Guild Wars 2

A lot of notes are way too vague. Deliberate or not, secret intention or not, my personal result is reduced motivation. Which is bad imo, since I get the feeling the patches try to mend criticisms I share.

Highlights of vagueness from the current patch include:
“items have a chance to drop off of certain bosses "
“The deeper you go, the harder it gets!”
" slightly increased the drop rate on Legendary precursor weapons"
“drop rarity of Rare and Exotic weapons from certain places in the world "
and many more.

Before, I stared in a black box of uncertainty, now I stare at it again and the vague promises of change do not help at all. I compare it to Diablo3’s monster power system, which is documented to the last digit, which I find much more motivating. I am totally ok with committing to grinding Fractals, but the obtuseness of the system and lack of documentation which parameter changes what exactly instantly wipes out 99% of my interest.

Forgotten notes and accidents are ok, just add another line to the patchnotes once you notice, done. Problem solved. That is not affecting me one bit. It is the deliberate secrecy surrounding base mechanisms intended to motivate me which is a huge bummer.

Patch Notes November 15th:

Fixed stuff that will happen when you do something.
Other stuff has been reduced.
If you do kill certain mobs then more of that other stuff will drop.
Other stuff can now also be obtained by doing something else.

Thank you all.

Since when is GW2 EVER EVER been clear on its documentation? It is probably in the game design philosophy that things are to be as vague as possible to make it more ‘fun’. Look at the map design and you can see their design philosophy written all over it. That signature also carries all the way through their tooltips’ vagueness.

It is ‘fun’ to others but it spoils the enjoyment of the game for me.

As usual, when I make statement like that, I don’t plug the term ‘vagueness’ out of thin air and slap it on GW2 leaving the game designer scratching their head wondering how to improve. Reference World of Warcraft as a standard. Imho, they are rated a 10/10 while GW2 is only 2/10 in documentation standard. I am not talking about game design here, only documentation, so don’t bash me for comparing GW2 with World of Warcraft.

Or maybe Anet can consider asking player to pay for clearer documentation such as paying 100/500/1000 gems to ‘upgrade’ to a clearer documentation while those non-paying player will forever be condemned to vague documentation. That will motivate Anet to act.

A tradition of being vague in the past does not automatically create an obligation to be vague in the present.

LOL, it reminds me of mark and lards vague news….

To be honest some degree of vagueness with regards to content changes is a good thing.

When the devs tell you absolutely everything about the game and explain the mechanics of every little detail it stops being about fun and just about playing the system.

Keep some mystery in the game.

Thx man, made my day

Skyrant Kangaroomouse.7458:

Patch Notes November 15th:

Fixed stuff that will happen when you do something.
Other stuff has been reduced.
If you do kill certain mobs then more of that other stuff will drop.
Other stuff can now also be obtained by doing something else.

Thank you all.

Additional Patch Notes
- Oh we apparently forgot something so we are adding that stuff today
- something happened, but we didn’t know about that, really, so we made it un-happens.
- something was lost but now it is given back
- some of our clocks went broken, so we changed them
- the old is new and the new is old

I agree. There patch notes should be much more robust and this philosophy of “leaving it up to the community to discover” is kind of dumb. Most of the community ends up reading it on a forum or wiki page any way but in the meantime when a patch launches it looks like they haven’t added very much.

I agree, Patch notes are vague and lacking.
I also think they are up very late. We should have them at least a week before they go live.