Guild Wars 2

Business normally does not do things without a decent amount of research involved. Especially when millions of dollars are involved.

I wonder what the research they did told them about the player loss/gain ratio attributed to the gear change? Unless they are completly inept, they had to know there would be some repercussions.

It would make sense to me that they imagined a pretty high number here, for them to have made these changes so quickly, without giving the original model a chance to work.

This actually brings up another question. Content takes time to plan, develop and test. The game has been out 2.5 months. I wonder just how long ago they decided to go with this tweak to thier model. The cash shop is pretty baren, just a few choices of gear skins and town clothes. It almost seems like they didn’t even try to me.

I wonder how long they had actually been planning to do this.

2million units sold, most of them weren’t GW1 fans. /thread?

Xpiher.5209:

most of them weren’t GW1 fans.

Source?

Mists of Pandaria is the last gasp for WoW. In the next year or two, it will haemorrhage players like no tomorrow as the technology behind it just becomes too outdated to be justified away.

Meanwhile, GW2 should allegedly be getting well into its lifecycle.

WoW’s mechanics are set up for pavlovian button pressing folks – who are psychologically simple to control and manipulate due to their response to simple cues and fear of change once behaviours are in place.

Any business manager worth his salt would be advising ANet to prepare a nice, welcoming, familiar environment for the MMO gerbils to hoover up these millions of simple folks as they leave WoW in ever-increasing numbers.

It’s simple logic to see there is more profit in catering to that readily-established and proven profitable market than to invest money in progressive ideas that may or may not work. If there wasn’t such a huge, clearly manipulable market then it might be worth the gamble as it could pay off bigtime. But Blizzard has brainwashed a very large number of these people into parting with cash non-stop for a very constrained treadmill experience – so it’s common sense to aim for that rather than build a new market, especially a market that may actually demand innovation and forward progression rather than recycled content.

There’s no conspiracy, there’s business choices. I’d not be surprised if the devs have a somewhat different view to other people in the company but in the long term, guaranteed $$$ tend to win out.

Xpiher.5209:

2million units sold, most of them weren’t GW1 fans. /thread?

So would it be wrong to assume you believe this was planned all along, and not a reactionary inclusion?