TSW was a flop, Funcom has a very small crew working on it and balance updates come once a year at best. Yet TSW’s PvP is extremely balanced and diverse and unless you’re a dungeon DPS, PvE has a lot of top-tier builds as well.

The reason behind it is that in a ‘chaotic’ and open system, there’s a lot more different possible combinations of set-ups so:

1. It’s harder to determine what are the best builds and you only need to change something slightly to trigger a domino effect and keep players guessing again.

2. There’s simply a lot more builds possible, so there are a lot of ‘overpowered’ metabuilds competing with each other instead of a few dominating everything.

3. The players have a lot more tools at their disposal to counter each and every build. With a limited and restricted system like ours, there’s a lot of builds that are simply very overpowered because there’s very little or sometimes nothing you can do to counter it.

In other words, in a very complex system, its players who set the metabuilds, not the developers, you simply need to give them the tools to do it instead of do all the work yourself.

I actually agree with this assessment. I think that keeping the number of skills (especially weapon skills) so small is one of the major things holding this game back from greatness. It’s a great form of progression (better than gear grind), and the lack of it simply leaves you without much to pursue, and too little creative freedom to really invest in your character, and by extension the game. And the tradeoff is…. maybe slightly better balance. Slightly.

It isn’t worth it. Balance will never be perfect. Never. So get over it and give us lots of fun and engaging forms of horizontal progression and lots of toys we can experiment with. This had a lot to do with GW1’s popularity and success.