Guild Wars 2

Hi all & especially to Arenanet,

I really enjoy this game, in fact its now my favorite MMO of all time.

I find the mistakes of others are “Free” mistakes, because you can learn the lesson without feeling the pain of the mistake, if you choose. Or you can just make the mistake again and fall into the same trap. All comes down to making good choices.

I was reading another thread about “Core Issues with game” and it inspired me to start a thread on a collection of what causes people to leave/stop playing certain MMO’s.

I present some some game killing examples from my team over the last 11 years, hopefully GW2 can avoid:
—- Lineage (the original) – After years of heal potions being a certain way, they changed them to be on a longer cool down. Thus more deaths, thus more lost XP, thus getting 1% of XP that took about 8hrs if you didn’t die. Turned to about 40+hrs due to slow potions and more deaths. Small change to them, big change to the player. That was it for me & my team. No one really wanted to play anymore. BAM: lost 150+ players from us and thousands of others.

WOW – Great thing about this game is even those with older computer could play. At high end though was nothing but a grind. Did runs that lasted for 6-8-14 hours and players often got zero reward. Grind became elitist and unbearably boring.

LOTRO – Great game, Shire was excellently done. After Moria though, expansions came to halt. Then when they finally came out, felt like they where just a content patch verses an expansion. Then the death knoll, the LOTRO Store. With the endless, buy buy buy, at every turn in game, couldn’t escape it. Then, “this will not be buy to win”, week later, all the things my team & I worked on for months to achieve was purchasable in the store. BAM: Instant backlash with players and lost of trust, members moved on, and eventually so did I. 1000’s of players lost.

SWTOR – World building exceptional, Story so wonderfully done. Rushed to market, members felt like they where paying to beta test the game on release. Constant glitches/bugs, but we championed through it. Load times = insanely long. Tatooine would often take 6 minutes to load. Coming & going to say pvp in long loading zone, was a nightmare.

Changing zones was even worse, took 10-20 minutes to get everyone across the various zone stops to one spot. Then we could play. Missing tons of basic features like Ready check for raids, raid bugs and the terrible “Stun lock” in pvp. PVP goes like this… Start, run out, stun lock, dead, Wait in Rez for 15-30 seconds, rinse & repeat.. Spent more time in Rez then playing PVP.

Also terrible customer service, upon server merging we where unable to have our guild name. Contact CS, they said to just change it, I write them back I was unable. We where put in at the start with the game from guild launch website, guild name is important to members & myself. They sent me the exact same thing I sent them, meaning they didn’t even bother to read it!! They sent another canned response to just change it. Ugh… 100+ players quit from our team & Thousands/millions of players lost due to just poor choices, bad communication with players.

- So That brings me to:
—- GW2 – Team moved here we started with about 40 members, One of the best built games ever at launch, some small issues, but overall exceptional. Now my all time favorite MMO. As the leader you’ve made my job so easy

Examples:
1) Alts: Once a person is added to the guild. When they make an alt they just hit “Represent” and bam that alt is in the guild. Takes away endless hours of my officers & I adding alts.
2) Resource nodes: No more node stealling/fighting over nodes and all that drama it makes.
3) Events: can be done without being in group, enjoyable and great repeatablity.
4) etc… I can list a hundred more.. but you get the idea.

So what caused the bulk of my team members to stop playing? Frankly, lack of something to do. They played so much because the game is so fun, they got burned out. At lev 80, they have very little to do other then grind Dungeons, Fractals, WvW/pvp grind, that will sustain them only so long.

Then what I hoped would revitalize the the game with members; guild achievements. Yeah brilliant idea to rouse members back to game! Uh what, what the.. look at those requirements! WHOA! We can’t do anything together right now? Can’t believe it! I’m still stunned. A door of opportunity was open, poor gate choices killed it.

Months of waiting for content and we can’t do as team now? But we can do them Months from now, after grinding gold/influence, uh what? Nothing? really? Grind the same thing over & over we have been grinding for months? ugh! No not here in my favorite game! Also excludes a massive section of your player base who have small guilds.

So the simple point here is when you say your gonna add content to game, make sure there is something to do right now.

So in review:
1) When adding content: Have something to do ON patch day at all levels aka small guilds to large guilds.
2) Have clear communication with players and stick to what you say. Built trust. The feeling of indifference is number one reason for people to no longer play games or purchase from a company. At the start of game I really like your video about “Hey we read this on the forums & we added it!” What a brilliant way to show, hey we are listening & we care.
3) Also why patch mid week? So you can work the bugs out? Work them out on test server. Patch on Fridays, it draws more players to log in and play.
4) Don’t listen to people who tell you how to “Make a buck” in game. Turning your exceptional game into a player money & time leach will cause a mass exodus. People don’t mind paying for stuff in the store, but don’t throw it in their face every 2 seconds like LOTRO did.

Feel free to post your reasons your team or you to move on from games. I would be interested to know.

Best wishes,

- Lord Kismet
Leader, Ring of Destiny
http://gw2.kismetbp.com
11 years of fun & teamwork together

enjoy the pve “farming” endgame.

thats the problem.

wow had hardcore challenge with epic loot.
gw2 have facerollable farmable events and boss or scrap to salvage.

endgame will work if the gameplay is worth it. now, in pve, your hero is a farmer.

see it how you want, not every player is ok with that.
it does get boring.

Avatar.1923:

enjoy the pve “farming” endgame.

thats the problem.

wow had hardcore challenge with epic loot.
gw2 have facerollable farmable events and boss or scrap to salvage.

endgame will work if the gameplay is worth it. now, in pve, your hero is a farmer.

see it how you want, not every player is ok with that.
it does get boring.

Comparing the best of one game with the worst of another.

Try fractals and Arah. Also participate in liberating the temple of grenth when it’s up.

Vorch.2985:

Avatar.1923:

enjoy the pve “farming” endgame.

thats the problem.

wow had hardcore challenge with epic loot.
gw2 have facerollable farmable events and boss or scrap to salvage.

endgame will work if the gameplay is worth it. now, in pve, your hero is a farmer.

see it how you want, not every player is ok with that.
it does get boring.

Comparing the best of one game with the worst of another.

Try fractals and Arah. Also participate in liberating the temple of grenth when it’s up.

Not to mention… at launch WoW didn’t have much “epic” content….

Kismet.1487:

So what caused the bulk of my team members to stop playing? Frankly, lack of something to do. They played so much because the game is so fun, they got burned out. At lev 80, they have very little to do other then grind Dungeons, Fractals, WvW/pvp grind, that will sustain them only so long.

Then what I hoped would revitalize the the game with members; guild achievements. Yeah brilliant idea to rouse members back to game! Uh what, what the.. look at those requirements! WHOA! We can’t do anything together right now? Can’t believe it! I’m still stunned. A door of opportunity was open, poor gate choices killed it.

To your two points. The first being being level 80 and little to do, you mentioned quite a bit and that is pretty much all that any other game offers. There are ends, some stop after they start repeating content, some grind forever because in the least case scenario the gold # goes up forever. So people left when they hit their enough button, seems healthy to me. When I do and I will, I look back at the times I had, A. was the game worth the $60? B. How does this compare to other like games? In general for me GW2 will score high enough.

Now your second point Guild content. I agree it’s a brilliant idea to think about, you can dream up of a lot of additional content and things to do if it’s done on a Guild level. Now in your case the point of entry is too high, I am not disagreeing, but to me you can make more epic Guild content that is different from the rest if you did require a fairly large guild. I’m still in thought about the possibilities in general, I am in a micro-guild, so currently I am out of the reindeer games. But I now think about what new content could be made for Guilds only and it’s a pretty vast realm. Intrigued, maybe even to the point of selling myself to Anheuser Bush, if you get the reference.

GW2 has some great innovations, or at least areas where it deviates from the norm.

Postive:

1) Dynamic/World events are better (IMO) than Rift or WAR dynamic events. Anything can get stale after you’ve seen it a million times, but RIFT and WAR made it feel like I’d seen it all a million times after the first 10 times. Much better variety and character to the dynamic events in GW2.
2) Basic game design encourages grouping by making nodes and mob kill credit shared.
3) Combat system feels pretty fluid and active. Hardly the first MMO with a good combat system but this is a very necessary ingredient. You definitely feel it in games that lack it.
4) Balance is surprisingly good for the short time the game has been out (although you wouldn’t know it by the volume of complaints on the forums).

Negative:

1) Devs seem trapped between giving people lots of stuff to do and not having the game be the typical MMO gear treadmill. They seem to be leaning towards the more mainstream model of treadmill. Total shame since that market is already well served by World of Warcraft and its various clones. The game is becoming incredibly unrewarding for those who have alts or like to experiment with different gear types, thanks to the slow drip pace of ascended gear acquisition. It was bad enough with the way dyes were designed, but this takes it to a whole ’nother level.

2) Still trapped in a lot of unnecessary “Traditional MMO” ideas, like dedicating the majority of the game world to leveling. Level grinding isn’t fun once you have a grasp on the game’s mechanics, and this is a very inefficient way of using development resources since those areas are poorly suited for use by the majority of the player base. Devs seem satisfied to continue this poor trend by raising the level cap in future content.

3) A surprising number of bugs or half finished features which are obvious, but don’t get fixed for some apparent reason. Example: Pets/Minions/Turrets/Spirit weapons don’t have any way to avoid very common AoE damage, don’t get their owner’s Agony resistance, etc. The lesson that “pets are stupid, they stand in fire, so they must be naturally resistant to environmental damage” has been taught in every MMO that has included pets (including GW1 !), yet this seems lost on GW2 dev team. Result: Lots of players complaining and feeling sorry for themselves over an easily tackled issue.

I HATE the account wide guilds. Worst thing they could have done. Gone are the days where you could pop on an alt to play quietly or with another guild. Now if you aren’t representing the guild officers or above will message you kittening about why you are not representing the guild.

I don’t think any developer can give the players endless new things to do. The man hours that go into making the things are countered by players doing the things in minutes. A hundred people just can’t churn out constant variety for three million people.

So the players have to contribute. The best way I’ve found is RP. I don’t mean just standing around and talking in character. I mean using the world as a setting for ongoing plots and adventures. I lasted 7 years in WoW due to finding great RPers and my guild there is still going strong with elaborate storylines involving many people cross faction (I am not in the game any more but I still read guild forums).

My RP guild on Tarnished Coast likewise has a constant outflow of creativity in writing, art, even music. We use the game world, incorporating jumping puzzles and the like into our stories. Guild chat is OOC and we keep it hopping with lively banter. We pursue PVE and WvW as the whim takes us, many of us getting multiple 80’s as the characters compel us to keep playing.

And we certainly don’t gripe at people for repping another guild (though if they NEVER sign on with us we might move them to Guest status). Alts might not fit ICly in our guild.

This is something ANet’s done right. They’ve made a world and a setting that lends itself to sandbox storytelling. Sure, there’s a lot of things still to add (sitting in chairs, better color for emote text, more animated emotes, etc) but the solid basis is there for anyone that has the imagination to use it. And if you aren’t feeling the IC itch — hop in a dungeon, complete a map, level crafting, kill enemies in WvW! Or even do those things ICly because hey, why not make them part of your story?

Donari.5237:

So the players have to contribute. The best way I’ve found is RP.

I agree with part one. Why not world gathering? Have NPC’s collect stuff that we all contribute to and as we do, it builds new things into the world. These would be pre-built in Anets world but invisible to us until we contribute enough. Think of different types of things, some helpful for daily venturing, others like landmarks, statues, etc. Throw a little sand box in there.

Horrorscope.7632:

Donari.5237:

So the players have to contribute. The best way I’ve found is RP.

I agree with part one. Why not world gathering? Have NPC’s collect stuff that we all contribute to and as we do, it builds new things into the world. These would be pre-built in Anets world but invisible to us until we contribute enough. Think of different types of things, some helpful for daily venturing, others like landmarks, statues, etc. Throw a little sand box in there.

The “real” endgame in an MMO has always been player created content of whatever sort… the social aspects and community culture of the game. It doesn’t matter how many dungeons or raids or whatever a company pumps out… players will consume it… and longevity comes from the tools the company gives the players to interact with each other, rather than the newest npc to slay. Barring any tools at all.. there’s plenty of opportunity for players to create their own stories it sure is nice to have it be a collaboration with the devs though.

I believe that learning from MMO mistakes of the past comes down to simply reality-testing the outcomes of developer’s brainstorms, i.e., thinking through the likely results of any proposed course of action. It requires both experience and good judgment. Do you know the thing that got me most excited in watching the ESO promos? It was the average age of the developers. It was a group with a long, shared experience in gaming. Experience tends to increase with age and judgment matures when you’ve had a chance to experience the bitter fruit of bad judgment.

I don’t know how this translates into the cultural milieu at Anet, but what I see lacking is post-brainstorm reality-testing (evaluation skills, judgment, whatever you want to call it).

bluewanders.5297:

Horrorscope.7632:

Donari.5237:

So the players have to contribute. The best way I’ve found is RP.

I agree with part one. Why not world gathering? Have NPC’s collect stuff that we all contribute to and as we do, it builds new things into the world. These would be pre-built in Anets world but invisible to us until we contribute enough. Think of different types of things, some helpful for daily venturing, others like landmarks, statues, etc. Throw a little sand box in there.

The “real” endgame in an MMO has always been player created content of whatever sort… the social aspects and community culture of the game. It doesn’t matter how many dungeons or raids or whatever a company pumps out… players will consume it… and longevity comes from the tools the company gives the players to interact with each other, rather than the newest npc to slay. Barring any tools at all.. there’s plenty of opportunity for players to create their own stories it sure is nice to have it be a collaboration with the devs though.

I won’t argue with that, but the places I frequent, it seems there are a lot of vocal players that don’t consider your definition as really part of their end game dreams. I would say the consensus is we don’t really now what end game should be as a whole. So that is why I don’t consider, endless grind, repeating raids, revolving PvP as end game, if it were truly that, then there wouldn’t be non-stop talk in the mmo world of end game fails. We would have been satisfied. That is why some push sand box, meaning ever evolving worlds.

End game so far to me has always been, done that enough… Next!

Avatar.1923:

enjoy the pve “farming” endgame.

thats the problem.

wow had hardcore challenge with epic loot.
gw2 have facerollable farmable events and boss or scrap to salvage.

endgame will work if the gameplay is worth it. now, in pve, your hero is a farmer.

see it how you want, not every player is ok with that.
it does get boring.

In GW2 it’s the PLAYERS that are epic.

they didn’t learn about how to run stealth. this is the worst implementation of stealth in pvp i’ve ever seen.

Karizee.8076:

Avatar.1923:

enjoy the pve “farming” endgame.

thats the problem.

wow had hardcore challenge with epic loot.
gw2 have facerollable farmable events and boss or scrap to salvage.

endgame will work if the gameplay is worth it. now, in pve, your hero is a farmer.

see it how you want, not every player is ok with that.
it does get boring.

In GW2 it’s the PLAYERS that are epic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAxHQox1IJg

:/
mmmk
…