Older player opinion
Unfortunately, well thought out posts like this are the rarity. Every thread that I have seen where someone is trying to express a distaste for the new content devolves into pure hatred. You’re comment about waiting to see where things go from here is where the difficulty is. You’re speaking to the generation that was raised on instant gratification. If they don’t get their way, and now, tantrums will be thrown.
I have been dropping by the forums once or twice a day, and I try to make most of my posts positive. It gets hard when people can’t have a conversation about something and instead just end up throwing insults around with no constructive content whatsoever.
AMA on Monday, the communication bridge is there, hopefully. I hope people cool down until then. I know I have. Thanks for the post, it’s full of win.
From a not so young player =)
Give me game. Not grind, not gating, not RNG, not +stat junk, not checklists.
I’ve never truly played an MMO before aside from MUDs – that much should be obvious form my other posts. GW1 was something I spent time on, but I never really engaged with it and much of it was spent playing solo. I believe I quit when I realised how much time I was spending trying to get a different coloured shirt for my character. It just wasn’t my thing, and I picked it up a good few years after release, so I felt a little out of synch.
GW2 has been excellent fun for me so far, though I admit that the experiences I’ve enjoyed might not be unique or interesting to any of the MMO veterans here. Dying to an Event boss, sprinting for five minutes back to the spot from the nearest Waypoint and seeing the same stranger that fought alongside me still wailing away at this thing and just hanging in there made me realize that online gaming didn’t have to be what I thought it was. Independently, without communication, we both decided that we were going to hang in there and beat this thing. That was pretty neat, albeit probably romanticized on my part.
I agree that ANet could easily improve its customer relations, but this is a tricky time to attempt being a little more personal. Hopefully when the ice has thawed, we can enjoy a little more open and measured communication on both sides. In the meantime, I would hope that people could understand that supporting your ideals does not always involve walking away from or attacking those who are disrupting said ideals – sometimes it’s about just helping someone understand that you would prefer they did things in a certain way and acknowledging it when they do.
Behold: Opinions!
Programming is not 2+2=4. There are a lot of variables involved.
In GW2, the following computes: 20=11
Also true: 10={3,6}
See the Mesmer’s portal and Moa skills.
Iruwen Evillan, Human Mesmer on Drakkar Lake
Thanks OP- as an older gamer myself I agree with you.
I am unhappy about the changes to the game yes and I threw my fair share of hissey fits but I love this game and I will wait for a response.
Gunnar’s Hold
The problem seems to be that the game was designed by a team with a vision and goal, but somewhere near the launch, for whatever reason, that team was fractured, the goals were revised, and now you’re dealing with reactions to whichever team is given responsibility, money and dev time to “fix” the game without any consistent direction or goal for doing so nor apparent access to or interest in feedback when it’s appropriate.
I could be wrong, but having worked in the industry, I don’t think I am. I can also assure you that a product lacking a unified team, vision and goal is a product destined for trouble. I would imagine that for the marketing folks that got paid and quit before launch, this was a highly successful title.
The problem with these forums is that too many people confuse their opinions for truths. They mistake their own predictions for facts, and start believing them because others share the same opinion. And then they conclude that they are obviously right, and that ArenaNet is obviously wrong (or worse: pure evil).
This is not to say that opinions have no value, but only that opinions in this forum tend to be overvalued as absolute truths.
Opinions are not truths.
Predictions are opinions.
Therefore, predictions are not truths.
And any conclusions based on predictions and opinions are unreliable.
If only more people could make this distinction.
AMA on Monday, the communication bridge is there, hopefully. I hope people cool down until then. I know I have. Thanks for the post, it’s full of win.
From a not so young player =)
Reddit is full of down-voting sycophants. Doing an AMA on /r/GuildWars2 is like a conservative who’s in political trouble doing a Q&A on Fox News.
Jack of all trades, master of some.
NSP – [Zos]
NSP – [Zos]
Reddit is full of down-voting sycophants. Doing an AMA on /r/GuildWars2 is like a conservative who’s in political trouble doing a Q&A on Fox News.
This is an example of an opinion (in this case, a suspicion) mistaken for a truth. Because NOBODY has any way of ACTUALLY KNOWING something like this. At best, there could be anecdotal evidence, which is insufficient to establish whether this claim is true.
If you really worry about this, then rally some frequenters of this forum to provide some opposition to this allegedly opinionated Reddit crowd.
(edited by Jornophelanthas.1475)
I’ve been gaming since Dos as well. AH what fun that was to get a game running in the early days. It’s true that it is to early to judge the long term outlook for the future of GW2 but most people project an image of that perceived future from the information and current games climate. For each individual it will vary greatly from the end of the world to the best thing since sliced bread. From my own point of view I will give them time but the direction looks as if it’s off from where I believed it was going. As for the state of the forums. Every forum suffers such rage outs if you will. In the heat of the moment some say things they would otherwise hopefully not, but it’s a forum and I’ve never been to a forum yet that didn’t resemble these ones at one time or another. I try not to take to much from them at least they are not the LOL forums with it’s lack of regulation and anything goes nature.
And then they conclude that they are obviously right, and that ArenaNet is obviously wrong (or worse: pure evil).
.
just 2 things:
not only on this forum but almost on any forum gw2 is discussed, the gear trendmill is largely discussed with many unhappy players
Second, Anet passed to the paradigm of the ethic model of mmo to the pure evil incarnate with just a single patch…..
From the most loved for years to the most hated…..
Something went wrong it seems….
I think we cannot just pretend complaint are just the normality.
GW2 balance:
A PvE player is supposed to avoid a 1-2 second 1 shotting aoe.
A WWW player is considered uncapable of avoiding a 5,75 second aoe for half his health.
A PvE player is supposed to avoid a 1-2 second 1 shotting aoe.
A WWW player is considered uncapable of avoiding a 5,75 second aoe for half his health.
I would hardly class them as most evil incarnate. A patch can be changed, things undone that were done.
This is an example of an opinion (in this case, a suspicion) mistaken for a truth. Because NOBODY has any way of ACTUALLY KNOWING something like this.
Or an attempt to change what the actual post was to fit into a context you created, as in someone trying to present an opinion as truth. Or maybe just you interpreting it that way.
It was just merely a casual observation and my particular opinion from observing the machinations of /r/GuildWars2 on the occasions where I’ve been bored enough to read it / lurk.
A prediction, sounds fun though! Okay, I predict =holds card envelope on to his forehead a-la Johnny Carson= that nothing will be said that hasn’t already been said by Chris. We will get more PR talk and that nothing concrete about the various controversies will be said because nothing can be said at this point to change most people’s minds.
Jack of all trades, master of some.
NSP – [Zos]
NSP – [Zos]
I would hardly class them as most evil incarnate. A patch can be changed, things undone that were done.
The $64,000 question is: will they?
And then they conclude that they are obviously right, and that ArenaNet is obviously wrong (or worse: pure evil).
.just 2 things:
not only on this forum but almost on any forum gw2 is discussed, the gear trendmill is largely discussed with many unhappy players
Which ArenaNet will likely be aware of. Because it is their job to be aware of player opinions, and provide decent responses and actions (if needed) to these.
Second, Anet passed to the paradigm of the ethic model of mmo to the pure evil incarnate with just a single patch…..
From the most loved for years to the most hated…..
Something went wrong it seems….I think we cannot just pretend complaint are just the normality.
This is a prediction about the future of Guild Wars 2 that is simply not confirmable at this time, which also means that the value judgements towards Guild Wars 2 are premature.
If Chris Whiteside were to actually say that new tiers of items with increasingly higher stats will be added every few months, then your prediction may count as confirmed. However, this is not the case.
All we know is that there is one tier of items added to the game three months after release. This could be “vertical progression”, but this could also be a fix to the game economy, because people were attaining exotic items far sooner and far more frequent than ArenaNet originally envisioned, with ascended items eventually being added to all existing dungeons, crafting and karma merchants.
We just don’t know, and hopefully an AMA Q&A session will help clear this out.
I just hope the AMA Q&A is not just a PR exercise with a fixed set of questions that avoid the issues. That’s my worry there. But again Monday will tell and I aint going to lose sleep over it as in the end it doesn’t really matter.
AMA are meant as promotional tools. Hopefully they can keep the message positive and forward-looking.
We have a very vocal minority of people who think 1 step of gear equals a treadmill.
I’ve been in other games when they did huge changes, much bigger than anything suggested for GW2 so far (thinkin of Everquest and WoW). People doom and gloom, people cry, people threaten rage-quit. But a year later those same people were still playing it, with a playerbase bigger than ever before.
We older gamers have a bit of history to guide us, and also less likely to suffer from “gamer ADD” that tends to make younger gamers jump from game to game. I like that GW2, like GW1, is one you can leave and come back as it suits you.
We have a very vocal minority of people who think 1 step of gear equals a treadmill.
And we have a very vocal number of people who don’t say that but that what ANet did was just the first step. Unnecessarily increasing stats in Ascended Gear is an abundantly clear sign. And those worries have not been proven ill-founded by saying that they’re not gonna add a new tier every three months.
Iruwen Evillan, Human Mesmer on Drakkar Lake