Guild Wars 2

I don’t know. I think this whole subject is open to interpretation.

Anet has said from day one they want a living breathing world. That was always the goal. They tried to do it with DEs and that basically failed. DEs added to the game were never talked about by players and no one really cared about them.

So Anet game up with the LS. That seemed to work for them, in spite of complaints. But most of the complaints were that it wasn’t permanent and it wasn’t repeatable. Anet listened and in season 2 they created the journal and fixed those complaints. We said we wanted account bound dyes and a wardrobe and we got account bound dyes and a player wardrobe. We said we wanted account bound WxP and we got account bound WxP.

It’s easy to forget the stuff we have gotten, because we haven’t gotten all of it. But that doesn’t mean Anet doesn’t care. Some of the stuff they’re not putting into the game because they do care. Like open world PvP. There’s been a lot of requests for it, but far more people would hate it than love it. It’s not in the game.

Anet is working on stuff too, and we have no idea what that stuff is. Some if it may be stuff we’ve asked for. But you have to admit, stuff we’ve asked for has made it into the game.

Ye I understand what you’re saying. The players for a long time have been quite against the whole living story thing, especially during season 1, yet the devs pushed with it. I think they are being too stubborn about the choices they make. Make the game the players want, not the game you want.

Im sure Anet had certain visions for the game when creating it, yet some of these sadly won’t come true because they are unrealistic and have certain problems with them that don’t sit well with the players. Temporary content is a perfect example of this. Everyone hated it, and they changed that, so thats good on their part. Yet they still take so long on so many features/content that are massively requested from the community and say “ye we’re looking into it”. Don’t just look into it, actually do it. Players want that more than anything from the living story, so put the living story on hold and give the players something they want. Guild halls for example are one of these.

SkylightMoon.2098:

Ye I understand what you’re saying. The players for a long time have been quite against the whole living story thing, especially during season 1, yet the devs pushed with it. I think they are being too stubborn about the choices they make. Make the game the players want, not the game you want.

Im sure Anet had certain visions for the game when creating it, yet some of these sadly won’t come true because they are unrealistic and have certain problems with them that don’t sit well with the players. Temporary content is a perfect example of this. Everyone hated it, and they changed that, so thats good on their part. Yet they still take so long on so many features/content that are massively requested from the community and say “ye we’re looking into it”. Don’t just look into it, actually do it. Players want that more than anything from the living story, so put the living story on hold and give the players something they want. Guild halls for example are one of these.

Everyone didn’t hate the living story, though most people did hate temporary content. I think numbers showed that the living story was quite successful, in spite of complaints. Sure seemed so with all the overflows at the Marionette and not being able to get into my home server for five days.

Vayne.8563:

SkylightMoon.2098:

Ye I understand what you’re saying. The players for a long time have been quite against the whole living story thing, especially during season 1, yet the devs pushed with it. I think they are being too stubborn about the choices they make. Make the game the players want, not the game you want.

Im sure Anet had certain visions for the game when creating it, yet some of these sadly won’t come true because they are unrealistic and have certain problems with them that don’t sit well with the players. Temporary content is a perfect example of this. Everyone hated it, and they changed that, so thats good on their part. Yet they still take so long on so many features/content that are massively requested from the community and say “ye we’re looking into it”. Don’t just look into it, actually do it. Players want that more than anything from the living story, so put the living story on hold and give the players something they want. Guild halls for example are one of these.

Everyone didn’t hate the living story, though most people did hate temporary content. I think numbers showed that the living story was quite successful, in spite of complaints. Sure seemed so with all the overflows at the Marionette and not being able to get into my home server for five days.

Not true. Pretty much everyone hated temporary content which WAS the living story. Heres why. 90% of the content created for the living story season 1 is not playable anymore, and yet the first season lasted most of guild wars 2 lifespan. Thats a terrible shame. A ton of highly requested features/content could have been added during the time if the living story was done right. Yet its not.

Polls and posts definitely showed people screaming for an expansion the entire length of the first season. Mainly because it was said that the living story can deliver expansion like content, but pretty much didn’t for most of the season(15 months).

Doing what the players want means giving them an expansion when you’ve proved you can’t do expansion like content. Thats what the post is about. Is anet still trying to make a game they envisioned, even if it doesn’t work, or are they willing to change completely and go with the players direction.

In every online game, someone (or some group) sets the design philosophy for the game. I suspect that ANet is no different.

From the position which we enjoy, it’s sometimes easy to see what that direction is, and sometimes hard. Also, it’s easy for us to get an impression of the game’s direction from what we see, but not to know the behind-the-scenes stuff that links the disparate parts together. With that kind of perspective, it’s easy to mistake our incomplete perspective for lack of direction on the part of the developer, or to develop a view of their game design philosophy that is incomplete, or wrong.

That said, what are the common threads behind the decisions being made by ANet management? What I see as clear elements in game direction are:

• Commitment to the concept of telling an ongoing story with various chapters.
• Commitment to large events in the persistent world.
• Cultivation of GW2 sPvP as an ESport.

If you’re like me, and these things are not really what you’re looking for from an MMO, or if they are, but the implementation isn’t doing it for you, then I can understand why you feel the way you do.

SkylightMoon.2098:

Ye I understand what you’re saying. The players for a long time have been quite against the whole living story thing, especially during season 1, yet the devs pushed with it. I think they are being too stubborn about the choices they make. Make the game the players want, not the game you want.

Im sure Anet had certain visions for the game when creating it, yet some of these sadly won’t come true because they are unrealistic and have certain problems with them that don’t sit well with the players. Temporary content is a perfect example of this. Everyone hated it, and they changed that, so thats good on their part. Yet they still take so long on so many features/content that are massively requested from the community and say “ye we’re looking into it”. Don’t just look into it, actually do it. Players want that more than anything from the living story, so put the living story on hold and give the players something they want. Guild halls for example are one of these.

Major course correcting takes time and thus is tricky to do . Assuming they’re not doing an expansion (which we dont know if they are or are not) now imagine the impact it would have if right after season 1 they decided to listen to the players and focus exclusively on an expansion. It would take a few months to design an expansion and about another year and 1/2 to finish it. So thats switching your game from providing new content every 2 weeks to potentially 2 years of drought with a few things sprinkled in if even! Do you think that would make people happy?

Thats considering they can match your average mmo development speed. Like it or not Gw2 isnt like your average MMO. Designing a Dynamic event which branches, has NPC scripting and animation, has NPCs activley involved in the action of that Dynamic event as well as scaling. undoubtly all that takes a lot more time to develop then your average quest which just has a static npc that does nothing more then show / speak some text with no animation / activity whatsoever. At the end of the day I doubt Arenanet have been sitting and staring at the wall. The amount of content they developed so far is all the output they can produce in this amount of time. Living story or expansion doesnt matter (provided they’re not secretly developing an expansion in the background of course) What takes other mmos 2 years to develop might take twice as long for arenanet to develop because of the added complexity to put in their game.

To OP: Remember Attributes at BETA? Or that round mini map? YEAAAAA!

I think devs made it to play alone and they keep us players giving them money for doin so

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/
In my opinion, the game took a radical shift after The Lost Shores and the 1st Wintersday, but the more i look into the wiki and the updates, it seems like GW2 was already going in this direction.

As Vayne said above, they wanted a “living, breathing world”, and that was a slogan they used all the time for GW2. There were around 100+ events all over Tyria, but they went unnoticed because they were never announced.

It’s hard to say if we were “lab rats”, because The Lost Shores was their 1st major update, and some of it was still temporary, but only certain things were temporary.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/november-2012/
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Lost_Shores

Temporary features
-A one-time weekend-long event that permanently changes the world in some places.
-Prelude content with hints and teasers to build up the game release.
-Unique minis, armor skins, town clothing, and weapon skins made for the Lost Shores event from Consortium Chests.

Everything else was permanent though.

A new PvP map: Temple of the Silent Storm
A new area: Southsun Cove, designed for level 80s.
Two new jumping puzzles.
New events.
New achievements.
A new dungeon: Fractals of the Mists, designed for level 80s.
A new set of exotic weapons: Fractal weapons.
A new enemy: the karka.
New ascended rarity and corrospending ascended equipment; with a new type of upgrade slot: Infusion.
A new PvE mechanic: agony.
New crafting resources to find and harvest – Karka Shells, Passion Fruits, and Passion Flowers – with 200 new crafting recipes, including the new Apothecary’s/Passiflora atrribute combination.
A new group of NPCs, a merchant conglomerate, called the Consortium.

After this, we got two(?) new SPvP maps, Obsidian Sanctum, EotM, Guild Missions, Belcher’s Bluff, Tequatl & Wurm events, TA: Aetherblade dungeon path, 3 new Fractals (thaumanova, molten furnace, atherblade), Jumping Puzzles, etc., and then all of Season 2 so far. Was this 2 years worth of content? I don’t know. To me, it isn’t.

They should’ve stuck with the Southsun Model, which added so many permanent things, such as new mobs, new zones, new dungeons and paths, new weapons, etc. Temporary events that shaped the story could’ve been the only things that needed to be temporary, as well as minis, skins, etc., but alas, they also made the former temporary too.

MauricioCezar.2673:

And by “Tested”, I mean that this just feels like that the general gw2 staff is just trying over a lot of different methods, and new sort of things on us, without really caring about if we wanted this.

Problem is .. there is no we

Because one we want raids, trinity, mounts, open-pvp, duelz and so on
another we don’t want that at all and maybe leave if we ever get that.

So yeah .. they have to test what works and what not, if they don’t want to copy
other generic MMOs .. and sometimes it works for me and other times it doesn’t
but i have no problems with that, as long as the game doesn’t mutates into a
generic raid-grinder or open-pvp gank festival.

I agree with you nexxe. The Lost shores release was exactly the sort of thing that I would expect from a game such gw2. I mean, the lost shores was still on the same level and concept og gw2 overall. But seens like everything else beyone that release got hardly changed.

The overall sense, is that anet put too much effort inplanning, and get with really low time to actually do something. One example is those “Feature packs”. Do you guys remember when we have a “Pack of features” every month with each release? Lost shores brought more features thatn this entire year have to bring. The 1st halloween release also has bring a lot of content (a good ammount of jumping puzzles, amd mini dungeons).

Well, that was the start, after this we got the biggest fail I’ve ever sen in gw2 : Flame And Frost. 4 Months of almost nothing but 1 end-chapter dungeon.

Also, why do they need to remove things that works well in the game? Such SAB, or the general meta events in orr of old-times, the TA path that got replaced (In order to get a new one, we need to lose another?), the water pvp combat (I know not everyone loved that, but still a large group of pvp’rs like me loved the UW combat).

MauricioCezar.2673:

Anyway, it is not only the lack of content that makes me feel uncofortable, its mostly about the overall sense that this game is no longer made by gamers, with gamers, to gamers.

- This is correct. The main focus was never in the gameplay. It would be spot on to call this game an attempt of simulation of a fantasy world.
Catapults, forts and supply camps. They’re treated like artwork or props in the world, not as gameplay elements. Nobody ever took a look at an arrow cart and said: “How could I improve the experience of using this cart?” Sure they meet the bare minimum needs of interactivity, but that’s not the reason they exist. If changes are made, the changes are in the numbers. Whatever keeps you playing. Look at the cash shop! They’re selling you more art! Fancy new town clothes for your character? Again, no gameplay element involved.

If you look at it this way it all starts to make sense.

synk.8762:

Living Story was popular for two reasons – rewards and there was nothing else to do. The longer this goes on, the more true it is. Truly interesting rewards are pretty well only found in LS or behind hard RNG (fractal skins, Teq box, Toilet, etc), and even then, you have to sort through piles of useless crap to find the interesting bits.

Similarly, I’m sure someone at Anet holds up their tablet with all the fancy piecharts that shows how well LS has done with players. The fallacy is that first, the content is completed in a couple of hours, and is easy for any semi-dedicated player to do, and second, it’s the only kittening new thing in the game. They’ve left us with the same zones, dungeons, fractals, wvw maps and pvp maps for two years, so yeah…we’ll go check out your little melodrama for two hours a week and then go back to whatever we can do to entertain ourselves.

To the OP – it’s definitely the game the Devs want. They’ve shown us again and again that this is what we’re getting, and if we don’t like it, tough luck. Now, that’s probably a mandate from management and driven by money issues. They hung their hat on LS early on, so all their development is arranged around it. Their earnings projections are built on it. Their press is created to support it. It’s not going to change, regardless of how much we’d like it to. The best we can hope for is some tweaks here and there, and maybe them throwing us a bone every now and again.

+1 – can´t say it better

Galen Grey.4709:

SkylightMoon.2098:

Ye I understand what you’re saying. The players for a long time have been quite against the whole living story thing, especially during season 1, yet the devs pushed with it. I think they are being too stubborn about the choices they make. Make the game the players want, not the game you want.

Im sure Anet had certain visions for the game when creating it, yet some of these sadly won’t come true because they are unrealistic and have certain problems with them that don’t sit well with the players. Temporary content is a perfect example of this. Everyone hated it, and they changed that, so thats good on their part. Yet they still take so long on so many features/content that are massively requested from the community and say “ye we’re looking into it”. Don’t just look into it, actually do it. Players want that more than anything from the living story, so put the living story on hold and give the players something they want. Guild halls for example are one of these.

Major course correcting takes time and thus is tricky to do . Assuming they’re not doing an expansion (which we dont know if they are or are not) now imagine the impact it would have if right after season 1 they decided to listen to the players and focus exclusively on an expansion. It would take a few months to design an expansion and about another year and 1/2 to finish it. So thats switching your game from providing new content every 2 weeks to potentially 2 years of drought with a few things sprinkled in if even! Do you think that would make people happy?

Thats considering they can match your average mmo development speed. Like it or not Gw2 isnt like your average MMO. Designing a Dynamic event which branches, has NPC scripting and animation, has NPCs activley involved in the action of that Dynamic event as well as scaling. undoubtly all that takes a lot more time to develop then your average quest which just has a static npc that does nothing more then show / speak some text with no animation / activity whatsoever. At the end of the day I doubt Arenanet have been sitting and staring at the wall. The amount of content they developed so far is all the output they can produce in this amount of time. Living story or expansion doesnt matter (provided they’re not secretly developing an expansion in the background of course) What takes other mmos 2 years to develop might take twice as long for arenanet to develop because of the added complexity to put in their game.

Actually when you consider some factors, it’s not that hard to guess they are working on an expansion of some sort.

We don’t know how many things will be released in the upcoming feature pack, but it might be weaker then the last one, from what we know right now (speculation).
If that’s true, then consider:
- how many things were released during LS1 season (including fractals, ascended armor sets etc and many more). Consider how much resources that took.
- how many (not THAT many) years it took them to develop GW2 worth of content
- how “rich” the new LS is. 1 map, few events
- check PoI series, you will find out only smaller poirtion of their team is working on the content. It looks like the environment was designed by few ppl. Then you have two or three guys for events…

My guess is they really are working on much more content as we speak. But even if that’s true, we all know it won’t be released this year.

Romek.4201:

synk.8762:

Living Story was popular for two reasons – rewards and there was nothing else to do. The longer this goes on, the more true it is. Truly interesting rewards are pretty well only found in LS or behind hard RNG (fractal skins, Teq box, Toilet, etc), and even then, you have to sort through piles of useless crap to find the interesting bits.

Similarly, I’m sure someone at Anet holds up their tablet with all the fancy piecharts that shows how well LS has done with players. The fallacy is that first, the content is completed in a couple of hours, and is easy for any semi-dedicated player to do, and second, it’s the only kittening new thing in the game. They’ve left us with the same zones, dungeons, fractals, wvw maps and pvp maps for two years, so yeah…we’ll go check out your little melodrama for two hours a week and then go back to whatever we can do to entertain ourselves.

To the OP – it’s definitely the game the Devs want. They’ve shown us again and again that this is what we’re getting, and if we don’t like it, tough luck. Now, that’s probably a mandate from management and driven by money issues. They hung their hat on LS early on, so all their development is arranged around it. Their earnings projections are built on it. Their press is created to support it. It’s not going to change, regardless of how much we’d like it to. The best we can hope for is some tweaks here and there, and maybe them throwing us a bone every now and again.

+1 – can´t say it better

Unfortunate truth that LS + gemstore will always remain the focal point in GW2…

It’s a shame because sPvP and WvW is the only endgame to many players and its so badly neglected…

So far for this upcoming feature patch, all WvW is getting is some more colors on an overpriced commander tag, 1 new trap and 1 new wvw mastery…. lol…. so that’s what we have been waiting on for the past MONTHS… thats what the WvW community gets?

Still no news on a new game mode for sPvP, its been 2 years…

Anet’s love for LS+gemstore junk has absolutely hurt the WvW/sPvP side of this game.

I didn’t bother reading any of this, just the title. And all i have to say is..who here enjoyed scarlet?

Zenith.6403:

Nobody ever took a look at an arrow cart and said: “How could I improve the experience of using this cart?”

Really? There’s essentially no chance that this is true.

Windsagio.1340:

Really? There’s essentially no chance that this is true.

- AoE goes through doors and ceilings.
- No top-down camera view for targeting while using it, but a small sliver of screen from awkward point.

Vayne.8563:

It’s easy to forget the stuff we have gotten, because we haven’t gotten all of it. But that doesn’t mean Anet doesn’t care.

Actually, I think the reason it’s easy to forget is because when Anet does something players have been asking for it often seems like a halfhearted effort and/or is rarely done quickly. We’re finally getting commander tag “improvements,” but it’s just account-bound and colors. Finally getting a solution to the asura pvp problem, but it is completely lacking options and won’t be usable in every game mode.

Plus, some of things players ask for are just fixes to glaring issues or inconsistencies that should have never made it to release. Anet already made karma, gold and pretty much everything account-bound before wvw exp. The playerbase shouldn’t have had to argue or ask for consistency in the first place.

You make it sound like most people won’t be satisfied unless they get everything they want. It’s more likely that people just want things done correctly the first time or improved more quickly. Plus, the way you put it sounds really condescending.

TLDR: The game has great potential but fails to live up to the hype and therefore our expectations, that Anet themselves impressed on us. It’s a game made for players by developers for profit. The game has some great systems, but disappointing and often frustrating negatives, such as too much focus on money making RNG and gemstore items and not enough repeatable content with a variety of activities, especially in PvP and WvW.

Now for the long version…

I can tolerate a lot of mistakes in this game, because Anet are trying new things and that, in my opinion, is a good thing. The MMORPG genre was getting stale and Anet has tried to freshen it up a bit. And to some extent they have done. And in places to an excellent standard.

The feel of the combat is the best there is at the moment (excluding poor AI and build diversity), the dynamic events idea is brilliant (though not implemented very well), the move to account bound systems is where it should be heading (there is only 1 person playing the game on my PC, me, so why should I have to do the work of 2, 3, 4 or more people just because I want to experience different professions and play styles?), and I absolutely love how PvE has very little to no contested content (how I hate to see it in new games now). Oh and I love how sPvP has everyone on equal terms and you can jump straight in at any time, without having to level up a PvE character first (it’s just a shame WvW doesn’t follow the same model).

But there are a few BIG negatives about this game that are slowly driving my enthusiasm away from GW2. My first gripe is the low player IQ Anet seems to have labelled us with. For example:

Here is the latest gemstore advert on the main page (I’ve highlighted the important part):

NPC Weapons

We’re bringing back some weapon skins that you all know and love: Marjory’s Axe and Dagger skins, Kasmeer’s Staff skin, Rox’s Quiver and Bow skins, and Braham’s Shield and Mace skins. These are back in stock for a limited time only, so unlock them for your Account Wardrobe while they last!

So let me get this straight, we are expected to believe that there is a physical limit on how many of these VIRTUAL items are available? And that if we do not buy them now they will run out?! How stupid do you think we are? Seriously, I find this kind of encouragement insulting. I am perfectly fine with the idea of items coming back into the gemstore and leaving again, so as to keep the store interface uncluttered, but please do not talk to us like we are gullible imbeciles.

The second thing I am finding hard to stomach is the gambling mindset Anet seems to be encouraging more and more. Everything is RNG now, pretty much. Take the chaos weapon skins for example (and previous BL ticket skins). You have to play the slot machine to get them. Wasting all your hard earning gold/money in the HOPES you get enough tickets. I find this tactic disgusting. Gambling may well be very profitable, but it is the most underhanded form of money making I can think of. It plays on human weakness and exploits it to the max. Offering gambling as your only source of acquisition just reeks of immoral money grabbing to me.

And the last thing that is testing my patience, like others, is the lack of repeatable permanent content at the end game. We do have a lot of end game content, but I do not feel it is very repeat friendly and most of it is PvE oriented. Anything beyond PvE just isn’t up to scratch.

sPvP desperately needs more modes, for both short games with few players and longer lasting games with larger numbers. We need more variety and the map specific mechanics simply aren’t enough. As for WvW, it gets boring very quickly because there is little impact in anything you do and it just doesn’t feel like the ongoing epic struggle most hoped it would be. There just isn’t enough variety in the competitive side of the game.

For any content to be repeatable you need variety. And no, 3-4 different activities are not enough. There is only so much I can zerg towers, take camps, supply run, and upgrade defences. Some might say there are more things to do, but when towers and camps flip so easily and frequently there seems little point doing anything else.

Continued on next post…

Though the new trick may help things a little, I do not feel it will be enough. We need substantial chances to how WvW works, from how easy or hard a tower is to take (and how long it takes) to what other beneficial activities can we do outside camps and towers. Make supply chains more vital, so people want to defend them. Give players something to do while they defend towers and reward them adequately for it. PvE has a decent selection of activities to participate in, PvP and WvW does not, and they (I thought) were supposed to be treated equally.

I am sorry for my long rant, and I do not blame anyone for not reading it all, but I had such high hopes for GW2 and it is a game that has a heap load of potential. It just saddens me to see it going to waste mostly in the name of profit. I understand Anet is a business and that profits are the bottom line, but I cannot help feel there are more player friendly ways to gain it, without it limiting how great your game can be.

Maybe my vision of what GW2 was going to be went beyond the hype. Maybe I was asking for too much. I hope Anet can repair their game and bring it up to the heights we all hoped it would reach, but a part of me feels this will never happen.

Is GW2 a game for players? Yes, it’s pay once play forever (theoretically). It’s fast paced reaction combat nicely blended with tab targeting build focused combat (though work needs to be done on the build diversity part). We no longer need to wait for healers or tanks! Hurrah!!! They have been slowly improving things as we requested (wardrobe, wallet, dyes, etc). So yes, I think the game has been built to some extent with players in mind. It would have failed within the first year if it hadn’t of been a little player focused.

That said though, it is also a game for the developers, and for the publishers. It is a game for the developers because they are trying new things. The living story is Anet’s way of creating a living breathing world. It’s not working yet in terms of player satisfaction and it is obviously a serious profit mechanism more than a happy player mechanism, but they are trying at least, which is more than some MMO developers are doing. And it is definitely a game for the publisher, because otherwise we would not have such an overwhelming and often suffocating amount of RNG and gemstore focus.

With all the above said, I will still continue to play GW2 for some time to come, but I just wanted to voice my opinions in the hopes it would make a difference and help the devs to see how some of us feel about the game they created. But then maybe I’m just an unrealistic dreamer who wants the ultimate game made by a developer that doesn’t care about profit one little bit.

I can keep dreaming can’t I?

Some of us have actually said and still say that we don’t think that the development team are mmo gamers at all honestly. It’s been said and pointed out in countless observations that some of the things they’ve done are in direct contradiction to what mmo gamers would have done because of the serious problems these experiments have brought to the table.

Like:

1. DR – an archaic form of loot restriction that has been responsible for the complete shutting down of whole gaming companies after their playerbase boycotted them.
2. DPS based open world rewards systems (instead of the more favorable more complex participation system)
3. Adding a long drawn out grind to everything.

I’ve often wondered when they called themselves gamers if it meant they liked farmville, mobile apps, and console exercise games because they are really not making decisions that typical mmo gamers would make about this title.

I’ve not seen a single decision so far that’s actually based on mmo development history at all. Most companies in the corporate world copy information on procedures done by other companies if indeed those other companies are successful with those procedures but with this game, it’s like they are making an effort to not only keep this game in perpetual beta but also to throw out all of the historical precedents for successful game design and it’s not even to start over, starting over happens before the game is launched.

I like the game I like how beautiful they made it, I love the movement, and some aspects of the potential of the combat, I like the ability to craft the way they designed the crafting was well done, but I just don’t know sometimes where their attention spans have wondered off to because some of these patches are just like way off in left field somewhere.

Zenith.6403:

Windsagio.1340:

Really? There’s essentially no chance that this is true.

- AoE goes through doors and ceilings.
- No top-down camera view for targeting while using it, but a small sliver of screen from awkward point.

Which of course doesn’t equate to ‘no thought was given to user experience.’

A lot of thought is always given to user experience, which should be pretty obvious. Bugs (maybe technical limitations) and choices that might have balance implications (the camera you don’t like) are simply different than what you said.

IndigoSundown.5419:

In every online game, someone (or some group) sets the design philosophy for the game. I suspect that ANet is no different.

From the position which we enjoy, it’s sometimes easy to see what that direction is, and sometimes hard. Also, it’s easy for us to get an impression of the game’s direction from what we see, but not to know the behind-the-scenes stuff that links the disparate parts together. With that kind of perspective, it’s easy to mistake our incomplete perspective for lack of direction on the part of the developer, or to develop a view of their game design philosophy that is incomplete, or wrong.

That said, what are the common threads behind the decisions being made by ANet management? What I see as clear elements in game direction are:

• Commitment to the concept of telling an ongoing story with various chapters.
• Commitment to large events in the persistent world.
• Cultivation of GW2 sPvP as an ESport.

If you’re like me, and these things are not really what you’re looking for from an MMO, or if they are, but the implementation isn’t doing it for you, then I can understand why you feel the way you do.

What kittenes me off is that the direction we were told in the Manifesto is not the direction the game has actually gone in.

That really rubs me the wrong way, because it’s broken promises.

Thats the point overall I think. As some more ppl said in last posts, we had a great manifesto and such a lovely halfway blogpost with a lot of good stuff that never happened.

But instead of that content, we got a lot, and a lot of unexpected things, that no one asked for, while important game aspects were left behind. I know that new things are important to game, and I love some of then. But does it really takes so much effort at the point to negate all the other aspects?

As some ppl say around, and I really believe thats the case : The actual team working on the content that we actually see in game, is only a small team of the whole Anet staff. My best hope is that really does exist something bigger behind the stages, but without any word is kinda hard to understand whats going on.

tigirius.9014:

…..
3. Adding a long drawn out grind to everything.

Above comment negates all reasonable expectation of anything else in this post. Poster has NO IDEA what grind in a MMO CAN BE. GW2 has minimal grind and it is ALL optional. NOTHING that requires any grinding is needed to complete game content.

Brother Grimm.5176:

tigirius.9014:

…..
3. Adding a long drawn out grind to everything.

Above comment negates all reasonable expectation of anything else in this post. Poster has NO IDEA what grind in a MMO CAN BE. GW2 has minimal grind and it is ALL optional. NOTHING that requires any grinding is needed to complete game content.

Yes, optional. What are players left to do then? If their main form of content updates is always optional, that leaves them with nothing to do. Re-read what i just wrote and comprehend it.

SkylightMoon.2098:

Vayne.8563:

SkylightMoon.2098:

Ye I understand what you’re saying. The players for a long time have been quite against the whole living story thing, especially during season 1, yet the devs pushed with it. I think they are being too stubborn about the choices they make. Make the game the players want, not the game you want.

Im sure Anet had certain visions for the game when creating it, yet some of these sadly won’t come true because they are unrealistic and have certain problems with them that don’t sit well with the players. Temporary content is a perfect example of this. Everyone hated it, and they changed that, so thats good on their part. Yet they still take so long on so many features/content that are massively requested from the community and say “ye we’re looking into it”. Don’t just look into it, actually do it. Players want that more than anything from the living story, so put the living story on hold and give the players something they want. Guild halls for example are one of these.

Everyone didn’t hate the living story, though most people did hate temporary content. I think numbers showed that the living story was quite successful, in spite of complaints. Sure seemed so with all the overflows at the Marionette and not being able to get into my home server for five days.

Not true. Pretty much everyone hated temporary content which WAS the living story. Heres why. 90% of the content created for the living story season 1 is not playable anymore, and yet the first season lasted most of guild wars 2 lifespan. Thats a terrible shame. A ton of highly requested features/content could have been added during the time if the living story was done right. Yet its not.

Polls and posts definitely showed people screaming for an expansion the entire length of the first season. Mainly because it was said that the living story can deliver expansion like content, but pretty much didn’t for most of the season(15 months).

Doing what the players want means giving them an expansion when you’ve proved you can’t do expansion like content. Thats what the post is about. Is anet still trying to make a game they envisioned, even if it doesn’t work, or are they willing to change completely and go with the players direction.

I didn’t hate the content at all. I know others who didn’t either. A living, breathing world is temporary – look we have Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall – each bring some temporary uniqueness to our world. So, A.Net was trying to do the same. That is what a Living World is.

I think the game is working. Could it be better, sure it could. A little love for Mesmers is ALWAYS needed. But, I think they have an interesting idea and I want to see where they take it. They have a vision, just what it is yet, is beyond me and that is the fun part. It is kind of like a car journey, you never know what is beyond the next hill.

In the end it’s

1) A business
2) It follows the creator’s vision unless it conflicts with 1.
3) Player input is welcome unless it conflicts with 1 or 2.

Yea, it’s very Asimov 3 rules but you get my point. They provide an entertainment product. It’s up to us as consumers to choose to embrace or reject it. As long as income and whatever metric they are using to determine “ratings” stay within expected limits, don’t expect major changes to conform with existing MMO tropes the game went out of it’s way to reject.

Behellagh.1468:

In the end it’s

1) A business
2) It follows the creator’s vision unless it conflicts with 1.
3) Player input is welcome unless it conflicts with 1 or 2.

Yea, it’s very Asimov 3 rules but you get my point. They provide an entertainment product. It’s up to us as consumers to choose to embrace or reject it. As long as income and whatever metric they are using to determine “ratings” stay within expected limits, don’t expect major changes to conform with existing MMO tropes the game went out of it’s way to reject.

And maybe that’s not actually a successful formula…after all, if this is all game developers (and Anet is not alone in following this), and games keep failing, then something must be wrong, right?

Here’s the rub: I have found that when developers actually make a game from a place of intense passion for gaming, people love it.

When developers make a game from the viewpoint of business – players hate it.

In the second case, developers attempt to apply psychological conditioning (Skinner boxes, casino mentality) to games to generate revenue, but very few people actually want that…they just do it to fill the time until something better (or different) comes out.

This cycle repeats over and over, year after year.

At the end of the day I think players just want a gigantic world, one that’s bigger than they could explore in the time they have to do it.

Or, something that is as close to that as possible.

Most games don’t come close.

nexxe.7081:

Brother Grimm.5176:

tigirius.9014:

…..
3. Adding a long drawn out grind to everything.

Above comment negates all reasonable expectation of anything else in this post. Poster has NO IDEA what grind in a MMO CAN BE. GW2 has minimal grind and it is ALL optional. NOTHING that requires any grinding is needed to complete game content.

Yes, optional. What are players left to do then? If their main form of content updates is always optional, that leaves them with nothing to do. Re-read what i just wrote and comprehend it.

Quite the opposite I would say.
For starters the main form of content update isnt grind its story. And you get a couple of hours of that every 2 weeks which is great. Grind is necessary in any MMO because its just impossible to push out content faster then people can consume so its unavoidable that people will have to repeat stuff and repeating stuff isnt really the problem either, its repeating the same things over and over again that is a problem and thats where optional grind shines.

How? well think about it, so today I am in the mood and I grind a bit great. Tomorrow I am not in the mood.. No problem go do something else you feel like for a month or two and come back to what you were doing then. Grind is optional so there is no issue in doing that.

Compare that to your typical MMO…
Got to end game now its grind A x amount of times to unlock B. Today I dont feel like repeating A well only 1 option take a break because unlike Gw2 all the content you completed so far is now expired and cant be played anymore. Fine take 2 month break, come back and now I still need to grind A x-1 times but not just that I need to grind B x amount of times because in the meantime C came out. The frastration. Take another Break. Awesome content D came out and I so want to play but guess what I need stuff I can only get from C in order to gain access to D ahhh

So really I Ask again are you sure that optional grind is what leaves you with nothing to play? cause in my opinion its preciesly the opposite. Nearly in every single MMO I played i ended up taking breaks at end game for the same reasons outlined above. In Gw2? never felt the need to take a single break. If I dont feel to do what I am doing there will always be something else I can switch over to for a while. Personally I think its brilliant!

ipan.4356:

And maybe that’s not actually a successful formula…after all, if this is all game developers (and Anet is not alone in following this), and games keep failing, then something must be wrong, right?

Here’s the rub: I have found that when developers actually make a game from a place of intense passion for gaming, people love it.

When developers make a game from the viewpoint of business – players hate it.

Games are work of art that take tremendous amount of work to develop, I dont think its possible to create a game, especially an MMO without a passion for it.

As for the business side of things thats also essential. For starters no business can start from scratch and pay the wages of some 300 employees for some 5 years without a single cent coming in not to mention all the other expenses such as rent, electricity, licenses etc.. They need investor money which automatically boosts up the need to give importance to the business side of things. Secondly people generally hate more when their beloved game closes then it focusing a little more on the business side of things. Ultimately it has to be a balance and really Gw2 doesn’t really focus that much on the business side of things.

ipan.4356:

In the second case, developers attempt to apply psychological conditioning (Skinner boxes, casino mentality) to games to generate revenue, but very few people actually want that…they just do it to fill the time until something better (or different) comes out.

This cycle repeats over and over, year after year.

At the end of the day I think players just want a gigantic world, one that’s bigger than they could explore in the time they have to do it.

Or, something that is as close to that as possible.

Most games don’t come close.

In an ideal world yes no doubt but consider this… simply coming out of divinities reach and running down through shaemoor. It will take what 10 seconds maybe? How long did it take devs to create shaemoor? You got several houses that needed to be modelled and textured. Trees, plants, props, text for the NPC characters, the tomb stones. Model and texturing for the interior of the tavern. Modelling and texturing the terrain. Placing the houses, the props inside. Weeks of work just so you can enjoy 10 seconds of game play.

Now thing about the amount of work necessary so that its not those 10 seconds that you’re covering but the 10m seconds per year a hardcore player who plays 8hrs a day spends in the game. Its just impossible.

nexxe.7081:

Brother Grimm.5176:

tigirius.9014:

…..
3. Adding a long drawn out grind to everything.

Above comment negates all reasonable expectation of anything else in this post. Poster has NO IDEA what grind in a MMO CAN BE. GW2 has minimal grind and it is ALL optional. NOTHING that requires any grinding is needed to complete game content.

Yes, optional. What are players left to do then? If their main form of content updates is always optional, that leaves them with nothing to do. Re-read what i just wrote and comprehend it.

Oh I know what grind means, just because you’re opinion is that it’s minimal doesn’t make it not a grind….it’s still a grind. You can’t deny that it’s a grind all you can do is use yet another logical fallacy to try to support your claim that so far everything they’ve been doing is perfectly fine. It’s not. And now even the major publishers about game reviews, those publishers who once held the GW2 banner high, are taking notice as well. It’s finally happened.

Maybe maybe instead of attacking people who actually care enough about the game to tell the developers what needs to happen to put the game back on track, you could be more contructive and actually join in with your own list of things the game needs improvement on as well as your own call for more communication. (Directed at Brother Grimm)

tigirius.9014:

nexxe.7081:

Brother Grimm.5176:

tigirius.9014:

…..
3. Adding a long drawn out grind to everything.

Above comment negates all reasonable expectation of anything else in this post. Poster has NO IDEA what grind in a MMO CAN BE. GW2 has minimal grind and it is ALL optional. NOTHING that requires any grinding is needed to complete game content.

Yes, optional. What are players left to do then? If their main form of content updates is always optional, that leaves them with nothing to do. Re-read what i just wrote and comprehend it.

Oh I know what grind means, just because you’re opinion is that it’s minimal doesn’t make it not a grind….it’s still a grind. You can’t deny that it’s a grind all you can do is use yet another logical fallacy to try to support your claim that so far everything they’ve been doing is perfectly fine. It’s not. And now even the major publishers about game reviews, those publishers who once held the GW2 banner high, are taking notice as well. It’s finally happened.

Maybe maybe instead of attacking people who actually care enough about the game to tell the developers what needs to happen to put the game back on track, you could be more contructive and actually join in with your own list of things the game needs improvement on as well as your own call for more communication. (Directed at Brother Grimm)

All theme park MMOs have to resort to some kind of grind, because no company makes content fast enough to satisfy the content locusts. Without the grind there’s be nothing to do, and everyone would go home. That’s why grind exists.

You buy a normal game for 30-40-50 bucks maybe. You play that normal game for 20 hours? 30?

You buy Guild wars 2 for 60 or 80 bucks and you get to play for what? At least a couple of hundred hours.

No game can provide thousands of hours of content. That’s why sand box games work for some people. Because not all the content comes from the devs. It’s why Skyrim was so popular on computer. Because of all the mods. Made by thousands of people. Wouldn’t work in an MMO though because too many people would create exploits.

So grind is introduced. You can actually enjoy this game without grinding, if you choose to do so. If you insist on having everything, you will have to grind.

If you didn’t have to grind to get everything, there would be no reason to play and most people would leave the game.

The game is working and making money because that grind exists.

Me, I don’t grind. How cool is that?

Well, I don’t quite agree about the ‘difficulty’ in creating new content – but I don’t entirely disagree, either.

What I’m saying, to the comments about how ‘hard’ it is to push out new content: this is true in principle, but I think that companies don’t do enough – in other words, I think they could actually push out more than they do – but they are constrained by marketing strategies, often strategies that fail in the long run.

Personally, I’d prefer a game where they put out a bunch of new zones (actually, I’d prefer if there weren’t any ‘zones’ to begin with, but rather a seamless world – but that’s another issue) that were partially completed (don’t need ‘heart’ quests, or DE’s, etc.) at first, and the went back and added a little every month.

I know that some people wouldn’t like this – I can already hear your arguments about ‘empty zones’, and I don’t care. I am simply expressing my own view, that I wouldn’t mind, if partially complete zones were added to the game on a monthly basis, and then more and more things were added to those zones over time (as in, they could add a DE or a dungeon or a heart quest, or whatever – slowly, over time – but release the zone itself sooner).

This I would find highly acceptable, and better than the current system.

But that’s just me.

In addition, I think it would seriously behoove Anet to start researching procedural generation – I am aware of how much work it takes to create content, and I believe that judicious use of procedural generation could take a lot of that pressure off the developers.

This is just a guess, but I would think that the first place they could do this is in something like Fractals – or perhaps a new dungeon system that is very similar.

They could use procedural generation to give us an ‘infinite dungeon’ – it wouldn’t have to be terribly complex, just have tons of different tilesets/environments, a huge selection of enemies (much larger bestiary than is currently available), it has to be soloable (scale the content to group size is ideal), and a randomized layout.

Kind of like what Diablo 3 is doing with their rifts.

This would ensure that there is always quasi-new content (as in randomized) available to ‘grind’, while they are working on more serious content, like the living story.

It would satisfy content kitten, and keep the complainers busy, buying enough time for the dev’s to put out the world and story content that they really want to do.

I think that is all it would take: an infinite randomized dungeon, with appropriate rewards (bosses should have a chance to drop exotics).

nexxe.7081:

Yes, optional. What are players left to do then? If their main form of content updates is always optional, that leaves them with nothing to do. Re-read what i just wrote and comprehend it.

Nice sideways insult there….If you have never played a game that REQUIRES you to repetitively do the same thing over and over until you EARN (either equipment or some currency, etc.) your passage to the next “Tier”, you have no idea what MANDATORY “grind” is. Anet does not have that at all… Convincing yourself that you need to do actions over and over to reach a goal you CHOSE to pursue is “grind” of your own making.

ALL MMO are going to have “grindy” aspects in them (they must to keep players in the game), but there is a difference between it being REQUIRED and OPTIONAL. Complaining that there is OPTIONAL “grind” in an MMO is like complaining that your flight to New York isn’t touching the ground.

Maybe maybe instead of attacking people who actually care enough about the game to tell the developers what needs to happen to put the game back on track, you could be more contructive and actually join in with your own list of things the game needs improvement on as well as your own call for more communication. (Directed at Brother Grimm)

I wasn’t attacking anyone, but pointing out the flaw and major exaggeration in an idea a person was posting. Sorry if it pushed your buttons but if you call what is going on around here “caring about the game”, I’d hate to see your idea of a lynching….

Of course GW2 has grind – I don’t even have all my exotics on all 8 of my characters yet, because it’s so expensive to buy them (on average, getting a full set of exotic gear, plus runes and sigils can run anywhere from 50-150 gold per character – it takes me about 2 weeks to farm 75 gold, and I often break for months at a time).

MauricioCezar.2673:

Hi all.

First of all, this is not meant to be a offensive thread, more likely a opinion and general discussion thread.

I’ve been playing gw2 since 2012 with the beta weekends and general open-betas. I really felt that it was such a incridible game meant to be a game for the players, because everything , the combat, the exploration and the feeling of liberty of game made me feel very confortable about the game.

This is mostly directed to the title of this post.

I dunno, i’m pretty sure it was the devs who created this game, not us. We had no input, it was all their doing. And for a small fee they’ve allowed us to enter their dream and vision of their world. Like it or not, it is what it is.
But ok, this was the very first concept of the game and I still love it. My concern here is what the game became after launch. Ever since the first releases, and when we started to “Experience” the living world, I’ve bee just feeling like a laboratory rat being “Tested”.

And by “Tested”, I mean that this just feels like that the general gw2 staff is just trying over a lot of different methods, and new sort of things on us, without really caring about if we wanted this. The game is hitting 2 years after launch, and have sooo few new content that I’ve been seeing ppl getting back in last week asking : “Hey, whats new around? I’ve left the game 1 month after launch.”.

What do I have to awnser to then? Sadly, not much. Anyway, it is not only the lack of content that makes me feel uncofortable, its mostly about the overall sense that this game is no longer made by gamers, with gamers, to gamers. All of the game now feel like the toy of the programmers and GD’s, testing their new stuff on us, and anoting what goes nice and what goes bad. And even with a million of common threads of things players want to see in the game, or want back in the game, things have been getting removed, or simply ignored, while stuff thatwe never asked or neither even wanted to have, are bring to the game with bright stars around almost saying : “This, is what you need and want!”. But no, this never has been what I’ve asked or even wanted.

All I see with Living story and feature packs are things that the GD’s wanted to put in and test. Not the things that the players overall wanted to see. I agree that some of the stuff is awesome, but still, its always like a test.

This is my little outburst about my feelings around of gw2 lately. By one of your veterans players, to the actual game devs of gw2.

Well that was weird, i quoted the OP with a reply and once i posted it, it only shows the original post but not my own reply. Ah well.

What i was saying, was mainly referring to the title of the OP.

I dunno. I’m pretty sure it was the devs who created this game, not us. We had no input, it was all their doing. And for a small fee, they’ve allowed us to enter their dream and their vision that was turned into gw2 universe.

Like it or not, it is what it is and yes, we can ask for them to change some things we would like to see, but ultimately, it is up them to allow us to alter their dream and their vision of this world.

You quoted your own post there, just edit out the first quote and last /quote.