Guild Wars 2

Hello, folks!

In 2012 I did some forum research into happiness in GW2. So now it is 2014… how have things changed? I sampled 30 posts in each profession sub-forum and judged the happiness of the OP on a scale of 1-5 (1 being very unhappy, 3 neutral, 5 very happy). This was done in March and May of this year. The ranking system was quite subjective and used a lot of my own discretion, so take the results with a grain of salt!

OVERALL
The overall forum happiness in March and May is 3.1: slightly happy! Although we are not flying colours here, at least the happiness is above neutral: which was not the case in 2012 (2.9 in September and December). The Profession Balance Forum was the unhappier than all the individual professions, with a happiness of 2.6.

Congratulations Engineers! You are the happiest profession in Mar2014!
RANKING (rounded to 1 dp):
1. Engineers _______________________3.5
2. Warriors & Guardians______________3.3
3. Elementalists & Thieves_____________3.1
4. Rangers, Mesmers & Necromancers____2.9
_________________Professions Overall: 3.1
5. Profession Balance ________________2.6

2014 SUCCESS STORIES
Overall, happiness on the forums have increased 23% since 2012. Either the angry ones have left, or the people still here are getting happier, or both!

Engineers are the happiest profession not only in May 2014, but also in December 2012 AND overall! The reason they scored so high was their absence of complaints, combined with many OP’s saying things like “my engineer is my favourite to play”, and “best profession in the game”. Engineers clearly take the cake in May. Congratulations Engineers!
Warriors made a huge bound to success, increasing in happiness by 46% since 2012 to take out second place equal. I can’t remember why they were so unhappy in release year, but there you go. Good on ya, Warriors.
2014 is also a much better year for Rangers, Mesmers, and Necromancers, who are all about 40% happier. If anyone remembers release year, I remember the forums at that time were flooded in a plethora of bug complaints regarding pets, clones, and minions. So it seems like that problem has at least improved.
Guardians and Engineers happiness have increased about 10%, but don’t let this deceive you because these two classes have been happy since the beginning.

NOT-SUCCESS STORIES
Thieves have increased slightly in 2014 (3%) but they were considerably happier in release year. They haven’t taken their nerfs lightly. Although I must add that most of the complaints in the thief forum are other classes complaining about them being too strong (similar case for Necromancers this month).
Elementalists are the only profession to be unhappier in 2014 than they were in 2012, having decreased 9%. The most common complaints I observed in the forum are about them feeling underpowered, i.e. being too squishy and not dealing enough damage, and feeling weak in PvP.
_Rangers, Mesmers and Necromancers are the unhappiest professions in May 2014, being the only professions to sit below the equality line. Most common complaints were regarding PvP imbalance.

PvP REQUEST: @Zuik.7158 and @Skan.5301
Here is my analysis of the sPVP and WvW sub-forums.
sPVP: 2.2
WvW: 2.9
I had lots of fun reading the sPVP forums, but they do seem rather unhappy. With a score of 2.2, this is one of the lowest scores I have EVER had over my four studies including about 100 forums. The only one that tops it is Personal Story (2.1) in September 2012, because it was not working. An interesting aside: at 2.3, even the BLTP forum was happier that sPVP, and it was completely down at the time. So there are some very unhappy sPVP’ers out there!
In fact, sPVP has had negative happiness in every study that I have run (2.7, 2.7, 2.6, 2.2).

WvW was also unhappy, but they were unhappier two months ago when they had a score of 2.5. The majority of the complaints here were concerning EoTM.

sPVP is 12% more unhappy than it was in release year. WvW is 10% more unhappy than it was in release year.

HATE POSTS
sPVP is the most hated forum, with 23% of posts expressing their rage.
In comparison, Profession Balance (which was also quite an unhappy forum) only had 10% hate posts.

LOVE POSTS
Warriors and Engineers enjoyed the most love, with 13% being love posts.
Guardians are the most undecided, and did not have any love nor any hate.

Hope you found this interesting!

TL;DR:
The forum is happier than it is in 2012. Profession Balance is rather unhappy. In May 2014, Engineers are the happiest profession. Rangers, Mesmers and Necromancers are the unhappiest. Elementalists are the only profession who is unhappier in 2014 than they were in release year.

Now do the same in the sPvP forum section.

And also do the same for the WvW forum.

And ask for deleted threads. That’ll change the outlook.

Yup. Anet took a step in right direction but they still have alot of improvements to work on.

If this was taken around Dec 10th 2013, thief happiness would have sharply dropped. No doubt about that.

there is one variable that is actually missing here.

You will not get your hand on it though.

Its simply that lots of negative post usually get deleted by mods.

But otherwise, nice job on this analysis

A) you have way to much spare time and i will talk to your boss :-)

B) Do this research on people who play role games because of their epic storys,
awesome heros and huge new continets to explore.
The regular Fantasy loving people. Prepare to add a 0 to your scale

Okay as requested I will do one for sPvP and WvW! Actually in my research in September and December 2012, I did sample THE WHOLE forum! But in the comments people only talked about the professions, haha. Taking 25 samples from about 35 forums means reading 875 posts – which I’m sure you can understand is quite a lot! But yes I will do sPvP and WvW and get back to you guys
And yes if Arenanet would give me all their deleted posts I would love to analyse that data!

….. what …. I don’t even…. forum happiness?

When I think of the GW2 Forums… the words that pop into my head are disdain, toxicity, ignored, loathing, hatred, pain, sorrow, donkey, guinea pig, torture, repetition, credit card, only pve matters, gem store is the game, no developers, no staff, no community managers, players suggestions mean squat, repetition of the same threads/ideas for over a year and nothing changes.

I think you mean ‘class happiness’. Since that is what you looked at.

The rest of the forums (bugs, spvp, wvw) are NOT a happy place. And rightly so, since they’ve been ignored in place of the gem store and pve since release.

Then there is the deleted threads and deleted posts to take into consideration, which were deleted because they didn’t positively praise the direction of the game/company.

Page 2 of bugs/sPvP/wvw contain some good threads.

We engis are pretty chill overall. It’s been known around our forums for awhile that we’re one of the most satisfied professions.

You are fishing in a fishbowl. “Hate” posts and threads are deleted. Just using common sense, if ppl were happier there would be more ppl playing right? That is not the case. If I open my guild panel, from 500 players there are 15-20 online at best.

You can also check this thread about the company’s income for 1Q 2014
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/NcSoft-earnings-1Q-14

In your analysis you said things like

“2014 is also a much better year for Rangers, Mesmers, and Necromancers, who are all about 40% happier.”

But you took 25 posts in a 5 month period (i.e: Ranger’s forum). Your sample size is too small. There are more than 30 replies just in 1 day, so 5×30×30 its more than 4500 post in that period of time but you took 25, I presume pseudo-randomly (after hate post were removed).

You can do the math to calculate the sample size needed for your analysis here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_size_determination

Another problem I see here is that you are using the arithmetic avg, and for a population with this dispersion is useless because, if a patch (April 14) is released you have a big gap in the playerbase mood.

i.e:
A person is happy if he earns more than 5 dollars/month. Then you have:
100 ppl earning 1 dollar a month and 10 ppl 100 dollars (bonus $$$ because of good performance), avg = 10 dollars month so everyone is happy? Nope, 90.9% is unhappy.

I’d like to review your research design, particularly the data collection and data analysis.

Engineers are the Master Class!

Best profession by a looooooong measure!

:D

Hello, folks,
I would have put in that disclaimer but it wouldn’t fit. So here you are:

DISCLAIMER
I know that forums aren’t a good representation of the game community as a whole, because people often use them to vent their frustrations and shout out their views, etc, etc. Much of my results ARE NOT TO BE TAKEN TOO SERIOUSLY. I try to joke around with how I write so that people get the idea that it’s not a fully fledged statistical research investigation – it’s just something that I sometimes do in my spare time

Although you have my apologies, I know sample sizes and all that jazz are important when making inferences about the population, so I should not have worded some things that way. I am aware that 30 posts are not many when there are hundreds, maybe thousands being posted every day. I could sample more, but it would take a lot of time. As it is, over my past 4 studies I have read and scored approximately 2,150 posts on the forums. Wow, I hadn’t realized it was that much. Geez, I should do something else in my spare time.

But again, I am just trying to make something that is light, interesting, and enjoyable to read.

I’ll write my method in more detail on the next post…

METHOD

Okay so I used two random number generators. The first was to generate a number between 1 and 5, which equated to the page number. The second was to generate a number between 1 and 30, which would be the post on the page.
1. I would not double-sample.
2. I would sample posts that had been recently locked (if I could open and read them), or if they were locked after I sampled them.
3. I did not sample the stickied posts at the top of page 1. If my random number generator told me to sample a post that was not there (i.e first 5 are stickies, so 25-30 do not exist) I would resample.
4. I would only sample the OP, not the comments below.

So then I would read through (or scan over) the post to get the idea of the “tone” of the thread. This was very subjective and there weren’t any hard rules, but here are some general guides that I used.
1 = these posts were people that weren’t offering anything constructive, they were obviously only there to vent. Swearing, hating on Arenanet, or things of this nature were generally 1 posts.
2 = these were people that expressed some form of annoyance. Someone who was very annoyed may be bumped from 1 – 2 (or at least a 1.5) if they offered suggestions or something like that.
3 = these were neutral, usually people just asking questions.
4 = these were people that seemed happy, using smiley faces, saying something they enjoyed, etc. Also 4’s were posts that were trying to help people, i.e. posting guides, help videos, or builds they thought people would like. Again, things were bumped around depending on other content of the post.
5 = were people openly praising their profession, thanking Arenanet, or something of that nature.

There were half marks given if I felt the post lay between two numbers. I used a lot of my own discretion, so someone else doing this analysis may have given different numbers.

So then the analysis was very simple… a table in Excel where I found and compared averages. I took averages within the columns and compared them to each other. I also took averages over time periods (March 2014 & May 2014 vs Sep 2012 and Dec 2012) and compared them. These comparisons were not using any formal statistical tests or anything, although I did do some t-tests for some of the larger differences and found some statistically significant numbers, but again… I know I don’t have enough evidence to go around saying “We have very strong evidence that Necromancers are unhappier in May 2014 than they were in March 2014!! Estimated decrease in happiness by between 0.1 and 1.2!!!” etc. That would just be silly.

Feel free to comment on my design and offer suggestions to improve, though! You can get as statistical as you want, I can handle it :P

this is.. odd
but i found the continual use of the words happy/unhappy very amusing
this game has no balance, or depth in its pvE content.. so i find it highly interesting how stable arena net’s business model can keep its customers ‘happy’
i also find it amusing that when ever someone does sampling, like some bored teacher or something, someone has to evaluate the adequacy of it

so bravo.. my unhappy elementalist and i   / applaud you

Thank you cheshirefox.7026!

Also, here is a link to my December 2012 study for anyone interested.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Forum-Happiness-Investigation-Revisited/first#post982372

It would have been interesting if you did one for 2013 as well, and all the hate threads/OP’s about Scarlet and the LS. I’d like to see how those numbers changed.

Valandil Dragonhart.2371:

It would have been interesting if you did one for 2013 as well, and all the hate threads/OP’s about Scarlet and the LS. I’d like to see how those numbers changed.

Yeah I know! I’m gutted I missed out on a whole year. But I was living in Hawaii at the time and I had rather a lot of other interesting things to do
Hopefully I can keep doing them more regularly from here on, and include the LS updates.

Karina.9871:

Elementalists are the only profession who is unhappier in 2014 than they were in release year.

No kidding. I wonder why, lol.
The only reason ele aren’t down with the ranger is cause the last patch they were thrown some candies and it feels like a kittening bday cake cause before that they were only eating bread crumbs.

To be fair, ignorant and hateful threads don’t count. If you cannot take the time, to post a well thought out yet still entirely disagreeable thread. Your post is likely not worth reading, and probably should be deleted. (Same with the whiny threads without content.)

I have posted some very highly critical threads. (Very negatively portraying things that have been done.) But none of them have been closed. Because I politely discussed just what I found terrible and improperly done. And the thread had an actual point. (I am sure if I had been a bit ruder, they would have instantly closed the thread gladly.)

You do not need to be rude and hateful to state your opinion. (Even when your opinion is in clear opposition someone elses.)

Yey! Thumbs up from me Karina.
Love it when anyone tries to bring data to the world. Almost any kind of data sample can give many interesting things to study. and your sis impressive.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

We engis are pretty chill overall. It’s been known around our forums for awhile that we’re one of the most satisfied professions.

With exception of the Hobo back-/clipping issues on back pieces/shield etc.

Thank you Karina!

You forgot to mention we engineers’ number 1 complaint is our Hobosack!

Shake my head. Necro always gets hate </3 >.>

Ashadow.6874:

To be fair, ignorant and hateful threads don’t count.

It is interesting that you think that, and I can understand why. People probably shouldn’t post negative threads with no real point or content… but in terms of my investigation those posts contain valuable information. Someone who DOES post something like that is probably the strongest candidate for a “1”. Someone like yourself who posts negative, but thoughtful posts were not given 1’s in my study: more often 2’s, or even 3’s.

SlaYer.2138:

You forgot to mention we engineers’ number 1 complaint is our Hobosack!

Haha, yes! I did read one quite humorous hobosack complaint. In comparison to some of the other classes complaints though – you engineers got off lightly!

Rangers are still in a horrible place, pets were nerfed 6/25/13, as well as our skills. Altho our F2 skill works 40-50% of the time , which is better than 10%. The pet AI has truly not been addressed and is still quite broken. It would be a good thing if Anet were to update their class descriptions, since rangers are not the archers they tout us to be, a thief or warrior is much more effective with a bow.
Mesmers were truly messed by the Feature Patch on 4/15, as well as others, such as necro. Warriors of course were not altered so much. Altho I appreciate the effort, the thousands of anti- megaserver posts in the forum would negate the happiness quotient. But, I suppose there will always be those white knights fawning over Anet to unquestionably disrupt the actual number of “happy” posts to the forums.