Guild Wars 2

That’s a great post. Our community is pretty sad sometimes, but ANET hasn’t figured out how to manage expectations beyond refusing to discuss certain things. That causes some of the problems as well.

Try the Guild Wars 2 reddit. Some people seem to prefer it.

They have my hundreds of dollars and performed a bait and switch with the game. Advertisement was misleading so you bet I’m going to complain and I don’t have to be particularly nice about it either.

Uruz Six.6594:

I get what you’re saying, and having boards like that would go a longer way towards building an actual community. Also remember, though, that CoH was an older and much smaller game, especially towards the end. Don’t discount the effect of being initially subscription based did on weeding out the Forum PvPers, either. There were a good few thousand plus of us at Atlas Park at the end, multiply that by at least ten – and I’m fairly certain I’m underestimating the factor – and tack on all the ‘not playing but still has B2P access’ and, well, here we are.

There’s no community here, the forums and game haven’t quite matured to that point yet. We’re still at ‘open-mic complaint hotline at Cowboys Stadium.’

Good points, and I know that there’s no instant solution to building a good forum or game community. It will be a long, slow process, with more than a few small backslides. The problem is, I don’t see ANet even trying to start the process, they just seem to be shocked that it’s not happening all on its own.

notebene.3190:

Chicken and Egg

It’s a two way street.

Anyone that happens to also play Marvel Heroes (no, it’s not a replacement for this game, just a different game, I play both, I know, the horror) and frequents the forums know what I’m talking about.

And that’s about all there is to say about that.

Played MH since closed beta. Best players-devs communication I’ve seen yet. Coming back to GW2 after over a year of absence and seen how different it is was a little… weird.

I mostly agree with Uruz, ANet must want to start a good relationship with the community, find ways to hear us, interact better and not use this current system that only drives people against ArenaNet and against each other at this forum.

This recent changes caused complicated issues to deal with, inside the game when i do world bosses i see people on flame wars most of the time, it’s one example of what is happening impacting the communities (specially European Servers).

Roleplayers are a huge complication, if you roleplay now on PvE people get mad at you and send you to “several places”, “kitten”, etc… As Roleplayers are now also with MegaServers, so ANet is really acting against its own community, it’s the inverse of building one Healthy Community.

Dark Catalyst.1028:

They have my hundreds of dollars and performed a bait and switch with the game. Advertisement was misleading so you bet I’m going to complain and I don’t have to be particularly nice about it either.

Just to correct you on this, here’s the actual definition of bait and switch (in this case taken from Wikipedia, but I know it to be right).

“Bait-and-switch is a form of fraud used in retail sales but also employed in other contexts. First, customers are “baited” by merchants’ advertising products or services at a low price, but when customers visit the store, they discover that the advertised goods are not available, or the customers are pressured by sales people to consider similar, but higher priced items (“switching”)."

In order for this to be bait and switch you would have to have one product advertised and, and then not be able to buy that item and instead be sold a different item.

I believe the word you’re looking for is false advertisement, where someone advertises something, and then delivers something different than they advertised.

The problem in this case is that Anet gave refunds to people up to six months after they made the ascended gear change and if you were unhappy, you were entitled to get a refund at least for the money spent on the game. You chose not to do that.

In which case, no court in the world would say that the company deliberately misled you.

Instead of getting the refund and moving on, you continue to come to these forums and bash a game that you don’t like that other people like just fine.

You should have just gotten your refund and drawn a line under it.

Zepidel.5349:

The last thing we need is to turn the official forums into an echo chamber, like tumblr or some reddit sub forums were any dissent/outside opinion is culled / mocked.

There really just hasn’t been many praise worthy things, sure this patch was good, and changes are going to upset people (mega servers etc…), but this is the best we have almost 2 years after launch?

-QoL changes
-Living Story content
-Fractals
- 5 or so new maps?
- 2 world bosses

compared to what GW1 had in this amount of time or any other game… GW2 seems to be in maintenance mode, just doing enough to keep people interested in buying things on the cash shop then getting bored and quitting.

This is true I quit for nearly a year because it was going nowhere and kinda still is. However, it does seem as though it’s finally beginning to move slightly. People say this is a different game but it is honestly a continuation of it’s former and in a year and a half after Guild Wars Prophecies we had Factions and were nearing Nightfall there was SO much more content and pleasurable things coming around. Prophecies people had new things from factions including Alliance Battles were able to compete for ownership of towns also introduced 2 new elite missions and much more. Guild Wars 2 has fallen short as a sequel to a great game. The things talked about in beta and prior to release had me estatic but after release I lost interest. I still love the company itself but they need to work on expanding to newer things with how the game is developed there are so many things you could open up for the players that we may have wished to see or explore from Guild Wars itself. On a side note….. We need the Tengu and much more! Thank you Anet for a wonderful game waiting to come out of beta since 2012!

Nage.1520:

Dark Catalyst.1028:

They have my hundreds of dollars and performed a bait and switch with the game. Advertisement was misleading so you bet I’m going to complain and I don’t have to be particularly nice about it either.

Just to correct you on this, here’s the actual definition of bait and switch (in this case taken from Wikipedia, but I know it to be right).

“Bait-and-switch is a form of fraud used in retail sales but also employed in other contexts. First, customers are “baited” by merchants’ advertising products or services at a low price, but when customers visit the store, they discover that the advertised goods are not available, or the customers are pressured by sales people to consider similar, but higher priced items (“switching”)."

In order for this to be bait and switch you would have to have one product advertised and, and then not be able to buy that item and instead be sold a different item.

I believe the word you’re looking for is false advertisement, where someone advertises something, and then delivers something different than they advertised.

The problem in this case is that Anet gave refunds to people up to six months after they made the ascended gear change and if you were unhappy, you were entitled to get a refund at least for the money spent on the game. You chose not to do that.

In which case, no court in the world would say that the company deliberately misled you.

Instead of getting the refund and moving on, you continue to come to these forums and bash a game that you don’t like that other people like just fine.

You should have just gotten your refund and drawn a line under it.

I left two months after release and by the time I came back to see what’s changed, it was too late.

I feel like truly passionate fans of a thing are not those who just worship it blindly (or bash on it blindly), but rather are the kind of people who can sit back, look at a thing objectively, recognize the negative aspects, and give good constructive criticism on it. I love GW2, but I do recognize that there are issues with it, and while I prefer it over any other MMO (I don’t really like MMOs in general), it isn’t perfect.

I tend to avoid the forums because they do get very toxic, but that is simply something that comes from the medium we’re communicating in. With a forum, you can just come on and basically say whatever you want. No need to edit, no need to think over what you’re saying, no (real) need to try and fit a specific length. If what you post is too much, it’ll be moderated.

This then results in a lot of unnecessary (and likely unintended) hostility, because people are posting what’s on their mind right this second without thinking it over a second time before posting it. I don’t post often on the forums, but I blog about the game, and when something has me really annoyed about it, I write it down. Then I let it sit, and go back and reread it a half hour later. By then the initial anger has dissipated, and I can edit it to something that’s still critical, but logically so, instead of relying solely on emotion.

I’m not saying that being emotional about a thing is bad – far from. You SHOULD have emotional thoughts about something you greatly enjoy. But sometimes I feel that posts on here could have been better served by the poster waiting until they were a bit calmer, or simply sitting on it for a few minutes, because frequently I see valid points and good criticism hidden in a post full of rage that just makes it hard to really get to the actual point.

I know there are trolls, and people who will jump on anything they can to bash it. But for the most part, I think a lot of the issues on the forums (with regards to it being a toxic environment) are because people are passionate to the point that they post blindly. The game’s community as a whole is great; we just get too over the top sometimes.

CHIPS.6018:

If Anet, right from the start, give indications that they actually listens to the community, they would be respected and none of this would have happened.

Ascended gear (nearly all GW1 players hate) is the prime example. Dhuumfire (nearly all necromancers hate, before it was released) is another.

I do agree that the community is now highly toxic. There are generally two types:

1) Anet bashers.
2) Anet die hard fans.

The first type would of course bash Anet none stop, even when it isn’t fair. The second type would defend Anet’s action no matter how little sense they made.

What we need are more people in the middle somewhere.

I think there’s a lot more people in the middle than you think. But you see two things happen:

1) The extremes tend to be the loudest. They’ll be the ones that post repeatedly and create multiple threads (sometimes about the same thing). An interesting fact about most forums (and where the idea of such official forums being a minority) is that the bulk of the posts come from a small number of people. Let’s take a forum of a half million users with 5 million total posts… 70% of the posts will usually come from 15,000-20,000 users.

No those numbers aren’t exact. It’s a very rough estimate to paint the picture of how forums tend to work.

2) It’s very easy to create a mental picture in your head of “defender” or “hater” and no matter what, that bias lingers. A lot of the “haters” aren’t types that just blindly rage… but the rage posts are what stand out. Same thing for the “white knights.” People who blindly hate and blindly support are truly very very rare. Yes, they exist… but that number is FAR smaller than the number that people perceive.

To the OP… these forums aren’t “toxic” in the sense that they are any worse than the official forums you’ll find for ANY developer. It really is “okay” in that sense. Yes, the bulk of the responsibility to be peaceable falls on the developer. Is that “fair?” Not really… but you sign on to this sort of job KNOWING such an imbalance of decency is GOING to happen.

You are GOING to get hate from a select group of players no matter what you do. You are GOING to get spit on and cussed out and screamed at. That’s simply the fact of the matter, fair or not. Developers have no real option but to accept it and deal with it the best they can.

To give an example of good communication with the playerbase, I’ll link this update: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Black-Lion-Trader-Armorsmith/first#post3930797

Basically, “Something’s wrong, we’re looking into it, we apologize for the inconvenience.” This is a PERFECT example of how they should communicate to the playerbase. Continued communication in the same vein as this will do a great deal to help restore faith in Anet. I give the staff member kudos for the way this was handled.

I would also like to add, it’s alright to give an update of “We checked it out and it turns out this issue is much more complex than we originally thought, and will take much more time than we anticipated. We ask for your patience, and apologize for the delay” if an fix will need to take some time. Don’t get me wrong, people will still be unhappy that the fix isn’t there, but their unhappiness will be directed toward the bug, not the staff themselves.

Things such as extended periods of silence, or even disrespectful responses toward the community will do the exact opposite. It will channel all of the unhappiness toward the staff, and will compound and grow with each and every new issue that arises.

This is the difference between good community relations and bad community relations. The thread that I linked shows an example of good community relations. It’s something I hope they take notice of and start to build on.

I guess I have high expectations. We were active in GW1 for about 7 years — all the way up until the release of this game, and anet managed to keep things fresh enough, yet without totally turning off the ‘hardcore’ crowd to keep people interested and active in the game for that long.

1 1/2 years into GW2 and I am already wondering if this is the best long-term solution for my guild. I was fine until this whole megaserver thing came about.

Normally, I’d agree that people are being a bit harsh on the forums, but that’s true for pretty much any game, at any given time. In this case, however, the outcry in the community is fully warranted. There are major parts of the game severely and negatively affected by the feature patch’s changes. I’ve never seen so many bugs/issues come from a single patch in GW2, and some of them are game-breaking.

This entire thing is a chaotic mess, and every day that ArenaNet declines to give even a quick response to our feedback, the community gets more and more angry. Rightfully so, too, because there are major problems going on, and none of us know if they’re being fixed or if a workaround is being discussed or not.

We’ve had no communication whatsoever on the big issues people have with this patch. That is not typical of ArenaNet – usually they’re pretty on top of things, and update us frequently, but for whatever reason, they are choosing to remain completely silent.

And no, realistically, we can’t expect ArenaNet to fix things overnight. But a simple “Hey, everyone, we’re looking into the ____ issue and trying to come up with a fix for it. We’ll update you as soon as we know something!” would go a long way to cool tempers.

People in the game are fine. Its just the forum community that sucks.

Resk.6412:

So, I’ve considered posting this for a couple days now. I tend to lurk rather than posting. I realize this will likely fall on deaf ears, but after this weekend, I feel like it really needs to be said.

The attitude on the forums, and the response from the community over the past week (and even before that) is appalling. Every new thread is created to somehow belittle or bash the Anet dev team, or to negatively criticize every aspect of the game (whether part of the new update or not). And it isn’t just in General – it’s happening in PvP, in WvW, in the Profession forums, all of them. Is this criticism valid? Certainly – there are threads created for the exact purpose of collecting that information (and no, we don’t need to keep making 9 different threads on the same topic). But the tone of that criticism has reached an all-time low, and it’s turned the forum into a toxic mess. We’re no longer in the territory of constructive, positive discussion that a forum like this is here to encourage.

The general consensus of the community appears to be one where we expect the dev team to be chained to their desks 24/7, fixing every mistake and catering to every whim of any player who feels like our gameplay has somehow been diminished. I mean, just look around – you’ll find it in almost every new thread that’s been created this week. How does this kind of feedback – the whining, the complaining, the bashing, the lack of patience, the anger – actually help the game or promote any kind of meaningful discussion? Everyone seems to be shocked at the lack of responses from the dev team about issues – is it really any wonder why? If I were them, I wouldn’t respond to anything either, considering the community won’t be happy with whatever they have to say (or even if its what they want to hear).

Have there been problems this week? Certainly. Could things have been rolled out differently? Probably. But in no way does that excuse how this community has reacted. We dare say the Anet team can’t have a bloody holiday weekend to themselves? Of course they can! Who are you to say they don’t deserve one? (And there are threads where this exact statement is happening).

Lets use the Megaserver as an example. For those complaining about the megaservers, have you even considered that releasing this update this week, in this way, is intended? The Megaserver system is a BIG deal. And the devs have said repeatedly that its an ongoing system. I mean, the update isn’t even a week old! How do you expect the dev team to make any meaningful changes to the system to improve things, when they don’t even have enough data yet to determine what those changes should be? It’s called patience, and this community could use a huge dose of it.

Altogether, I know this thread isn’t going to deter the community’s reaction to the new content. I know it’s not going to correct anything. But I’m hoping that, if you support the dev team, their hard work, and their efforts to give us something great to play, you’ll post in here and let them know.

I love the new updates, and I know that I for one can’t wait to see what’s coming for us next

I totally agree. I played about 10-15 hours in the last 3 weeks and I haven’t had any problems with the servers whatsoever. The game runs smooth on all my computers, I still like it since closed beta and I’m always pumped to get to find out what new content I will available for me to discover.

For example I was stumped to discover Lion’s arch destroyed not long ago, this is the kind a living breathing world looks to my eyes. Yes Arenanet isn’t always giving us what we want, they sometimes more viciously try to get into our pockets but overall it’s a great balance and I’m always glad to buy a few gems for unlimited gathering tools, etc.

I hate to say it but yes we suck, most like any other MMO forums in the universe. Still it’s good to take a minute to say it. Arenanet has given us a great MMO and if you have played more then 100 hours and don’t agree then you lie. (IMO if you played that much and you’re level 80, that’s because there was something you liked all that way uh?

I’m now level 60 with about 120 hours logged, not much but kitten I’m always looking forward to log some more time in!

“Our Community is Disappointed”

or alternatively

“Our Developers are a Disappointment”.

Now it’s right …

" No other company on the planet would expect to behave this way and still be in business, let alone continue to neglect and look down upon their customer base."
I have in the past played EVE Online.CCP ignored player feedback again and again.Even updates that were tested by the playerbase and hated or found not to work were still implemented.Reported bugs in many cases were ignored or took a long time to fix.Unwanted changes made me give it up.The same is happening with GW2.Game devs get told what to do and it happens,sod the community.Online games have a plan and no input from the players will make any difference.We either live with it or quit.

You know we had communities, people chose servers based on what type of players they wanted to play with, servers built up communities, cultures and pride. Then Anet decided to stick everyone together.

You think we are being harsh, unfair, mean to the Devs? Why shouldn’t we be, they are wrecking the game for many people, and why? Just so the China release can go smoother?

There would be no disappointment if ArenaNet didn’t decide to “fix” the things that aren’t broken and destroy the server communities and guild alliances we’ve built in the last 1.5 years.
Negative feedback is important – it is our only was to show Anet how displeased we are with where they are heading, and how to keep us in the game. Personally, I’m leaving GW2 as soon as / if MegaServer gets implemented everywhere. But I like the game as it was before 15th April, and would continue playing if we get our servers back. Forum feedback is telling the devs how to keep a player like me. If they ignore it (like they’re doing right now), they will lose their playerbase. If they hear the feedback and concerns of the great part of the community (please check this thread), they will be able to act on it and possibly keep the players playing.

My negative feedback is not to “belittle the devs”, it’s to provide consumer feedback and try to keep the product that I enjoy, without it being changed into some other game.

Oh where are those simpler days when the only bad thing in GW2 was Scarlet!?

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Nage.1520:

Dark Catalyst.1028:

They have my hundreds of dollars and performed a bait and switch with the game. Advertisement was misleading so you bet I’m going to complain and I don’t have to be particularly nice about it either.

Just to correct you on this, here’s the actual definition of bait and switch (in this case taken from Wikipedia, but I know it to be right).

“Bait-and-switch is a form of fraud used in retail sales but also employed in other contexts. First, customers are “baited” by merchants’ advertising products or services at a low price, but when customers visit the store, they discover that the advertised goods are not available, or the customers are pressured by sales people to consider similar, but higher priced items (“switching”)."

In order for this to be bait and switch you would have to have one product advertised and, and then not be able to buy that item and instead be sold a different item.

I believe the word you’re looking for is false advertisement, where someone advertises something, and then delivers something different than they advertised.

The problem in this case is that Anet gave refunds to people up to six months after they made the ascended gear change and if you were unhappy, you were entitled to get a refund at least for the money spent on the game. You chose not to do that.

In which case, no court in the world would say that the company deliberately misled you.

Instead of getting the refund and moving on, you continue to come to these forums and bash a game that you don’t like that other people like just fine.

You should have just gotten your refund and drawn a line under it.

I left two months after release and by the time I came back to see what’s changed, it was too late.

Either way, claiming a company has done something illegal is probably overstating your case. You know I get the whole thing about being disappointed by a game.

I don’t get hanging around and complaining about it for years on end. You’re not helping the game and you’re not helping yourself. You’re just annoying people who like the game.

Is that really your goal?

This is the type of thing, and I don’t mean to single you out, that makes the community look bad. People who don’t like the game, don’t play the game and come here and talk about the other games they feel are better.

It’s okay to think other games are better. But saying it in a game’s forum….just not cool.