Guild Wars 2

The bottom line is. Anet cares more about putting out another expansion to get $$ out of the (very small mind you) player base that will buy whatever they ship (the same people who buy every BL skin they release every two weeks) than they care about fulfilling the promises they made to their fans. they would rather have 70 people on an expansion that no one is going to buy, than have 30-40 people on one that’ll still have a playerbase to buy it when it hits shelves even if it’ll only cause a real delay of 4-5 months. the only reason their team is spread thin is because they have their priorities in the wrong place.

Cysgod.8523:

The bottom line is. Anet cares more about putting out another expansion to get $$ out of the (very small mind you) player base that will buy whatever they ship (the same people who buy every BL skin they release every two weeks) than they care about fulfilling the promises they made to their fans. they would rather have 70 people on an expansion that no one is going to buy, than have 30-40 people on one that’ll still have a playerbase to buy it when it hits shelves even if it’ll only cause a real delay of 4-5 months. the only reason their team is spread thin is because they have their priorities in the wrong place.

I would buy it. :>

MashMash.1645:

Two things:

1) Can we can have an assurance that the remaining Legendaries will not be locked behind Expansion #2.

2) Other gametypes such as raids (less players do these than do Legendary weapons) and gemstore resources (we have enough stuff in the shop!) should be scaled back / suspended until all of HoT’s promised and advertised content can be implemented, and LS3 can be done properly.

Agreed. If they say new legendaries are coming out with Expansion #2, they’re making us pay for it twice.

Holy kitten, this thread lol.

Kamara.4187:

This was a good call. The issues with the foundation of the game needs to be addressed before new content. This is what we have all been asking for and it is basic common sense that the core game needs to be right before anything else people…jump back and let them breathe. We can revisit legendaries later.

They said they’re working on LS 3 and a new expansion instead of the “Heart of Thorns” legendary weapons. That doesn’t ring “core game”/foundation to me. That’s working on the next sales drive as opposed to delivering on features used as selling points in the last expansion. They’ve already been paid for it, so they basically don’t care about holding up their end – not when they can profit on the next big thing they’ll over promise and under deliver on. Look at how many game systems are a mess: WvW, PvP, they canned dungeons, and now they’re shelving legendary weapons – which were a pretty significant driver for PvE engagement with both old and new content.

It’s also been what, 6 months since HoT launched? And we can only expect 4 total legendaries out of 16 that were promoted with the expansion. Seems like they’ve had plenty of time to breathe, not only since HoT’s launch, but since the point in time where they thought it’d be feasible to include 16 new BiS weapons with the expansion, as a selling point.

There’s a whole lot of “later” with little being done for those foundation issues, and it would seem projects are consistently being dropped by the wayside. I get that Mike is taking over and adjusting the direction development took under Colin, but there are “agreements” with players that still need to be maintained.

Having been a project manager/producer, I feel bad for the team on the legendary project. I’d be livid, were I working for Anet, if my team had been assigned to do something that they obviously couldn’t manage in a reasonable amount of time – the burden of promising too much, with too few people, in too little time. I feel bad for them, as I’m assuming they’ve been crunching to make decent progress, and fixing what had been implemented poorly — and rather than adding some extra resources to finish it faster, they opted to shelve it indefinitely, making it essentially a wasted effort.

Endless Soul.5178:

Holy kitten, this thread lol.

Right? The salt…if anything they should compensate these people by mailing every poster in this thread a vial of salt from the PvP meta.

There’s already plenty of content for living world… HoT released 4 brand new intricate and beautiful maps with each map full of achievements and events to do. There really does not need to be MORE living world progression as far as I’m concerned for at least one more year. I’m far from being bored in gw2 between all the things to do daily. Instead I agree with many of the opinions above, PLEASE work on bug fixes and perfecting your current content. After that I’d like to see all 16 new legendary weapons, and fractal backpiece and legendary armor released because that’s what many people bought HoT for, including myself.

It’s like their priorities focus around what’s profitable or not. This is how I imagine their meetings went:

Can we make money by giving players more dungeons? No? Let’s make them redundant and soak up all the gold that’s floating around from running said dungeons, that way they will have to resort to purchasing gems if they ever want to buy any of these fancy skins we’re pumping out on our store, muahahaha.

Better yet, let’s remove any future means of acquiring cool skins by actually playing the game itself and have them resort to purchasing our gem store skins, I mean if we give them legendary skins why would they want to buy our rehashed gem store weapons? So let’s remove that off the to-do list and proceed with what we decided in 2010 something something about a living breathing world, okay wait that didn’t make sense.

Long story short team we need to capitalize on all those losers that bought into our false promises and empty bottles and really go for their wallets, we did it once we can do it again I mean some of these losers paid a $100 for the expansion dev team all laugh, some who didn’t find it amusing handed in their resignation letters

The expansion move gave us a huge Christmas bonus so we’re going to rinse and repeat this model and we all get paid handsomely and won’t have to pour hearts into this game anymore we can kitten for months on end and spend our not so hard earned money. Okay guys I’m the guy in charge now and I say let’s make money!

I’d just like to see folks get everything they paid $50 to $100 for.

It’s not the fact that the legendaries are delayed/ not coming at all that is upsetting. I currently have two legendary weapons (just fined bolt a few weeks ago) and will probably make a third over the next year but I’m not planning on it now so I could care less about the delay. It’s just that the xpac news had a lot of hype that in the months leading up to October was slowly backtracked for the sake of shipping it. Now we’ve bought the xpac with the expectation that this content would be delivered in a timely fashion. To me, I’d put that at 8-12 months for the promised stuff. The big reason I purched the xpac was to get the new living world content. I figured the expac should come with 2 seasons of living world. So my question is what are the 70 people working on the next xpac working on? That shouldn’t even come out for 2 years. How are they developing content for chapter 6 of the story when chapters 4 and 5 haven’t been written yet? I understand moving more people onto the living world content. I want to play it. But those 70 people should all be working on what we were promised with this xpac, including the living world, inclusing the other 17 legendaries. Once the fires are put out then work on the next xpac. I didn’t hesitate with the last xpac and didn’t hesitate to buy gems because I was getting a lot of fun from one low price I paid years ago. Now It starting to feel like a money grab and I’m beginning to feel scammed. I mean how can you be working on your next xpac when the one we caught isn’t finished yet? Delay the legendaries all you want but if I don’t see them all before the next xpac is announced you won’t be getting another dime from me. it just shows you won’t deliver on what you sell. For the record I would rather wait 4 years for another xpac and see HOT delivered I full than see an xpac next year and not get what I paid for.

cranos.5913:

Just like the angry posts about raids are never about legendary armor, right? People want their shinies, plain and simple. And honestly I don’t blame them, shinies are the GW2 endgame after all.

That’s one of the things – yes. Personally I was looking forward for a legy weapon that one of my characters would find fit to wield. But I wouldn’t get so annoyed (same as I didn’t get annoyed when some of the features like guild anthem magically disappeared) if it wouldn’t be for the fact, that they are ripping their costumers off.
Promising, promoting and literally selling their article and 5 months later canceling some of the promised features with a fake and really bad reason that they will use those developers to tackle the living world development, while they have 70 others devs working on the next expansion… I mean really. What kind of bullkitten is this?

ANY company with some kind of a plan, would first realize their original plan of the article they are already selling and getting money from.
At this rate, people simply won’t buy the next expansion until EVERYTHING promised will be in game.

Mike O Brien.4613:

“AN shipped half an expansion with HoT.” I take issue with that. etc etc

i think the counterargument to this is that the writing team made this sound like it wouldn’t be half-akittened content

You want something constructive? Take note of what people do, as in what is still fun so many years after release. The two biggest point of GW2 were zone designs (not the heart quests though) and the awesome zone events, made even better when you streamlined how the event worked with timers and all. Those two things kept most of your active players happy. You created a ton of fun zone events but you stuck them in Living Story season 1, and they were all lost, it’s a shame.

Then you changed the recipe, you made Season 2 more of a solo experience, something this game needed, so that was good.

But the one thing you forgot was what people mostly do: zone events. At peak time, nearly all servers, even those on medium pop servers manage to create overflow, how about that? And what did you do in HoT? You ruined that and created a terrible, terrible mess. You created that convulsed mess of timed events that are just unfun. Why couldn’t it be simpler like the good ol’ events? Let us experience the zones without having to grind mobs for 90 minutes to maybe, finally, unlock that last or whatever you’re looking for.

Also dungeons are pretty cool, lots of people love to do those, nice way of getting armor sets and weapons, cool skins too, what happened to those? Fractals are alright, but dungeons were more fun.

So yeah, I’d say the first step is redesigning those HoT zones, make them feel like home, like GW2, like places you can actually go through, with awesome events like Shadow Behemot/Fire Elemental/etc…

Thank you for your willingness to share with us your plans.
This, together with the first AMA should revive the link between developers and players, the bond that was lost somewhere, along the way. I’m really sorry for negative reactions, most is due, I believe, this lack of communication. My opinion is, you better deliver an unpleasant truth than to create unrealistic expectations.

Mike O Brien.4613:

Ewon.5903:

Maybe not the place to ask this, but is the legendary backpack for fractals still on the table?

pachex.9723:

Have to ask Mike, but…does this also apply to legendary armor?

We’ll deliver both. This is about legendary weapons.

Mo

This is a phrase from the AMA summary:
“We designed the rewards for raids around the acquisition of Legendary Armor and have no alternate plans for getting them.”
I understand that the Legendary armor is and will be for the raiders only. Please allow me one single and simple question: It’s your last word about it?
Whatever the answer, thank you for the 3 and a half years that I spent playing GW2

So I made a poll, and it seems that most of the populace likes this decision of shifting to Living World content, they just don’t like the lack of promises being kept or the rushed content releases.

http://strawpoll.me/7187079/r

I bought this game in September to craft legendaries. I even bought LS2 so I could fill out the masteries for legendaries. Every thing I have done in this game has been about that. I feel deceived and ripped off. But you know what is more disturbing? Anet apparently thinks it is a good idea to pit one group of players (those who want more living season more quickly) against another group of players (crafters). So much for “community building”. I cannot for the life of me see any other reason to couch this in the terms that anet has. “We had to pull people off legendaries to make living season because more players want that.” So basically treating crafters like we are an unpopular afterthought when in actuality the economy fairly much exists because of us and our grind for mats to craft. And they are counting on the majority of players not giving a rat’s backside about our issues. All those lost hours of map completion for Gifts i will never use – or at least not this year, or probably next, either. Shame on you anet. Divide and conquer… shame shame shame

It’s all hype & (mostly broken) promises until it’s actually in game.

The game would also feel if it had more content if goals will actually be achievable; this is more than the fixes that will be coming in the Spring patch and this problem will not be solved. Gold needs to be devalued.

I think a more fitting poll would have been….. Do you like when Anet keeps their promises? or do you like when Anet breaks their promises?

Cronos.6532:

So I made a poll, and it seems that most of the populace likes this decision of shifting to Living World content, they just don’t like the lack of promises being kept or the rushed content releases.

http://strawpoll.me/7187079/r

Because nothing says ‘community’ like “I got mine, so up yours.” Your poll is egregiously insensitive to the hours upon hours of grind that people have already put forward for something that they have zero idea of when they will get. I even bought bank expansions to house the stuff I was collecting for amalgamated gems. Unbelievable.

Spira.4578:

cranos.5913:

Just like the angry posts about raids are never about legendary armor, right? People want their shinies, plain and simple. And honestly I don’t blame them, shinies are the GW2 endgame after all.

That’s one of the things – yes. Personally I was looking forward for a legy weapon that one of my characters would find fit to wield. But I wouldn’t get so annoyed (same as I didn’t get annoyed when some of the features like guild anthem magically disappeared) if it wouldn’t be for the fact, that they are ripping their costumers off.
Promising, promoting and literally selling their article and 5 months later canceling some of the promised features with a fake and really bad reason that they will use those developers to tackle the living world development, while they have 70 others devs working on the next expansion… I mean really. What kind of bullkitten is this?

ANY company with some kind of a plan, would first realize their original plan of the article they are already selling and getting money from.
At this rate, people simply won’t buy the next expansion until EVERYTHING promised will be in game.

Delayed, not cancelled. ^^

I don’t think it’s the smartest move either and I sympathize with people feeling deceived. I personally was an avid dungeoneer, so I get where people are coming from. However it’s hard to see the “people are upset about the broken promise” part when most ppl are throwing a tantrum because daddy didn’t wanna buy em a new toy.

In the end they also promised lots other things and they probably saw this as the lesser of 2 evils to delay. Tho I must say I don’t really get why they don’t drop the leggys in with the old style precursor acquisition.

Dashingsteel.3410:

I think a more fitting poll would have been….. Do you like when Anet keeps their promises? or do you like when Anet breaks their promises?

A fitting poll would be “How would you feel if the part of the game you like was put indefinitely on hold to give other players what they wanted EARLY”

islarose.7356:

Kamara.4187:

This was a good call. The issues with the foundation of the game needs to be addressed before new content. This is what we have all been asking for and it is basic common sense that the core game needs to be right before anything else people…jump back and let them breathe. We can revisit legendaries later.

They said they’re working on LS 3 and a new expansion instead of the “Heart of Thorns” legendary weapons. That doesn’t ring “core game”/foundation to me. That’s working on the next sales drive as opposed to delivering on features used as selling points in the last expansion. They’ve already been paid for it, so they basically don’t care about holding up their end – not when they can profit on the next big thing they’ll over promise and under deliver on. Look at how many game systems are a mess: WvW, PvP, they canned dungeons, and now they’re shelving legendary weapons – which were a pretty significant driver for PvE engagement with both old and new content.

It’s also been what, 6 months since HoT launched? And we can only expect 4 total legendaries out of 16 that were promoted with the expansion. Seems like they’ve had plenty of time to breathe, not only since HoT’s launch, but since the point in time where they thought it’d be feasible to include 16 new BiS weapons with the expansion, as a selling point.

There’s a whole lot of “later” with little being done for those foundation issues, and it would seem projects are consistently being dropped by the wayside. I get that Mike is taking over and adjusting the direction development took under Colin, but there are “agreements” with players that still need to be maintained.

Having been a project manager/producer, I feel bad for the team on the legendary project. I’d be livid, were I working for Anet, if my team had been assigned to do something that they obviously couldn’t manage in a reasonable amount of time – the burden of promising too much, with too few people, in too little time. I feel bad for them, as I’m assuming they’ve been crunching to make decent progress, and fixing what had been implemented poorly — and rather than adding some extra resources to finish it faster, they opted to shelve it indefinitely, making it essentially a wasted effort.

I get what you are saying, and yes they will need to produce the legendaries promised “before the next expansion” but I understand also that the game community was starting to crack over unaddressed issues, and if it was to be neglected much longer they were not going to have a community to develop for.

If you’ve been a project manager then you know that many developers are contracted to do certain work while some developers remain company side? I believe M.O. is moving the resources that “he is able to move” while leaving those he can’t move to continue working on what they have been contracted to do.

Yes I could be wrong, but if I was in his shoes that is exactly what I would do for the over-all health of the game and community, then I’d return the team back to finish the legendaries once the core issues were addressed that was causing the game to bleed out player interest in key areas of the game.

Actually, a fitting poll would’ve been -

Do you like not getting everything you paid for?

Elku.6429:

You want something constructive? Take note of what people do, as in what is still fun so many years after release. The two biggest point of GW2 were zone designs (not the heart quests though) and the awesome zone events, made even better when you streamlined how the event worked with timers and all. Those two things kept most of your active players happy. You created a ton of fun zone events but you stuck them in Living Story season 1, and they were all lost, it’s a shame.

Then you changed the recipe, you made Season 2 more of a solo experience, something this game needed, so that was good.

But the one thing you forgot was what people mostly do: zone events. At peak time, nearly all servers, even those on medium pop servers manage to create overflow, how about that? And what did you do in HoT? You ruined that and created a terrible, terrible mess. You created that convulsed mess of timed events that are just unfun. Why couldn’t it be simpler like the good ol’ events? Let us experience the zones without having to grind mobs for 90 minutes to maybe, finally, unlock that last or whatever you’re looking for.

Also dungeons are pretty cool, lots of people love to do those, nice way of getting armor sets and weapons, cool skins too, what happened to those? Fractals are alright, but dungeons were more fun.

So yeah, I’d say the first step is redesigning those HoT zones, make them feel like home, like GW2, like places you can actually go through, with awesome events like Shadow Behemot/Fire Elemental/etc…

I wouldn’t go as far to say those events are “awesome”….

But really, I don’t know (or do if it deals with trying to stop being from completing stuff too fast and slow income) why they strayed from the Silverwaste’s concept of map events.

It felt fun to me. While the attacks on the forts were on a timer, upgrading and defending meant that you achieve the major event sooner. Which, was great! The players worked together better to proc the event. And if you didn’t work well together, then it progressed slowly or not at all.

Basically, the players were more in control, and I liked it

Mike O Brien.4613:

I strongly believe that we will in fact entertain you. We’re a team of people who love the game that you love, and are working on things we’re confident you’ll love. But I’m not here to convince you of that, and I wouldn’t expect you to take my word for it. You can make that judgment in April, and each subsequent time we ship. I will work to make you happy, and I’ll do it by making you happy with what we ship, not with what we promise to ship.

Mo

If it’s anything like LS2, I can tell you now the answer is “no”. Legendary weapons were what kept me playing over the last year – a goal, a purpose, a reason to keep playing events in zones both old and new.

I’ve been playing another game that recently launched (BDO is taking over my life) but I’d half expected I could manage both games. At this point, I’m ready to write off GW2. Check my gemstore history – I’ve been invested for a decent amount of time, and no small amount of cash. I don’t regularly complain on the forums. But, unless you overhauled the LS system, and fought John Smith over reward structure, it’s not going to pay off – legendary weapons offered more longevity. At the very least, add them in the same way as the old legendaries – RNG precursor, craft at the forge. You can add the collections later.

This was one of your HoT selling points, something often requested and much awaited by a portion of your community (legendary weapon holders are not a minority), and there are players who have built up collections with the intention of crafting a HoT legendary. Especially those of us who are stuck with lackluster/undesirable options (Howler, Meteorlogicus, Minstrel, etc.).

cranos.5913:

Spira.4578:

cranos.5913:

Just like the angry posts about raids are never about legendary armor, right? People want their shinies, plain and simple. And honestly I don’t blame them, shinies are the GW2 endgame after all.

That’s one of the things – yes. Personally I was looking forward for a legy weapon that one of my characters would find fit to wield. But I wouldn’t get so annoyed (same as I didn’t get annoyed when some of the features like guild anthem magically disappeared) if it wouldn’t be for the fact, that they are ripping their costumers off.
Promising, promoting and literally selling their article and 5 months later canceling some of the promised features with a fake and really bad reason that they will use those developers to tackle the living world development, while they have 70 others devs working on the next expansion… I mean really. What kind of bullkitten is this?

ANY company with some kind of a plan, would first realize their original plan of the article they are already selling and getting money from.
At this rate, people simply won’t buy the next expansion until EVERYTHING promised will be in game.

Delayed, not cancelled. ^^

I don’t think it’s the smartest move either and I sympathize with people feeling deceived. I personally was an avid dungeoneer, so I get where people are coming from. However it’s hard to see the “people are upset about the broken promise” part when most ppl are throwing a tantrum because daddy didn’t wanna buy em a new toy.

In the end they also promised lots other things and they probably saw this as the lesser of 2 evils to delay. Tho I must say I don’t really get why they don’t drop the leggys in with the old style precursor acquisition.

Well Delayed in ANETs language pretty much means canceled. Remember the precursor crafting in 2013? We only needed 2 years and a bought expansion to get it.

At the same time, the main issue here is that they were promoting so many features which are now being delayed or canceled, while the devs were redistributed to work on other aspects of the game. They have 70 devs working on a new expac.. while their current one has unfinished features and content.

Anka.5086:

And yes, most GW2 players are in the same group as me not bothered by legendary weapons.

And you know this how? Have you taken a sample group to poll? Do you have access to metrics? Because Legendary weapons are pretty common, and that’s not including the people still working toward acquiring one (or more). Thus, one would have to assume with all the people that have them, that the “majority” don’t consider them a waste of effort/resources.

To all the people happy this is a transparent answer, is it really? We don’t know by how much this will speed LW, what this means for the other legendaries (armor and backpacks), what made the legendaries so hard to develop, or what requirements need to be met to start development on these back up again. Too much complaining is bad and it devalues actual criticism. Giving them a reason to not give us the full story with these things is even worse. And all these complaints are entirely reasonable too! This is the only forum post I’ve seen where the complaints were all reasonable. Every. Single. One. (out of several pages I’ve read so far, I’ll edit this if I find something) kitten , you’ve got a forum leader of raids, fractals, and dungeons condemning this choice. If they wanted to be transparent, they would’ve told us a lot more, and would have retro-actively gone back to things that are in limbo.

Serophous.9085:

Elku.6429:

You want something constructive? Take note of what people do, as in what is still fun so many years after release. The two biggest point of GW2 were zone designs (not the heart quests though) and the awesome zone events, made even better when you streamlined how the event worked with timers and all. Those two things kept most of your active players happy. You created a ton of fun zone events but you stuck them in Living Story season 1, and they were all lost, it’s a shame.

Then you changed the recipe, you made Season 2 more of a solo experience, something this game needed, so that was good.

But the one thing you forgot was what people mostly do: zone events. At peak time, nearly all servers, even those on medium pop servers manage to create overflow, how about that? And what did you do in HoT? You ruined that and created a terrible, terrible mess. You created that convulsed mess of timed events that are just unfun. Why couldn’t it be simpler like the good ol’ events? Let us experience the zones without having to grind mobs for 90 minutes to maybe, finally, unlock that last or whatever you’re looking for.

Also dungeons are pretty cool, lots of people love to do those, nice way of getting armor sets and weapons, cool skins too, what happened to those? Fractals are alright, but dungeons were more fun.

So yeah, I’d say the first step is redesigning those HoT zones, make them feel like home, like GW2, like places you can actually go through, with awesome events like Shadow Behemot/Fire Elemental/etc…

I wouldn’t go as far to say those events are “awesome”….

But really, I don’t know (or do if it deals with trying to stop being from completing stuff too fast and slow income) why they strayed from the Silverwaste’s concept of map events.

It felt fun to me. While the attacks on the forts were on a timer, upgrading and defending meant that you achieve the major event sooner. Which, was great! The players worked together better to proc the event. And if you didn’t work well together, then it progressed slowly or not at all.

Basically, the players were more in control, and I liked it

Here’s my two cents on why Silverwaste types are not particularly attractive. First, if it’s nowhere near peak time, those events are almost impossible. That’s about 75% of the day. So if you work weekends, and you decide to have a gaming day, well, you’re not playing Silverwaste. Meanwhile, at anytime of the day, since only one by zone event is going on at a time, you’ll have tons of people to play with.

I don’t think I’ve ever completed the SW even once, due to my schedule ( I work night shift). I know we got to the plant once, but everybody wiped within 2 minutes.

And the zone events were fun, it’s just that they haven’t added anything new since release other than the big crab, so it does get a bit dull when you’ve run the same thing for years on end. That’s why we need new ones.

Even if I understand why they made this decision, it perfectly shows how much Anet can be trusted about what they are promising and promoting.

I’ve not read through the entire thread yet, but I wanted to stop for a minute and recognize that this was posted on the GW2 forums. I’ve been a huge criticizer of stuff not being posted here, and I did want to stop, and give credit where credit was due.

Thank you, Mr. O’Brien, for posting this here. I do truly appreciate that.

I’m gonna go back to reading everything, then reply more when I’m done. It’s a lot to read, so I’m sure it’ll be late, but wanted to get that thanks in.

Spira.4578:

cranos.5913:

Spira.4578:

cranos.5913:

Just like the angry posts about raids are never about legendary armor, right? People want their shinies, plain and simple. And honestly I don’t blame them, shinies are the GW2 endgame after all.

That’s one of the things – yes. Personally I was looking forward for a legy weapon that one of my characters would find fit to wield. But I wouldn’t get so annoyed (same as I didn’t get annoyed when some of the features like guild anthem magically disappeared) if it wouldn’t be for the fact, that they are ripping their costumers off.
Promising, promoting and literally selling their article and 5 months later canceling some of the promised features with a fake and really bad reason that they will use those developers to tackle the living world development, while they have 70 others devs working on the next expansion… I mean really. What kind of bullkitten is this?

ANY company with some kind of a plan, would first realize their original plan of the article they are already selling and getting money from.
At this rate, people simply won’t buy the next expansion until EVERYTHING promised will be in game.

Delayed, not cancelled. ^^

I don’t think it’s the smartest move either and I sympathize with people feeling deceived. I personally was an avid dungeoneer, so I get where people are coming from. However it’s hard to see the “people are upset about the broken promise” part when most ppl are throwing a tantrum because daddy didn’t wanna buy em a new toy.

In the end they also promised lots other things and they probably saw this as the lesser of 2 evils to delay. Tho I must say I don’t really get why they don’t drop the leggys in with the old style precursor acquisition.

Well Delayed in ANETs language pretty much means canceled. Remember the precursor crafting in 2013? We only needed 2 years and a bought expansion to get it.

At the same time, the main issue here is that they were promoting so many features which are now being delayed or canceled, while the devs were redistributed to work on other aspects of the game. They have 70 devs working on a new expac.. while their current one has unfinished features and content.

Afaik the only other delayed/cancelled thing is the fractal leaderboard which in all honesty ppl don’t give a crap about. I guess the lesson here is to not let ppl know how many ppl are working on a new xpac… :P Back to no communication it is.

I just feel that its odd he ignored the quote from their own team stating we were going to get 16 legendaries added as part of the expansion. Lets be honest… they shipped what he calls a full expansion, and now they are cutting some of that out. So they didn’t ship half an expansion… they are just cutting it down to one. He says he promises to entertain us with what they DO ship, not what they promised to ship…So why would we take his promise as any less empty than the previous promise.

I was personally not happy with many things when the expansion came out, such as the fact they lied to us about needing the core game in order to push their money-grab sales. Which then they later made the game free to play with no requirement to buy the core game. You buy HoT and you get the core as part of it. So yeah. This company leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I for one will no longer trust them. They have misled us far too much.

A company is only as good as its image…and Anet is getting rather dirty.

So I will not be buying the next expansion. They are showing us just how much we can trust them to put out what they promise it will have in it.

cranos.5913:

Spira.4578:

cranos.5913:

Spira.4578:

cranos.5913:

Just like the angry posts about raids are never about legendary armor, right? People want their shinies, plain and simple. And honestly I don’t blame them, shinies are the GW2 endgame after all.

That’s one of the things – yes. Personally I was looking forward for a legy weapon that one of my characters would find fit to wield. But I wouldn’t get so annoyed (same as I didn’t get annoyed when some of the features like guild anthem magically disappeared) if it wouldn’t be for the fact, that they are ripping their costumers off.
Promising, promoting and literally selling their article and 5 months later canceling some of the promised features with a fake and really bad reason that they will use those developers to tackle the living world development, while they have 70 others devs working on the next expansion… I mean really. What kind of bullkitten is this?

ANY company with some kind of a plan, would first realize their original plan of the article they are already selling and getting money from.
At this rate, people simply won’t buy the next expansion until EVERYTHING promised will be in game.

Delayed, not cancelled. ^^

I don’t think it’s the smartest move either and I sympathize with people feeling deceived. I personally was an avid dungeoneer, so I get where people are coming from. However it’s hard to see the “people are upset about the broken promise” part when most ppl are throwing a tantrum because daddy didn’t wanna buy em a new toy.

In the end they also promised lots other things and they probably saw this as the lesser of 2 evils to delay. Tho I must say I don’t really get why they don’t drop the leggys in with the old style precursor acquisition.

Well Delayed in ANETs language pretty much means canceled. Remember the precursor crafting in 2013? We only needed 2 years and a bought expansion to get it.

At the same time, the main issue here is that they were promoting so many features which are now being delayed or canceled, while the devs were redistributed to work on other aspects of the game. They have 70 devs working on a new expac.. while their current one has unfinished features and content.

Afaik the only other delayed/cancelled thing is the fractal leaderboard which in all honesty ppl don’t give a crap about. I guess the lesson here is to not let ppl know how many ppl are working on a new xpac… :P Back to no communication it is.

Several Masteries got cut off. Several guild and guild hall upgrades/functions got cut off (Hall music for instance – you can see the materials needed for the upgrade, but can’t purchase it anywhere. At the same time, there’s also the guild anthem, which was so well promoted, and now, well – they forgot about it – they also announced in the latest AMA that they won’t be working on those things anytime soon)

Hmm.

I just want to say, I’m not terribly choked up about the Legendary weapon thing, because I’ve found the requirements for all the released Legendaries to be higher than I really cared to bother with, so I wouldn’t likely be getting any of them any time soon regardless.

What does bother me is that they seem to be missing milestones, and this reorganization indicates that they weren’t well organized in the first place, which indicates that things which should already be out might not be out for a long time yet.

ANet’s policy of not discussing future plans, as well as statements about how they feel they have delivered on the promise of the HoT expansion, really worries me about what we’re meant to expect over the near future.

Make no mistake, I fully expect that before they ask us to pay for a new expansion, they fully deliver on the following key elements:

• At least two, ideally more, fully developed open world maps equivalent to the non-Dragon’s Stand HoT maps. They released three maps after GW2’s launch, and they originally launched with over a dozen, while HoT only gave us four. I’m not saying they need to match what GW2 launched with, but for the same asking price, they know they need to do better than the four we got.

• At least two full Living World seasons of story content, equivalent in scale and quality to Season 2 (or one of twice the size, three of 2/3 the size each, whatever).

Once those goals have been met, they can consider asking for additional money to add even more maps, elite specs, races, whatever they have in mind beyond that. If they attempt to ask for more money without meeting those goals, I think they’re going to have an uphill battle.

Sounds like a sound decision. I know it may aggravate folks but, shifting the focus to more PvE content and LW is for the best. Think about the Legendary collections themselves. Those collections are what takes so long to create, not the shiny skin itself. With new content in game it’ll give the dev’s more to use to create said Legendary collections. I think making the content, then following up with another batch of Legendaries is the best course of action.

The game is bleeding and burning out player’s who are still grinding HoT content for Masteries and Guild Hall’s. We’re starved for new content that’s light hearted and fun. Nothing too difficult and nothing with mobs that one shot. The dev’s need to turn way down their desire to troll players and make something fun.

Mike O Brien.4613:

I strongly believe that we will in fact entertain you. We’re a team of people who love the game that you love, and are working on things we’re confident you’ll love. But I’m not here to convince you of that, and I wouldn’t expect you to take my word for it. You can make that judgment in April, and each subsequent time we ship. I will work to make you happy, and I’ll do it by making you happy with what we ship, not with what we promise to ship.

Mo

Great to hear! I hope you can manage to get the best out of this situation. I hope you deliver on entertainment in HoT and not only in the next expac.

Davey.7029:

I absolutely support this. Bring us more meaningful content that we can actually play over simply item skins that are just gold sinks.
I would rather have a new dungeon or new LS event or a new Story mission then a legendary which is just a stat swapper and that’s it.
This game has loads of weapon skins as it is, I think Legendaries can wait.
We need more playable content above all.

Lol, do you consider LS2 “meaningful content” with replayability? Legendary weapons are not just skins – they are BiS weapons with selectable stats. Further, those weapons support the in-game economy for materials, and they drive players to participate in content they otherwise might overlook.

I didn’t run Silverwastes and map metas for kittens & giggles, I did it for loot to convert into gold to apply to my legendary crafting. I didn’t go out and farm every permanent rich ore node on a daily basis for fun, I did it to sell the mats for.. you guessed it, gold. I didn’t run dungeons (post-nerf) for fun for the 100th+ time, I ran them for tokens. Allowing players to set goals through content is part of the replayability. Without some sort of goal to work toward, what’s the point? The loot is garbage, LS2 is shallow and short-lived, I mean..

You’d take 1 quick and easy story mission over something that requires dozens of hours of playtime/investment?

Quality > Quantity. We already have a ton of existing content, there’s just no reason to play it beyond collections/legendary weapons. Adding a new Maguuma map isn’t going to revolutionize anything, in less than a month people will be back to complaining about having nothing to do. Legendary weapons at least supported replayability and longevity of the content.

Siobhan.5273:

I’ve not read through the entire thread yet, but I wanted to stop for a minute and recognize that this was posted on the GW2 forums. I’ve been a huge criticizer of stuff not being posted here, and I did want to stop, and give credit where credit was due.

Thank you, Mr. O’Brien, for posting this here. I do truly appreciate that.

I’m gonna go back to reading everything, then reply more when I’m done. It’s a lot to read, so I’m sure it’ll be late, but wanted to get that thanks in.

I agree, it’s great that it was posted on the forums and not just reddit.

Spira.4578:

cranos.5913:

Spira.4578:

cranos.5913:

Spira.4578:

cranos.5913:

Just like the angry posts about raids are never about legendary armor, right? People want their shinies, plain and simple. And honestly I don’t blame them, shinies are the GW2 endgame after all.

That’s one of the things – yes. Personally I was looking forward for a legy weapon that one of my characters would find fit to wield. But I wouldn’t get so annoyed (same as I didn’t get annoyed when some of the features like guild anthem magically disappeared) if it wouldn’t be for the fact, that they are ripping their costumers off.
Promising, promoting and literally selling their article and 5 months later canceling some of the promised features with a fake and really bad reason that they will use those developers to tackle the living world development, while they have 70 others devs working on the next expansion… I mean really. What kind of bullkitten is this?

ANY company with some kind of a plan, would first realize their original plan of the article they are already selling and getting money from.
At this rate, people simply won’t buy the next expansion until EVERYTHING promised will be in game.

Delayed, not cancelled. ^^

I don’t think it’s the smartest move either and I sympathize with people feeling deceived. I personally was an avid dungeoneer, so I get where people are coming from. However it’s hard to see the “people are upset about the broken promise” part when most ppl are throwing a tantrum because daddy didn’t wanna buy em a new toy.

In the end they also promised lots other things and they probably saw this as the lesser of 2 evils to delay. Tho I must say I don’t really get why they don’t drop the leggys in with the old style precursor acquisition.

Well Delayed in ANETs language pretty much means canceled. Remember the precursor crafting in 2013? We only needed 2 years and a bought expansion to get it.

At the same time, the main issue here is that they were promoting so many features which are now being delayed or canceled, while the devs were redistributed to work on other aspects of the game. They have 70 devs working on a new expac.. while their current one has unfinished features and content.

Afaik the only other delayed/cancelled thing is the fractal leaderboard which in all honesty ppl don’t give a crap about. I guess the lesson here is to not let ppl know how many ppl are working on a new xpac… :P Back to no communication it is.

Several Masteries got cut off. Several guild and guild hall upgrades/functions got cut off (Hall music for instance – you can see the materials needed for the upgrade, but can’t purchase it anywhere. At the same time, there’s also the guild anthem, which was so well promoted, and now, well – they forgot about it – they also announced in the latest AMA that they won’t be working on those things anytime soon)

Oh rip, more game breaking things that are as important as the fractal leaderboards… I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make tho. As I said I sympathize, but let’s stay real here. The bulk of the anger is coming from ppl not getting their shinies. If it was another small thing like that stuff you’d hardly see anyone that cares, as has been the case up till now.

In the end it is what it is. MO is trying to clean up Colin’s cluttered table and sadly it hurts certain areas. Personally I’m mostly just confused as to why they don’t bring them out without the precursor crafting.

I’m disappointed myself, I think. But not with the legendary thing as much as just feeling generally disappointed in my HoT purchase. I actually really liked GW2 prior to it, and yet now I find little to appeal at this point; it’s many small things such as the design for large groups, somewhat leaning too much on verticality in the new maps, and the draught of story – among many other small things. It’s worth mentioning i joined the game during living stories, so for me that’s actually what really brought me in. A perfect game to do solo- and event-style things in.

I have always found the raid concept to be really overrated – 5 or so people are more than enough for me to get a cool dynamic, though I understand still that some enjoy large-scale things. As such I don’t have a huge gripe with the raids, and even if there is balancing to be done I also enjoy the elite specializations.

I think like many others in the thread it’s just disappointing to see the seeming lack of hours, manpower or whatever that has ended us here, considering the very substantial pricetag of the expansion – it is the priciest one I have bought for an mmo, so it was a bit of a gamble. As it stands now i don’t feel like it was warranted for me.

Anyway, here’s hoping I’ve got a cause to enjoy the game more like I used to, in the time to come.

As someone who has found the construction of six prior legendary weapons tedious, I’m very glad that you decided to go in this direction. I never found either the new collections or the construction of them to be content, but more of a side project to do in case of extreme boredom. I look forward to LS season 3.

DeWolfe.2174:

Sounds like a sound decision. I know it may aggravate folks but, shifting the focus to more PvE content and LW is for the best. Think about the Legendary collections themselves. Those collections are what takes so long to create, not the shiny skin itself. With new content in game it’ll give the dev’s more to use to create said Legendary collections. I think making the content, then following up with another batch of Legendaries is the best course of action.

The game is bleeding and burning out player’s who are still grinding HoT content for Masteries and Guild Hall’s. We’re starved for new content that’s light hearted and fun. Nothing too difficult and nothing with mobs that one shot. The dev’s need to turn way down their desire to troll players and make something fun.

What you optimists seem to miss is that we are not angry about the legendary weapons in particulat. But the fact that they are taking the devs that are working on the release of the promoted (And in our case, bought) content to work on something else, while they have 12 times the amount of developers working on the NEXT expansion. They shouldn’t even be working on the next expansion before delivering what they were promoting and selling.

Mike O Brien.4613:

Thanks for all the comments. I know there’s nothing I’m going to say that will make you feel better, but I’ll share some final thoughts for the night.

I said three weeks ago I’d focus on sustainability and quality. I want to reiterate the part about sustainability. Be angry about legendary weapons, sure, but how about the recent drought of content? That kind of thing happens when we spread ourselves too thin, and when we let the content development pipeline empty out so we can fight fires. What I think we actually owe you is sustainable, predictable, high-quality content. I’m making a decision that’s painful in the short-term so we can position ourselves to deliver that.

Akuni.8604:

Consider this… HoT currently has: 3 new maps (which are still buggy looking at DS) which are grindy as hell, Elite Specs which are heavy powercreep (pay to win in PvP…), a Story which is short but at least good (if you ignore the myriad of bugs f.e. in the Mordi battle), Guild halls, 2 Raids with 5 1/2 bosses, a new PvP map (which is quite unbalanced) and now only 4 legy weaps (3/4 being rarely used thanks to being underpowered or buggy)… That’s it?

I previously addressed the “half an expansion” thing, and I can point you to pages like this one and this one (https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2:_Heart_of_Thorns), but that doesn’t matter because it’s just arguing. My job is to entertain you, not to argue with you.

I strongly believe that we will in fact entertain you. We’re a team of people who love the game that you love, and are working on things we’re confident you’ll love. But I’m not here to convince you of that, and I wouldn’t expect you to take my word for it. You can make that judgment in April, and each subsequent time we ship. I will work to make you happy, and I’ll do it by making you happy with what we ship, not with what we promise to ship.

Mo

Then how about instead of having 70 people assigned to developing your second expansion, you assign them to finishing your current half finished expansion?

This is ridiculous, I’m never buying anything made by ArenaNet ever again, if I could get a refund for HoT, I would.

AzureBlade.2817:

Mike O Brien.4613:

Thanks for all the comments. I know there’s nothing I’m going to say that will make you feel better, but I’ll share some final thoughts for the night.

I said three weeks ago I’d focus on sustainability and quality. I want to reiterate the part about sustainability. Be angry about legendary weapons, sure, but how about the recent drought of content? That kind of thing happens when we spread ourselves too thin, and when we let the content development pipeline empty out so we can fight fires. What I think we actually owe you is sustainable, predictable, high-quality content. I’m making a decision that’s painful in the short-term so we can position ourselves to deliver that.

Akuni.8604:

Consider this… HoT currently has: 3 new maps (which are still buggy looking at DS) which are grindy as hell, Elite Specs which are heavy powercreep (pay to win in PvP…), a Story which is short but at least good (if you ignore the myriad of bugs f.e. in the Mordi battle), Guild halls, 2 Raids with 5 1/2 bosses, a new PvP map (which is quite unbalanced) and now only 4 legy weaps (3/4 being rarely used thanks to being underpowered or buggy)… That’s it?

I previously addressed the “half an expansion” thing, and I can point you to pages like this one and this one (https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2:_Heart_of_Thorns), but that doesn’t matter because it’s just arguing. My job is to entertain you, not to argue with you.

I strongly believe that we will in fact entertain you. We’re a team of people who love the game that you love, and are working on things we’re confident you’ll love. But I’m not here to convince you of that, and I wouldn’t expect you to take my word for it. You can make that judgment in April, and each subsequent time we ship. I will work to make you happy, and I’ll do it by making you happy with what we ship, not with what we promise to ship.

Mo

Then how about instead of having 70 people assigned to developing your second expansion, you assign them to finishing your current half finished expansion?

This is ridiculous, I’m never buying anything made by ArenaNet ever again, if I could get a refund for HoT, I would.

They removed my post with the website link of the laws about this matter.
You actually can demand a refund – or sue them. The law literally says that with what they just did, they made HoT, simply put, a fraid.

Hey Mike,
I bought HoT solely because of the legendary backpack (which, after almost half a year is still not available in the game!) and new legendary weapons.
Now imagine how this news makes me feel and how much trust in your company I still have.
Yeah…

Where is the report for scamming button?

ozma.3498:

Mike O Brien.4613:

Then we shipped precursor journeys for existing legendaries, and said, “We’ve been working hard on new legendary weapons, the first handful of which will be introduced in Heart of Thorns, with more to come in subsequent updates.” While I fully get that you’re disappointed today, this is not about us shipping half an expansion pack.

Actually Mike, the specific wording was:

“Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns heralds the beginning of the *first new set of legendary weapons to be added to the game since its original set of twenty included in the launch of Guild Wars 2. The first three we’ll release are a celestially themed axe called Astralaria, an experimental energy themed pistol called H.O.P.E., and a raven spirit themed staff called Nevermore. It takes a lot of work to craft these legendary journeys for release, so rather than take the time to develop the full set before releasing any of them, we will be releasing new legendary weapons in small groups at regular intervals until the full set of sixteen has been added to the game.”

Source

Is there not a legal obligation to provide paying customers with the things that were advertised as being part of the expansion but to be released at a later date?

No, not really. You paid for /access/ to the full game.

Aidan Savage.2078:

ozma.3498:

Mike O Brien.4613:

Then we shipped precursor journeys for existing legendaries, and said, “We’ve been working hard on new legendary weapons, the first handful of which will be introduced in Heart of Thorns, with more to come in subsequent updates.” While I fully get that you’re disappointed today, this is not about us shipping half an expansion pack.

Actually Mike, the specific wording was:

“Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns heralds the beginning of the *first new set of legendary weapons to be added to the game since its original set of twenty included in the launch of Guild Wars 2. The first three we’ll release are a celestially themed axe called Astralaria, an experimental energy themed pistol called H.O.P.E., and a raven spirit themed staff called Nevermore. It takes a lot of work to craft these legendary journeys for release, so rather than take the time to develop the full set before releasing any of them, we will be releasing new legendary weapons in small groups at regular intervals until the full set of sixteen has been added to the game.”

Source

Is there not a legal obligation to provide paying customers with the things that were advertised as being part of the expansion but to be released at a later date?

No, not really. You paid for /access/ to the full game.

Wrong. We paid for the advertised features and content.