Guild Wars 2

Xbon.9086:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

The performance of HoT was not as expected. We learnt the lesson.

This part is what I found most intriguing. What lesson did they learn?

honestly I’m not sure what there is to learn, HoT was everything I wanted…. granted, it was mostly the free stuff that came along with it like action cam, but I can’t imagine the game without autoloot, and raiding is fun and engaging, and the HoT area as a whole is great, the new classes and elite specs are super fun, not sure what people don’t like about it… but if they intend to do even more for the next expac, all the more power to them!

There have been numerous complaints about HoT:

Complaints about the business end:

• Costs too much (for what it offers)
• Core game bundled into HoT, Vets pay “full price” for “less”
• New profession but no free slot to make one

Complaints about difficulty in fights:

• Mobs are too hard
• Too many mobs swarm events
• Too much CC
• HP Champions can’t be soloed and/or will become untenable over time
• Mob density while running around is too high

Complaints about lack of fun:

• GH/scribing way too expensive
• Maps are too convoluted/difficult to navigate
• Too much grind in general
• Accessibility stinks due to timers and long chains
• Gated access to things like Adventures, HC’s etc. mean doing stuff (sometimes fairly lengthy stuff) you don’t want to do just to get to stuff you do want to do

While you may not have issues, there have been many expressed.

In the April changes, we saw events added (mostly “Kill the Vet or Champion”), rewards shifted to events in some cases (not in all), a few spawns removed, a few Champion heavy hits reduced and scribe/GH costs reduced a bit. I suspect addressing some of the other complaints would take more time than they’ve so far had, if in fact they have any interest in addressing anything else. Also, there have been enough issues expressed that we don’t really know which they’ll take counsel of.

I hope one of the lessons they learned was not to gate Masteries/account progression behind mini games and on top of that, gate the access to the mini games behind a timer. It’s annoying when I have the time and I want to try to do them to get mastery points so I wp to the map, mouse over the mini games and it’s locked, locked, locked, locked, locked. It’s annoying enough to have Masteries gated behind mini games, but a timer gate on top of that is way to much.

Debatable as to whether having mastery points earned by doing adventures was bad/good.

The biggest issue with the expansion, imo, was that they spent way too much energy trying to entice new categories of players to the game and, at least partially, neglected their long term supporters and fans.

This was an expansion with no new guild missions, no new fractals, one new pvp map. Even open world had an issue. While the open world stuff was (and still is for me) fun, it suffered because it wasn’t deep enough to actually count as a full expansion – resources were split off to things obviously intended to bring in new audiences (most notably raids).

It pains me to say this, because I love this game – but if they rush another expansion now without building on core game elements, the game population will (probably slowly at first) begin to dwindle.

This expansion was marketed as building base systems that would then be built upon – quicker implementation of events, fractals, guild missions (a dev even said "I’m excited to see what our team will do with missions in the HOT zones in a video just prior to launch).

We haven’t seen any of these things and they are already talking about rushing out another expansion. We can only hope that the people actually developing the game see the reality of the situation.

Anet has no business even saying the word expansion for at least a year and half, imo. They have more important work to do.

penelopehannibal.8947:

ArenaNet will be taking my money anyway, no matter what, when the next expansion comes out.

Let’s face it, they’ll be taking most of yours too, even if you deny it now.

Not much of a chance of that happening if things don’t change. Not even a sliver of one if I don’t get what I paid for out of this one.

It would be nice to hear what specific lesson(s) they learned.

Ashen.2907:

It would be nice to hear what specific lesson(s) they learned.

Yea but this was the home office, NCSOFT, talking to an audience who wants to see earnings growth. Not ANet talking to players, they’ve already done this a lot since the start of the year. Analysts thought that expansion would translate into a huge amount new income considering how well the game did at launch. That didn’t pan out so the their forecasts were off and they really don’t like it when that happens. They simply care that NCSOFT recognizes something was off and that they are doing something about it.

Wait. This is a letter to investors, about revenue. The lesson learned is about the amount of revenue that an expansion will bring in, not the why’s of it. They overestimated it. They will now have a shortfall for 2016 yearly unless they get another expansion out this year, to make up it. The shortfall is offset a bit by slightly higher than expected item sales. Most of the people who bought the first one will buy the 2nd, most who didn’t, won’t.

I’d like to see a report about the conference call, but I doubt it will be about the details of why HoT didn’t sell, particularly in game details. The game had already lost lots of players (see revenue before the HoT sale), so the buyer base was smaller than launch, and some extant players did not buy it. It will be about other game launches, etc.

Most of the call will be about how to make the revenue promises for the year, including another expansion sale. The people moved from Legendary development to the expansion are to speed it up, not make it bigger or better.

IndigoSundown.5419:

• Too much CC

What is CC?

Daddicus.6128:

IndigoSundown.5419:

• Too much CC

What is CC?

Crowd Control.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Control_effect

Thanks!

(I have to make this longer because they won’t take short posts.)

The performance of HoT was not as expected.

This is pure gold. What did they expect given the state of what they released?

What did they expect 4 maps with terrible grind, poor and rushed story and little to no content that was heavily time gated would do?

I wonder what lesson they learned.

Daddicus.6128:

Thanks!

(I have to make this longer because they won’t take short posts.)

Try spaces!

PopeUrban.2578:

Blackhearted.1264:

The performance of HoT was not as expected. We learnt the lesson. A second expansion is in work and will be released as soon as possible.

They’re learned their lesson eh? Does that mean they wont try charging $50 for a very content light xpack again?

The two things they learned were the cost/grind balance in HoT wasn’t in line with the expectations of their players. This is why they switched gears to bring it back in line with the April patch. They saw their established community voting with their wallets. That problem is solved now, and we shouldn’t see such a radical change in the grind versus income level in future expansions.

The second lesson they learned is that GW2 players expected a MUCH larger amount of core-like content for kitten price tag.

PvP and WvW players will not pick up an expansion that has very little content for them. You’ll need more than one elite spec and three armor skins. You’ll need to give WvW heads a way to use your new systems without requiring them to do other stuff.

PvE players will not be content with both a lack of new repeatable content to play AND a lack of new easily available skins. People would be fine with the content of HoT’s maps if it also came with a metric ton of new loot. In GW2, stats are not loot for PvE players. Sure, they added some new stat sets, runes, and sigils, but GW2’s design necessitates that stat adjustments are easy to get and require very little player effort. “Loot” in GW2 is skins. All skins. Despite weapon skins being faster to implement, weapon skins are less desirable than armor skins due to the mechanics of the game. It is far more likely an individual player can use an armor skin than a weapon skin. Thus, there’s less player satisfaction when you add a massive range of weapon skins than armor skins simply because players look at the pool of avaliable loot and can use a third of the armor, and a tenth or less of the weapons.

Players will not be willing to put up with repeating four maps, even if they’re very good maps, (and I personally think the HoT maps are fantastic) when they’ve acquired all of the loot in just a couple weeks, most of it as guaranteed drops or vendor purchases.

In future expansions I’d expect to see multiple elite specs (as these have mass appeal to every part of the player base, regardless of content type) a much larger number of armor skins (again, rewards that the entire player base can get behind and that can be rewarded to all three game modes through various means) less weapon skins (as Anet has learned people are perfectly happy to buy black lion skins for weapons, and that weapons aren’t as good a value proposition per man hour for player satisfaction as they though) and a larger focus on expanding content rather than systems (they did the heavy lifting with HoT, and while people are generally supporting of the systems they bemoan there’s not enough content for any of those systems)

As well i think they’re realizing that attempting to make everyone happy all at once is impossible. They’re beginning to take a page out of blizzard’s book here and hyper-focusing on part of the player base in major ways, then moving to a different part, and so on. All groups of players are minorities, and thus any feature or content will only ever serve a minority. In Anet’s drive to respond to player needs they fell in to a mire of feature creep trying to simultaneously please every minority.

We’ll see how it shakes out, but since Mo took over for Colin, Anet seems to have a much closer understanding of the compromise between developer vision and player expectation. I’d expect every patch to be a big focus on one area of the game, with a reasonable rotation between focuses, and Expansions to be the big content drops that have something for everyone, most of that something being things like elite specs and skins that are easier to design once and deploy across the entire game.

This person gets it – they made a lot of mistakes with HoT but what I believe to be the capital number one mistake is that they forgot to put skins in a primarily skin-driven game.

That’s right – everything that you do in GW2 is ultimately motivated by skins once you hit ascended stats – so it makes sense that an expansion that costs as much as the core game but delivers only a fraction of the skins that came with said core game will flop or at least do poorly.

Also – elite specs have mass appeal because of the immense power creep they brought to the game. As an MMO player I like my classes OP too.

I sure hope the next expansion isn’t rushed though – it’s mostly what killed HoT. That and poor decisions.

Harper.4173:

The performance of HoT was not as expected.

This is pure gold. What did they expect given the state of what they released?

What did they expect 4 maps with terrible grind, poor and rushed story and little to no content that was heavily time gated would do?

I wonder what lesson they learned.

Because they are talking about the expectations before HoT came out. This was out the expected injection of income from the expansion, not how well it did 1Q16.

Honestly, we do not know what they learned. we only know what we learned.

For all we know, they are the read headed kittened step child and wont learn anything….

and that kid is stuck in their room with no more allowance until the chores they promised to do, get done.

Michael.9403:

Wait. This is a letter to investors, about revenue. The lesson learned is about the amount of revenue that an expansion will bring in, not the why’s of it. They overestimated it. They will now have a shortfall for 2016 yearly unless they get another expansion out this year, to make up it. The shortfall is offset a bit by slightly higher than expected item sales. Most of the people who bought the first one will buy the 2nd, most who didn’t, won’t.

I’d like to see a report about the conference call, but I doubt it will be about the details of why HoT didn’t sell, particularly in game details. The game had already lost lots of players (see revenue before the HoT sale), so the buyer base was smaller than launch, and some extant players did not buy it. It will be about other game launches, etc.

Most of the call will be about how to make the revenue promises for the year, including another expansion sale. The people moved from Legendary development to the expansion are to speed it up, not make it bigger or better.

Except that wasn’t what is being talked about. NCSOFT made 27.5% profit last quarter, 22% for the last 12 months.

And you are going to force me to transcript the ANet questions with your misstatements aren’t you? Well have nothing better to do for the next hour.

From the conference call. The first portion is going over the power point presentation. The only mention of GW2 was the increased income year over year (+52.6%) is still reflecting the expansion release last October. This portion of the call lasted around 8 minutes. Biggest dis, not talking about Wildstar at all even though it’s broken out in the PPP.

Next 3 minutes was a statement of what’s coming, mainly mobile, MxM, Lineage Eternal and others, nothing that sounds targeted to NA/EU market. The thrust here was that 2015 was a flat growth year relatively speaking over 2014 but 2016 will see revenue growing. The solution is to keep the development pipelines full.

=======

Q: (impact of BnS NA/EU revenue) … and GW2 expansion revenue that appears to be falling a bit. (this all leads to the question about meeting 2Q estimates and how BnS, GW2 and yet to be released games will affect whether these estimates are met).

A: And in the case of GW2 right now also the revenue there seems to have stabilized however with regards to the first expansion pack that we had launched, the performance was not up to our expectations. So we have taken this as a lesson and right now we are in the process of preparing a second expansion pack for GW2 which we are planning to launch as soon as possible.

Q: If you look at the expansion pack and the revenue contribution in the 4th quarter, I think we are aware of what the total impact has been and why it was so however if we look at the 1st quarter surprisingly again it seems that the performance has been okay. So where has the actual revenue been derived from? For example is it that the contribution is coming from the actual box sales or is it because in terms of the in game items sales that this area has been strong? And in addition to that, and you did talk about this a bit before, but what is your outlook for the 2nd quarter in terms of the performance for this game?

A: So for GW2 if you look at the 1st quarter revenue of course due to the expansion pack that was launched in the 2nd half of last year, there was some contribution from continuing box sales however we would have to say that the larger contribution was from the in game item sales that we have seen which have actually been very strong, so as we have had in game events there as been revenue related to that which has continued to drive performance and we do believe that this is a trend that we will see continue going forward. As time does pass however we do believe that the overall revenue may weaken and therefore to prepare for such a situation that is why we are right now preparing the 2nd expansion pack which we are planning to launch soon.

Excuse the run on sentences and questionable punctuation, the translator doesn’t really pause for sentence breaks.

======

Those are the two questions and answers that deal with GW2. The first, “the lesson” may mean the boost in income the expansion created so they should do another sooner than later.

The second seems to qualify the 2nd expansion as something to release when revenues decline. “Soon” may simply mean we aren’t going to wait two years of decline before starting one in earnest. The AMA told us that roughly 1/3rd of the devs were on the expansion while the rest are on the live release.

Behellagh.1468:

From the conference call.

<snip>

Thanks for posting this.

Per my post, directly above yours, note that they did not mention as lessons learned the lack of new PVP content, the Hot maps being too hard or too few, the mobs hitting too hard, WVW maps being changed, the Master of Monuments being broken (twice) after working for years, the loot being the same as always, the price being too high, no free character slots, or any of the literally dozens of other things listed in this thread as suggestions of what they probably learned. I.e. no in game fine grained details were discussed at all. It’s finance people talking to investors, not gamers to gamers.

Like I said, it’s about revenue expectations not being met by HoT.

Their fix? Have another expansion sale in 2016 to get more revenue. Likely at the same price, same size, same freebies, etc. They moved devs from Legendary development to expansion development to make it happen this CY.

Exactly what I said they would say. I’ve been to a hundred of those, at least.

If they release another Exp in 2016, that means this game moves into a sudo subscription model of about 4.30/month, to stay current with content.

Currently, this game is not worth an upkeep like that, let alone another ‘expansion’ so soon (sorry 12months is not long enough between releases).

So, i really hope they are not planning on pushing another paid expansion this soon else they are no better then EA with CoD releases.

JustTrogdor.7892:

penelopehannibal.8947:

ArenaNet will be taking my money anyway, no matter what, when the next expansion comes out.

Let’s face it, they’ll be taking most of yours too, even if you deny it now.

They will have to earn my money with the next expansion. I seriously doubt I will pre-purchase the next expansion like I did HoT after my disappointment with it. I threw money at them once and won’t do it again. Anet will have to show me a lot more if they want to earn my money for the next expansion. Even then I’ll probably wait a month or so after release to read up on player feedback.

This is me. I’m not gonna buy the expansion right away. I was in the beta for HoT, but honestly, it was worthless since they hindered the players so much to keep the “surprises” (IE, the cost of specializations, the other zones (could’ve pointed out DS and crashing), etc). Honestly, it felt like JUST bug testing, and nothing else (yes, I understand that is what a beta player should do).

So yeah, the beta left a sour taste in my mouth. The start of the expansion left a sour taste in my mouth (the recent update washed most of it away though), but I am still skeptical.

edit: I’m also going to make a prediction I HOPE isn’t true.

We get LS3 this fall, it lasts us basically till the holidays. And at the end, just like with the end of LS2, trailer for 2nd expansion coming spring 2017.

Please let me be wrong

MORE MAPS THIS TIME!

Behellagh.1468:

Harper.4173:

The performance of HoT was not as expected.

This is pure gold. What did they expect given the state of what they released?

What did they expect 4 maps with terrible grind, poor and rushed story and little to no content that was heavily time gated would do?

I wonder what lesson they learned.

Because they are talking about the expectations before HoT came out. This was out the expected injection of income from the expansion, not how well it did 1Q16.

And again – they are surprised a bad expansion underperformed both in the long run and in the short run?

There’s no hype for HoT because players ran it into the ground on the first week – because it was that bad – no hype means nobody buys.

Harper.4173:

Behellagh.1468:

Harper.4173:

The performance of HoT was not as expected.

This is pure gold. What did they expect given the state of what they released?

What did they expect 4 maps with terrible grind, poor and rushed story and little to no content that was heavily time gated would do?

I wonder what lesson they learned.

Because they are talking about the expectations before HoT came out. This was out the expected injection of income from the expansion, not how well it did 1Q16.

And again – they are surprised a bad expansion underperformed both in the long run and in the short run?

There’s no hype for HoT because players ran it into the ground on the first week – because it was that bad – no hype means nobody buys.

They are, perhaps, surprised because they are businessmen and not gamers. They see that $xxx were invested but returned less than projected, not gameplay, features, or fun factor.

Or at least thats what they talk about with investors.

Michael.9403:

Behellagh.1468:

From the conference call.

<snip>

Thanks for posting this.

Per my post, directly above yours, note that they did not mention as lessons learned the lack of new PVP content, the Hot maps being too hard or too few, the mobs hitting too hard, WVW maps being changed, the Master of Monuments being broken (twice) after working for years, the loot being the same as always, the price being too high, no free character slots, or any of the literally dozens of other things listed in this thread as suggestions of what they probably learned. I.e. no in game fine grained details were discussed at all. It’s finance people talking to investors, not gamers to gamers.

Like I said, it’s about revenue expectations not being met by HoT.

Their fix? Have another expansion sale in 2016 to get more revenue. Likely at the same price, same size, same freebies, etc. They moved devs from Legendary development to expansion development to make it happen this CY.

Exactly what I said they would say. I’ve been to a hundred of those, at least.

They didn’t mention specific lessons at all.

A: And in the case of GW2 right now also the revenue there seems to have stabilized however with regards to the first expansion pack that we had launched, the performance was not up to our expectations. So we have taken this as a lesson and right now we are in the process of preparing a second expansion pack for GW2 which we are planning to launch as soon as possible.

It’s entirely up to the listener as to what the lesson they are talking about is. Was it suggesting it would do better to analysts before it was released? Was it they need more frequent expansions?

In the 4th quarter conference call they stated it’s under performance was from a lower F2P conversion rate and the solution was to entice more of these F2P players to get HoT. I saw that as the reason we got core Tyria gliding. Every glider in the skies of core Tyria is metaphorically towing a “Buy HoT” banner behind it for every player who haven’t yet bought HoT to see.

Everyone who have HoT could enumerate a list of issues HoT had. But at this level the people tuning in don’t care about the individual issues in a game, it’s all about “do you have a plan to fix what ever the reason is and see it doesn’t happen again so we can anticipate a nice spike in revenues?”

In the end, isn’t it all about pleasing your shareholders? As if anybody cared about the quality of their games as long as they generate a good amount of net profit.
If the expansion sales still are their most desired way of generating revenue then they will certainly introduce more stuff to make HoT a must have for any player.
Either that or the decision for a 180 degree turn back to the old Living Story only direction putting any future expansions on ice for now.

Michael.9403:

Behellagh.1468:

From the conference call.

<snip>

Thanks for posting this.

Per my post, directly above yours, note that they did not mention as lessons learned the lack of new PVP content, the Hot maps being too hard or too few, the mobs hitting too hard, WVW maps being changed, the Master of Monuments being broken (twice) after working for years, the loot being the same as always, the price being too high, no free character slots, or any of the literally dozens of other things listed in this thread as suggestions of what they probably learned. I.e. no in game fine grained details were discussed at all. It’s finance people talking to investors, not gamers to gamers.

Like I said, it’s about revenue expectations not being met by HoT.

Their fix? Have another expansion sale in 2016 to get more revenue. Likely at the same price, same size, same freebies, etc. They moved devs from Legendary development to expansion development to make it happen this CY.

Exactly what I said they would say. I’ve been to a hundred of those, at least.

I guarantee you, just from knowing how Anet works, that the new expansion will nothing at all like HoT. Anet has always been hyper-reactive to crticism. Always.

Prophecies came out and people complained it was too long and too slow. Factions came out and it was half the size, half the missions, and lightning fast to level to max level.

Nightfall came out and the penduluum swung back.

Guild Wars 2 comes out and people complain the game is too easy. The result is HoT. Everything stepped up a notch to handle the complaints. To try to fill the gap.

The complaints about HoT will be addressed in the next expansion, just because that’s what Anet does. I’d be surprised if we saw verticality like HoT or meta events like HoT or anything else like HoT in the next expansion.

I think Anet should just use moderation. Not swing desperately from one place to another.

Meta events are good – meta event on a tight schedule are bad.
SW meta event model works – but of course they can’t have one good thing and leave it – they need to “iterate and improve” it until it’s broken.

Harper.4173:

I think Anet should just use moderation. Not swing desperately from one place to another.

Meta events are good – meta event on a tight schedule are bad.
SW meta event model works – but of course they can’t have one good thing and leave it – they need to “iterate and improve” it until it’s broken.

Meta events are type of content, but some players want more freedom. The original maps didn’t have a consuming meta event like SW and, though a lot of people like SW, a lot of people prefer the freedom of freely exploring and finding random stuff, instead of everything focused.

We now have five maps (six if you count Dry Top) of what are basically map wide metas. I’d personally like to see some maps that are more sandboxy and less themeparky.

I agree that Anet shouldn’t make such drastic changes, but I don’t suspect that will stop it.

Vayne.8563:

The complaints about HoT will be addressed in the next expansion, just because that’s what Anet does. I’d be surprised if we saw verticality like HoT or meta events like HoT or anything else like HoT in the next expansion.

I’ve now got this brilliant vision of an expansion that is the exact opposite of HoT, which is bought by all the folks who love HoT, because they are currently happy players but who will not like XP2 and which is boycotted by all the folks who dislike HoT, because they’ve been bitten once but who would like XP2 if only they had bought it.

It doesn’t bode well! ;p

Surely the solution is to cater for the full range of skill levels and taste and hardcore-ness.

I love HoT but if they released a bunch of maps to open up core Tyria further I’d be all over those as well. I know everyone would love a new race, if you could play a whole map as a Quaggan or Tengu, people would buy that in a heartbeat.
Keep existing currencies, stop inventing more, help stabilise some parts of the market.
Use GW1 lore, don’t need to spend resources thinking up new stuff.
I could see us getting a new continent that would keep everyone happy for the usual amount of time – about a week for the first wave of people through to 12 months for the average player.

DoctorDing.5890:

Vayne.8563:

The complaints about HoT will be addressed in the next expansion, just because that’s what Anet does. I’d be surprised if we saw verticality like HoT or meta events like HoT or anything else like HoT in the next expansion.

I’ve now got this brilliant vision of an expansion that is the exact opposite of HoT, which is bought by all the folks who love HoT, because they are currently happy players but who will not like XP2 and which is boycotted by all the folks who dislike HoT, because they’ve been bitten once but who would like XP2 if only they had bought it.

It doesn’t bode well! ;p

Surely the solution is to cater for the full range of skill levels and taste and hardcore-ness.

It’s not that simple. I really enjoy HoT, but I’ve also had enough HoTness for the time being. I like other things about the game as well. Just because you enjoy HoT doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy the core game.

A little BnS rant. I played it. The game itself is great (and Lyn are the best.) The cutscenes are so much greater than any in GW2 (excluding GW2’s cinematics that are as great.) But. Translation into English is horrible. The voiceover is garbageous. You practically have to mod your client with JP or KR voiceover version not to cry constantly (with several exceptions). Its incarnations of TP and gem exchange is prehistoric. The game is NOT for casuals, you have to keep evolving your equipment or no one will ever party with you.

So. I bought HoT. I did it for the elites. At first I felt forced into it, because PvP was being horrible, in WvW I had a disadvantage (and shield gens wouldn’t work for me.) I enjoyed the core, played living world season 2 to try it out before buying the rest of it, so I didn’t expect much more than that. When I first heard my character talk, I melted. ANet actually managed to surprise me (in a positive way.) Verdant Brink looks so great and radiates the junglish theme so well. Music’s also good (and I am the person who would want Soule’s music everywhere.)

All in all. If ANet didn’t touch PvP (in terms of power creepness,) all would have been well for me. So what I meant to say is that BnS will probably implode in EU&NA some time soon, since it is a flunked localization and that I still retained my adoration for GW2 despite and at the same time because of HoT.

DragonflyDusk.6582:

DaikonSamurai.6714:

April patch, AMAs, WvW polls etc. indicate to me that ANet is moving in the right direction or is at least making an effort to get in better touch with their player base. If the WvW poll were any indication though it’s that the “general” player base is not nearly as single minded as most people probably think and “just do what the players want” is far more difficult to determine than many of us realize.

Also I came into this thread expecting a lot more drama. Got popcorn and everything. C’mon guys!

I agree with this 100%. Including your awesome Gravity Falls reference.

Someone quoted me?! Hold on while I get my armor on, grabbing my katana, jumping on my high horse which will surely be beaten once dead… This forum warrior’s ready for battle!
…
…
…
Oh you agree with me? High five o/*\o

Yeah Gravity Falls was awesome! I need more though… T-T

inubasiri.8745:

A little BnS rant. I played it. The game itself is great (and Lyn are the best.) The cutscenes are so much greater than any in GW2 (excluding GW2’s cinematics that are as great.) But. Translation into English is horrible. The voiceover is garbageous. You practically have to mod your client with JP or KR voiceover version not to cry constantly (with several exceptions). Its incarnations of TP and gem exchange is prehistoric. The game is NOT for casuals, you have to keep evolving your equipment or no one will ever party with you.

So. I bought HoT. I did it for the elites. At first I felt forced into it, because PvP was being horrible, in WvW I had a disadvantage (and shield gens wouldn’t work for me.) I enjoyed the core, played living world season 2 to try it out before buying the rest of it, so I didn’t expect much more than that. When I first heard my character talk, I melted. ANet actually managed to surprise me (in a positive way.) Verdant Brink looks so great and radiates the junglish theme so well. Music’s also good (and I am the person who would want Soule’s music everywhere.)

All in all. If ANet didn’t touch PvP (in terms of power creepness,) all would have been well for me. So what I meant to say is that BnS will probably implode in EU&NA some time soon, since it is a flunked localization and that I still retained my adoration for GW2 despite and at the same time because of HoT.

BnS made me appreciate GW2 all the more.

Behellagh.1468:

From the conference call. The first portion is going over the power point presentation. The only mention of GW2 was the increased income year over year (+52.6%) is still reflecting the expansion release last October. This portion of the call lasted around 8 minutes. Biggest dis, not talking about Wildstar at all even though it’s broken out in the PPP.

Next 3 minutes was a statement of what’s coming, mainly mobile, MxM, Lineage Eternal and others, nothing that sounds targeted to NA/EU market. The thrust here was that 2015 was a flat growth year relatively speaking over 2014 but 2016 will see revenue growing. The solution is to keep the development pipelines full.

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Q: (impact of BnS NA/EU revenue) … and GW2 expansion revenue that appears to be falling a bit. (this all leads to the question about meeting 2Q estimates and how BnS, GW2 and yet to be released games will affect whether these estimates are met).

A: And in the case of GW2 right now also the revenue there seems to have stabilized however with regards to the first expansion pack that we had launched, the performance was not up to our expectations. So we have taken this as a lesson and right now we are in the process of preparing a second expansion pack for GW2 which we are planning to launch as soon as possible.

Q: If you look at the expansion pack and the revenue contribution in the 4th quarter, I think we are aware of what the total impact has been and why it was so however if we look at the 1st quarter surprisingly again it seems that the performance has been okay. So where has the actual revenue been derived from? For example is it that the contribution is coming from the actual box sales or is it because in terms of the in game items sales that this area has been strong? And in addition to that, and you did talk about this a bit before, but what is your outlook for the 2nd quarter in terms of the performance for this game?

A: So for GW2 if you look at the 1st quarter revenue of course due to the expansion pack that was launched in the 2nd half of last year, there was some contribution from continuing box sales however we would have to say that the larger contribution was from the in game item sales that we have seen which have actually been very strong, so as we have had in game events there as been revenue related to that which has continued to drive performance and we do believe that this is a trend that we will see continue going forward. As time does pass however we do believe that the overall revenue may weaken and therefore to prepare for such a situation that is why we are right now preparing the 2nd expansion pack which we are planning to launch soon.

Excuse the run on sentences and questionable punctuation, the translator doesn’t really pause for sentence breaks.

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Those are the two questions and answers that deal with GW2. The first, “the lesson” may mean the boost in income the expansion created so they should do another sooner than later.

The second seems to qualify the 2nd expansion as something to release when revenues decline. “Soon” may simply mean we aren’t going to wait two years of decline before starting one in earnest. The AMA told us that roughly 1/3rd of the devs were on the expansion while the rest are on the live release.

Oh, thanks for the clarity, the lesson was purely about sales, then about content. So as far as NCsoft goes, they didn’t get involved at all with what the expansion provided or the consumer reactions to it.

The first words I saw when I opened one of the ‘fact sheets’ there was this:

_"Some of the information and data in the material have been prepared based on assumptions. There can be no assurance that the assumptions used by NCSOFT are correct and even if they are, that the effect of such assumptions on NCSOFT’s business and results of operations will be as projected.

Therefore, NCSOFT will not be responsible for individual investment decisions based solely on this material."_

:D

Which is why they have conference calls. Fortunately it appears that forced window upgrades have forced the site hosting them to no longer use Microsoft DRM so I can actually play the file on other players, not just Media Player Classic.

And that disclaimer is standard boilerplate with non-audited quarterly numbers. It’s a “we think we got all the numbers that matter but if we forgot one … sorry”..

Vayne.8563:

I guarantee you, just from knowing how Anet works, that the new expansion will nothing at all like HoT. Anet has always been hyper-reactive to crticism. Always.

I can’t speak to that. However, lest we miss who is pulling on the puppet strings and who is dancing, note that NCSOFT announces to investors that they need another expansion, and ANET shelves the popular Legendary crafting indefinitely and moves the people to the expansion, to speed it up.

They might be disappointed by the sales of the new expansion, too. It depends on how buyers react to the hype and general let-down many experienced with the first expansion. And since there’s no guarantee that anything announced for an expansion will actually make it into the game, it’s hard to say. Buyers might be leery the second time around whereas they were more trusting the first time.

Michael.9403:

Vayne.8563:

I guarantee you, just from knowing how Anet works, that the new expansion will nothing at all like HoT. Anet has always been hyper-reactive to crticism. Always.

I can’t speak to that. However, lest we miss who is pulling on the puppet strings and who is dancing, note that NCSOFT announces to investors that they need another expansion, and ANET shelves the popular Legendary crafting indefinitely and moves the people to the expansion, to speed it up.

But you ignore that fact that NcSoft has been claiming an expansion was coming soon since the first report after Guild Wars 2 launched. You have a data point of 1 and your’e trying to draw conclusions from it.

NcSoft has always said an expansion was coming even when Anet didn’t say it and wasn’t actively working on it.

From past experience with the company, I don’t think NcSoft has too much control over Anet. For example, for ages, people said the reason Anet had their silence policy was due to NcSoft. Yet NcSoft owned Wildstar too and they didn’t have a silence policy.

No, I think that Anet would have done this anyway, as a response to the vocally negative reaction to the first expansion and the fact that it didn’t meet expectations.

Vayne.8563:

I guarantee you, just from knowing how Anet works, that the new expansion will nothing at all like HoT. Anet has always been hyper-reactive to crticism. Always.

I agree with this – ArenaNet also has a knack° for creating content and features we players wouldn’t even think of. The next expansion will have one or two surprises in store for us. We’ll speculate for months what they’ll be, suggest ideas for features/content. Then bam – something new we never actually suggested or thought of.

Gliding in Heart of Thorns is a good example of this.

(°sp? I’m from the UK, so good English isn’t my first language!)

Vayne.8563:

Michael.9403:

Vayne.8563:

I guarantee you, just from knowing how Anet works, that the new expansion will nothing at all like HoT. Anet has always been hyper-reactive to crticism. Always.

I can’t speak to that. However, lest we miss who is pulling on the puppet strings and who is dancing, note that NCSOFT announces to investors that they need another expansion, and ANET shelves the popular Legendary crafting indefinitely and moves the people to the expansion, to speed it up.

But you ignore that fact that NcSoft has been claiming an expansion was coming soon since the first report after Guild Wars 2 launched. You have a data point of 1 and your’e trying to draw conclusions from it.

NcSoft has always said an expansion was coming even when Anet didn’t say it and wasn’t actively working on it.

From past experience with the company, I don’t think NcSoft has too much control over Anet. For example, for ages, people said the reason Anet had their silence policy was due to NcSoft. Yet NcSoft owned Wildstar too and they didn’t have a silence policy.

No, I think that Anet would have done this anyway, as a response to the vocally negative reaction to the first expansion and the fact that it didn’t meet expectations.

What you said only supports his argument in that NCSoft controls the inevitable flow of content out of sheer business logic versus how ANet plans to operate.

That is really exciting ! Can’t wait for new expansion pack !

Michael.9403:

I can’t speak to that. However, lest we miss who is pulling on the puppet strings and who is dancing, note that NCSOFT announces to investors that they need another expansion, and ANET shelves the popular Legendary crafting indefinitely and moves the people to the expansion, to speed it up.

Actually they moved the Legendary team to the LS3 content production, not to the expansion. And they had a chunk of expansion devs leave off the expansion work in order to work on the well-received April balance patch.

Perhaps there is pressure from NCSoft to speed up the next expansion but you used incorrect information to support the theory.

Biggest issue for me is that I just don’t want to give ANet (or NCSoft in general) any of my money right now. There are a lot of things I want, and would love to buy, but I don’t feel like I should support the company after everything they’ve done.

They make playing a game into a massive timesink that feels like work. PvP, which is my primary focus in game, is just frustratingly un-fun. PvE has no meaningful rewards, and most of the rewards you need for ascended gear (or even exotic in some cases), you’re better off merely farming a different material altogether, selling that, and then buying what you need.

You can only run the same content over and over again for pennies before you just burn out. Farming thousands of ore or wood for ascended gear, knowing that I’ll have to farm even more than what I need to pay for some of the other materials is just depressing.

“Play the way you want.” That’s great, I do think it’s great that I can eventually gain the materials I need for whatever by doing whatever I want. However, I really wish it didn’t take MONTHS of effort to do so in some cases.

I didn’t feel accomplished when I made my first piece of ascended gear, I felt demoralized knowing that making the rest was going to take so much more time and effort for a very miniscule upgrade in stats. I’ve basically completely written off the idea that I’ll ever get a legendary, and that’s fine, but disappointing.

The main thing that prevents me from wanting to give ANet money is simple – if I’m paying a company to play a game, I want to enjoy it. I don’t want to pay a company and then feel like I’m going to work each time I log in.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

The performance of HoT was not as expected. We learnt the lesson.

This part is what I found most intriguing. What lesson did they learn?

The contribution of item sales to the total sales is much stronger than the box sales. The revenue will weaken over time. The second expansion should address this fact.

That the cash shop is and will remain their top priority.

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

As usuall I do beleave in Anet that they will do good, now it is up to the players and not keep the grudge from HoT.

Both your trust and your blame seem to be misplaced. After Heart of Thorns turned out to be lackluster – by ArenaNet’s own admission – perhaps you shouldn’t be so quick to place your faith in them. And to suggest that the customers – whose trust was just violated – should be so quick to forgive and forget that violation rather than approach the next expansion with a skeptical eye is just naive.

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

As usuall I do beleave in Anet that they will do good, now it is up to the players and not keep the grudge from HoT.

I don’t know about keeping a grudge but if a company takes my money then doesn’t give me what I paid for then I’m most definitely going to remember that the next time they ask for my money. I’ll consider any promised advertisements for things that will be added later as “vaporpromises” and not to be relied on.

PopeUrban.2578:

The two things they learned were the cost/grind balance in HoT wasn’t in line with the expectations of their players. This is why they switched gears to bring it back in line with the April patch. They saw their established community voting with their wallets. That problem is solved now, and we shouldn’t see such a radical change in the grind versus income level in future expansions.

The second lesson they learned is that GW2 players expected a MUCH larger amount of core-like content for kitten price tag.

I would ask why didn’t they realise this from the start? Why did it take the poor performance of HOT and the storm of criticism that followed it to make them change?