Guild Wars 2

It has been stated multiple times that Anet uses metrics to determine what people like in order to divide developer resources where they believe it would be most advantageous. I wanted to know however, what is taken into account with that.

I remember a Q&A that was done a long while back. A person asked when Anet was going to fix or develop better fitting armors for the Charr. Anet’s response was that it would be a waste of time to work on Charr armors because so few people play Charr. I know that I personally have no interest in playing a Charr simply because armor in general, except for the Cultural Armor, does not look good in my opinion. They never really look right. They feel stretched and just goofy. However, I like the idea of a Charr.

Let’s take this to another aspect of the game. For dungeons, the readings the metrics seem to give Anet is that making challenging dungeons is not worth it. They base this off of the reception from fans after the AC revamp (eons ago) and the Aetherblade Path. While it is true that people run these less, is it really an indication that the community does not want new dungeons? A lot of people may have been tired of AC in general. As for the Aetherblade path, you also have to consider the fact that Scarlet was a big part of that path’s theme. Although challenging, a lot of people do not consider the Aetherblade path challenging in the right way.

I just want to know how blindly Anet follows these metrics and if they take into account that lack of interest shown through numbers may be for reasons having to do with the quality of that content rather than its category.

I am reminded of when I wanted to buy some quality running socks. I went to Big 5 (the closest store that sells sports things, including a shoe section). They had about 20 different brands/styles of socks… all size medium (shoe size 7-10). not a single large (or small) in the entire store. my guess on why this was the case: probably ~90% of the socks they sell are medium, so they choose to only stock medium.
I have a feeling a similar thing happens at Anet. 90% of players play the easiest content they can for the loot they get, so that’s what Anet focuses 100% of their effort on providing.
I went to another store to buy my socks.

Only fools trust metrics considering they can be skewed by tons of things. If you offer better rewards/time/effort for something easy people will go there. MMOs are driven by rewards. If Anet would start making proper rewards, more people would play fractals and dungeons for example.
People dont play Aetherpath because they can get the same rewards in other ways for less effort. The special skins their are very high RNG with low chances, so better to farm gold somewhere else and go buy the ones you like from TP. If the chances would be lets say 10 times better more people would go play it – if only to complete the wardrobe. This could be combined with a collection achievement for even more motivation.

ANet won’t tell us what’s coming more than a week in advance. Do you seriously think they’d let us know what data they collect and how they interpret it? Do you seriously think any of us can do more than make a WKG (Wise Kittened Guess)?

The thing is, we’ve been hearing for years from a number of devs from different companies that people don’t really enjoy the harder content. Some people do, but not most people. It’s not one or two guys saying this. Anet doesn’t only have the metrics from Guild Wars 2, they know what people played in Guild Wars 1 as well. They learned what most people play. You may not believe it, but that doesn’t make it less of the truth.

A few months ago, a Lotro dev who left the company (and thus could no longer be gagged) said that not only did less than 10% of the Lotro population raid, but less than 10% of the population raided since the game launched. He also said that forum posts by that group made up 50% of the posts.

This isn’t just Anet pulling numbers out of the air. First of all, more people solo in MMOs than most of us would like to believe. And those people tend not to do dungeons at all and none of them would care about dungeons unless they made a solo version.

Secondly, a lot of people just don’t want to be yelled at or kicked from groups, and they have a bad experience and stop doing it completely. Why play a game if you’re not having fun.

I’m relatively certain there’s a fairly big demographic of the game that will either never do a dungeon, or only do dungeons reluctantly.

Vayne.8563:

The thing is, we’ve been hearing for years from a number of devs from different companies that people don’t really enjoy the harder content. Some people do, but not most people. It’s not one or two guys saying this. Anet doesn’t only have the metrics from Guild Wars 2, they know what people played in Guild Wars 1 as well. They learned what most people play. You may not believe it, but that doesn’t make it less of the truth.

A few months ago, a Lotro dev who left the company (and thus could no longer be gagged) said that not only did less than 10% of the Lotro population raid, but less than 10% of the population raided since the game launched. He also said that forum posts by that group made up 50% of the posts.

This isn’t just Anet pulling numbers out of the air. First of all, more people solo in MMOs than most of us would like to believe. And those people tend not to do dungeons at all and none of them would care about dungeons unless they made a solo version.

Secondly, a lot of people just don’t want to be yelled at or kicked from groups, and they have a bad experience and stop doing it completely. Why play a game if you’re not having fun.

I’m relatively certain there’s a fairly big demographic of the game that will either never do a dungeon, or only do dungeons reluctantly.

I see it more as a effort vs. reward problem. currently, they reward everything about the same, so of course people would do the easier things most often. If they scaled the rewards for how much effort was put into it, everything would get played equally. adjusting the gold reward for each dungeon path was good… except they are barely any different from each other. I’m a fan of automatic reward adjustment. no one does arah path 4? the game will increase it’s reward. everyone does CoF path 1? the game will decrease it’s reward. the game would just have to keep track of how many parties successfully ran each dungeon path, compare those numbers to each other each day, adjust the rewards accordingly. it dynamically scales the reward for how popular that content is. they use this in other places, but no where useful (such as bonus exp for npc kills)

people will do harder content if they get proportionally rewarded for it. look at the marionette boss and scarlet invasions. I would say those were plenty hard, but they were also very rewarding, and players swarmed to those events like ravaging ogres.

Vayne.8563:

The thing is, we’ve been hearing for years from a number of devs from different companies that people don’t really enjoy the harder content. Some people do, but not most people. It’s not one or two guys saying this. Anet doesn’t only have the metrics from Guild Wars 2, they know what people played in Guild Wars 1 as well. They learned what most people play. You may not believe it, but that doesn’t make it less of the truth.

A few months ago, a Lotro dev who left the company (and thus could no longer be gagged) said that not only did less than 10% of the Lotro population raid, but less than 10% of the population raided since the game launched. He also said that forum posts by that group made up 50% of the posts.

This isn’t just Anet pulling numbers out of the air. First of all, more people solo in MMOs than most of us would like to believe. And those people tend not to do dungeons at all and none of them would care about dungeons unless they made a solo version.

Secondly, a lot of people just don’t want to be yelled at or kicked from groups, and they have a bad experience and stop doing it completely. Why play a game if you’re not having fun.

I’m relatively certain there’s a fairly big demographic of the game that will either never do a dungeon, or only do dungeons reluctantly.

It was an interesting revelation, especially for a game which had such outstanding dungeons. Certainly the best in an MMO Ive played and to read so few people played them considering how highly regarded they were made me look at the mmo genre with new eyes.

That said, disregarding them entirely just upsets 10% of the playerbase. Which is consequently what they have done. I’d hate to see that here.

I also remember the same philosophy being applied to pvp since that was always an MMO’s weakest community by numbers, but also by far its most vocal. That appears to have changed as resources committed to it (and also more pvp orientated games appeared to compete against).

As for metrics? Well stats can tell you anything you want, but it depends entirely on the context you use them in and whether you take into account why those stats are the way they are.

Vayne.8563:

A few months ago, a Lotro dev who left the company (and thus could no longer be gagged) said that not only did less than 10% of the Lotro population raid, but less than 10% of the population raided since the game launched. He also said that forum posts by that group made up 50% of the posts.

This isn’t just Anet pulling numbers out of the air. First of all, more people solo in MMOs than most of us would like to believe. And those people tend not to do dungeons at all and none of them would care about dungeons unless they made a solo version.

I am not sure if you meant to conflate raiding and dungeons but they are extremely different beasts. Raids require large amount of people, coordination and communication. Dungeons are nowhere near the same.

To return to the Opening. I regret that go ArenaNet had that reaction vis a vis armor.
Because I do not play that non-human races plupars the time.

And I cringe every time I see the armor. Unable to personalized me thoroughly.

Dungeon … it would be good for the sylvari nightmares invade Aetherlame way as they are gone.
And put this path in the fractal.