Guild Wars 2

ozma.3498:

If you separate small features into separate list items, sure, they’ve added “more”. That’s kind of like saying an author who wrote two 100-page books has written more prose than another author who wrote a 500 page book.

Let’s face it – the second list is where all the exciting stuff and the bulk of the actual content is. If you pick a random item from the first list and compare it with a random item from the second list, virtually none of them can compare.

Getting a new item from salvaging greens vs. a precursor scavenger hunt? Slapping a bit of gold onto dungeon end rewards vs. fully revamped fractals and dungeons? Getting a loot bag from champions vs. all crafting professions at 500? Increased way to earn skill points (i.e. double-clicking a scroll…) vs. a full set of new legendary weapons?

I didn’t deny that they’ve added quite a bit of stuff from the blog post. My point is that they routinely get carried away over-hyping stuff, and then fail to deliver because they weren’t realistic about what could be done. I’d much rather they took a Blizzard style approach, where you know exactly what you’re getting. (In Blizzard’s case, ridiculously polished content at a painfully slow rate – but hey, at least they don’t pretend it’s going to delivered quickly.)

Uh, they both have elements of big and small. FotM revamp (big) is now on 11/26 while Wintersday is 12/10. All crafting to 500 fits into ascended armor. Both of which aren’t big. The only ones that would take time that they have missed are new pvp maps, new legendaries, new fractals (next patch), and possibly the way to acquire precursors.

Celestina.2894:

Mash Hog.5672:

People like you are the reason that companies like ANet cannot be transparent about what they’d like to do.

On one end people are yelling at them to tell them their future plans. On the other hand there are people like you QQing about not meeting the standards that they set for themselves EVEN THOUGH they had stated that these timelines are not set in stone.

It seems like ANet has made great strides over the course of this year and has met most of their benchmarks. They still have 2 months to come to terms with even more of them and my faith in the ANet team is strong.

There’s a great article that relates to this, basically saying the fans are the game industry’s worst enemies I think is what it’s point was. Don’t remember where I saw it though.

To be honest, the reason I make these kind of posts is because I like GW2 and I like ArenaNet, and I want to help them make the game better and sometimes the best way to do that is to point out the things they’re doing that are hurting their player-base and severing the trust the average player has in the company rather than just keeping quiet and hoping they notice this stuff themselves.

With other games (like Rift, or SWTOR) I couldn’t care less about the game, so despite the massive amount of serious issues both those games have, I never made a single post criticizing them, because I figured they didn’t even deserve that.

GW2 is a game with a huge amount of potential. The art style is second to none, it’s great having an MMO with active combat, and the frequency of updates is awesome. I can also tell judging by the streams/interviews that their staff are really nice people. But so far, it’s been a rocky road – with each thing I love about GW2 has been something that severely detracts from the game. I can’t even get most of my friends who played at launch to come and try the new content in GW2 because they were so put off by their initial experience and all the issues the game has/had. They’re just not interested.

So I’m very critical of ArenaNet on the forums, while in my own time I admire the good stuff they do. Perhaps I’ll be more vocal about the good points in the game in the future, but I don’t feel that’s always the best thing for a developer to hear.

If ArenaNet were in regular contact with the community, it would be different. If you look at WoW’s official forums, the devs are constantly speaking with players. If you look at the GW2 suggestions forum, for example, you’ll basically find zero instances of ArenaNet staff talking about the suggestions people make, though I guess that’s what this “Collaborative Development” project is all about.

chemiclord.3978:

And here is why Arena.net has gotten into the practice of lumping everything they say with a million qualifiers rather than “straight talk.”

The idea isn’t for ANet to stop promising anything, or to apply qualifiers to everything they say … the idea is for ANet to follow through and actually deliver what they project. If I’m a company and one of my suppliers decides that their solution to poor delivery is to stop promising me anything, they stop getting my business.

Same thing happens if you buy a plane ticket, the plane is late, and rather than try to offer an estimated departure time the airline simply tells you nothing because they don’t want to be wrong. A few repeats of that and you stop flying that airline.

The problem isn’t one of unrealistic expectations, it’s one of unfulfilled projections. And please don’t drag out that tired excuse about software development being difficult and unpredictable. It’s only difficult and unpredictable if you didn’t initially establish the proper core structure and/or aren’t very good at what you do. EVERY reputable software company has deliverables and a time frame for executing them … ANet should be no different.

Xae Isareth.1364:

Protoavis.9107:

Vayne.8563:

snipped because message was too long to post.

I dunno, I’m developer by trade (ecomm rather than gaming, banks before that…you have bugs in either of those and someone’s likely to get fired due to money issues and legal issues, have been involved in 13 of the top 30 grossing ecomm sites in my country) and the project/account managers don’t tell the client’s any dates or estimates until it’s guaranteed to be out by that time (often this involves breaking down big tasks into tiny tasks by someone very familiar with the system), as dev’s we don’t tell the project/account managers estimates or dates until we can guarantee it’ll be out by that time…because if we did and continually failed to deliver it would be what the company is known for and that’s a reputation you don’t lose, clients don’t ever forget and they will talk like crazy with anyone that will listen.

Microsoft get away with it because effectively they have a monopoly, OS and Linux don’t and won’t ever hold a big enough share of the market for MS to worry about quality because they know people are going to buy it (kind of like apple knowing people are just going to buy iphone’s…even though very little changes between versions)

You missed the point though, Anet can say things, things they know will be delivered while still holding back on things they aren’t sure about yet rather than blurting out everything in one go and then ultimately failing. They could be having a continual stream of info rather than a giant info dump that ultimately they can’t deliver. At the moment, the LS updates are on a 4 month dev cycle (4 teams, each doing 1 month of content every 4 months) there’s a lot of time in there for them to know what is and isn’t going to happen INTERNALLY before releasing what is going to happen to us.

The gaming industry is different. You absolutely need to tell players when things are coming all the time because otherwise they’ll lose interest. Players want to know things are happening and that the game is going to grow. They want to know they won’t get bored of the game.

Anet was bashed constantly for making too many replies of ’we’re thinking about it’ or ’we’re working on it’.

They, still would know things are happening…reread the last paragraph, continual stream of actual deliverables rather than lofty idea after lofty idea that never come (extended experience, precursor scavenger hunt, etc)

The main thing I want from the list is the new skills and traits. That is what will actually freshen the game a little bit.