Guild Wars 2

Just a request for a little bit more of a heads up and better publication of upcoming changes to the game.

The nerf to the PvP rewards took many of us by surprise. I understand there was some mention of it, but it was not well publicized IMO and many of us simply did not see it. If you peruse the PvP forums, you’ll see many people expressing disappointment over losing their earned rewards. While it’s not the end of the world, it does leave you with a sense of unfairness or being a little kitteneated.

I agree that the PvP rewards were a little bit too high, but that’s what was promised at the time that people earned them. Unfortunately, not everyone got a chance to redeem them and I believe most would had they known that their value was going to be significantly reduced in the upcoming patch.

Maybe an in game mail or message to notify us of important changes and a little more of a time window. I think a lot of people missed it because the announcement was rather subtle and only gave us about 5 days.

They used to give us a little better heads up…and then sometimes, when they failed to get the changes released when they said they would, people QQed. And complained. And in some cases, screamed like little children. Bad publicity and all that.

So, they stopped telling us anything.

Now, we learn about changes when they are released, so they no longer have to worry about meeting peoples expectations on time.

I think what we have is probably the best communication we are going to get. Some companies give a big heads up. Some stay tight lipped. Both have advantages and disadvantages. We just have to learn to live with what we get.

^ That’s true. They got burned one too many times. It got rather frustrating for them as you can tell by this post (highlighted section).

Josh Foreman:

1. It’s most helpful if you state your request or actionable item at the top. Then your reasons below. This helps us find and reference your post, pass it around for discussion, etc.

2. Don’t assume the reason that things are the way they are due to developer incompetence, laziness, apathy, stubbornness, greed, selfishness, lust or any of the other deadly sins. There are other possibilities beside developer personal defects. “Just” changing one thing usually has ramifications on other things that are hard to anticipate. An MMO is an incredibly complex web of interdependencies, and tweaking any individual part runs the risk of breaking many other parts. That’s why we don’t typically jump to instant ‘fixes’ (even though it’s tempting!) and why things that seem like obvious problems can take a lot longer to address than many would intuitively think they should. There is no MAKE IT WORK button that we refuse to push out of spite. Even if that were the case, it just doesn’t make sense to insult the party you are requesting something from. In what part of the real world does that ever work? No one wants to ‘slap you in the face’ or make the game less fun. We love you guys, and are thrilled that people play our game!

3. Don’t assume that we can just rearrange resources to work on your particular issue. Most of our teams are very specialized. It takes a long time to build the experience necessary to be a good productive member of the PvP, Story, Systems, or any other team. Just because we have X programmers working on bug fixes and Y working on Gameplay improvements, doesn’t mean we can arbitrarily move those numbers around. It’s just not that simple.

4. Please stop calling us liars when we fail to implement something we intended to months ago, but for some technical, balance, or other reason found it to be untenable. We can’t be very open about our plans if every word we say is taken as a contractual obligation. Imagine if every word you said to your friends were recorded and played back at the most inopportune time in order to make you look like a fool. You’d probably clam up pretty quickly. Making an MMO, especially one as experimental as GW2 requires… experimenting. Requires making plans, following through, finding dead ends, back-tracking and trying something else. Sometimes that means that we will state a clear goal, test it internally and find out it just won’t work. The idea that this means we don’t have a clear vision is wrong. There is a difference between a core vision for our design principles, and the implementation of specific systems. We are very clear about the mountain we want to scale, but whether we do it in 4×4, on foot, with a grappling hook, or a hot air balloon are all contingent on the terrain we discover as we progress.

5. You are not “all players”. Please stop saying “Players want X” just because you want X. The fact is that players want X, Y, Z, and the rest of the alphabet, and most of those desires conflict with each other. And I guarantee you, anything that the vast majority of the players want, we (as players of our own game) also want. If you don’t understand why something the vast majority of players and the devs want is not implemented, see the above points 2-4. I have a people-pleaser mentality, so this is one of the hardest pills for me to swallow as a developer. I want EVERYONE to be happy. Unfortunately, the rules of the real world make that impossible.

^I’ve always loved that post. It should be required reading for all.

The difference is they need to communicate intent and actively discuss how to improve the game rather than just pushing changes with no interaction.

Major successful companies take the feedback and in particular, provide justification on why or why not they made or didn’t make changes.

The problem with ANet has had a history of providing no reasoning behind why they made any given change. Recent patches have been better, but that’s only one or maybe two of them. People complained because negative changes were released, and the reasoning behind why they were released never ended up seeing the light of day.

Not to mention that open communications – such as coming out and saying “hey, look, here’s an experiment we’re working on that may or may not be released, tell us what you think” – are so much more valuable than silence or just making statements about “this is what we’re currently developing.” One thing implies it may never see the light of day, the other implies it’s greenlit to making its way to production/release.

The other realization to be made is that not everyone will always be happy, and people will complain. No matter where you go in life, there are going to be ungrateful people who kitten on anything they can. Using this as an excuse to stop interaction is absurd when communication is critical to a business’s success.

In this case (the pvp and fractal ascended equipment changes) they did communicate but did so badly.

At minimum they should have sent an in game mail as well as a forum post and for changes as drastic as these more than 5 days would seem appropriate. They’ve repeatedly said that few people read the forums (I know I see the same names again and again around here, my own included) so it seems like a poor choice if they wanted to let people know.

I fully agree with you guys. This certainly is not intended to be some non-constructional rant against anet. Just ended up on the short end of the stick on this recent nerf. Not the end of the world, but just a little disheartening to lose out on awards you thought you had earned. Really just hoping to avoid future instances like this and thus the request for a little more heads up. Cause as Pifil stated, the forum in which the communicated in, isn’t always monitored well by many of us.

Well, though the lead-in was longer, many missed the changes to the acquisition of GoB, as well.

Still, as pointed out by many others, we must be more diligent, I suppose. Lesson learned.

DeceiverX.8361:

The difference is they need to communicate intent and actively discuss how to improve the game rather than just pushing changes with no interaction.

No, they really don’t “need” to do anything. A lot of us want them to communicate more information more often and in more depth. A lot of us want them to engage in back & forth, about details of the game important to us.

But they can, and have, pushed out changes to their games for, oh, the entire duration of the franchise, without that. And we’ve not always been pleased with the results regardless.

DeceiverX.8361:

Major successful companies take the feedback and in particular, provide justification on why or why not they made or didn’t make changes.

There are plenty of major successful companies that never worry about customer feedback or only about the feedback from a tiny minority. Other companies stick to gathering feedback in very controlled ways, via surveys and focus groups, and the general public never hears a word about it.

I’m all for better communication by ANet. In particular, I think they miss out on some low-cost, high benefit types of things (for example: consistently cross-posting on Reddit, the forums, their official blog, their official Twitter, and official Facebook).

But let’s not pretend that they are somehow required to do this by some rules of commerce laid down at Harvard Business School or set in stone by the Alliance of MMO Producers.

tl;dr some of us would like better communication; it’s up to them to decide how important that is.

As you said – there was mention of it.
If a friend texts you some info do you also expect them to send a whatsapp, facebook msg, email, handwritten letter, leave a msg on your answering machine and mailbox and come by in person to make sure you got the msg?

Neve.3145:

As you said – there was mention of it.
If a friend texts you some info do you also expect them to send a whatsapp, facebook msg, email, handwritten letter, leave a msg on your answering machine and mailbox and come by in person to make sure you got the msg?

Presumably my friends will contact me by a method they know I use. Anet doesn’t have that. I don’t use twitter. I don’t like twitter. I don’t care about twitter, and I only use Facebook grudgingly. I prefer email to my email address as a prime form of communication though friends can obviously call me.

If a friend tweets something or posts it on Facebook, I’m not likely to see it for a long long time…if ever. But my friends know that.

If Anet wants to communicate with people, putting it out in one place isn’t really good enough.

Neve.3145:

As you said – there was mention of it.
If a friend texts you some info do you also expect them to send a whatsapp, facebook msg, email, handwritten letter, leave a msg on your answering machine and mailbox and come by in person to make sure you got the msg?

With the exception of Facebook all of those examples are direct forms of communication; if your friend texted you then he directly contacted you with the message, presumably because he wanted you to actually get the message.

Your friend wouldn’t post the message using a form of communication that he knows you don’t use and expect that you’d somehow get it.

ArenaNet have in the past, created posts on their website, created forum posts, sent in game mails, tweets, regular old emails and reddit posts. They can do all these things they simply chose not to.

Vayne.8563:

…

I agree

The one thing next to direct mail is the official forum. ANETs forum.
twitter, fbook, tumblr, reddit, etc etc is nice but has nothing to do with GW2 < for me

Just a flesh wound.3589:

^ That’s true. They got burned one too many times. It got rather frustrating for them as you can tell by this post (highlighted section).

Josh Foreman:

(…)

2. Don’t assume the reason that things are the way they are due to developer incompetence, laziness, apathy, stubbornness, greed, selfishness, lust or any of the other deadly sins. There are other possibilities beside developer personal defects. “Just” changing one thing usually has ramifications on other things that are hard to anticipate. An MMO is an incredibly complex web of interdependencies, and tweaking any individual part runs the risk of breaking many other parts. That’s why we don’t typically jump to instant ‘fixes’ (even though it’s tempting!) and why things that seem like obvious problems can take a lot longer to address than many would intuitively think they should. There is no MAKE IT WORK button that we refuse to push out of spite. Even if that were the case, it just doesn’t make sense to insult the party you are requesting something from. In what part of the real world does that ever work? No one wants to ‘slap you in the face’ or make the game less fun. We love you guys, and are thrilled that people play our game!

(…)

Thats all a good post and good info, but their solution led to several worry state of the game mechanics.
Ic it has they burned themselves….to adress the game to a certain type of players instead, the players that accept anything they do if theres easy rewards (wich thends to end in those people saying rewards are hard to get).
This game is mostly about pve, even classes were designed to pve only, and they do a strange balance called metas over time to well… kinda adress it in a slacker way, since they tend to shutdown one gameplay for another.

Its complex, yes it is, but the base or core is not set or not stable eneught and tends to be devianated from a certain path wich imo is what happened every time, what they do to close on issue open other several issue, instead of focus in a simple and clean solution at long term that will open path for more easy improvements later they suearch for a temporary solutions that will ocupy them more than anything else.
Sometimes the best solution is the easiest to implement not the harder one, a good solutions is something that is easier to do and its elegament at the same time.

4years have passed and we still discuss what we were discussing 4years ago, and for the looks of it what is wrong it will even worse with the next game aditions, it will more of the same that HoT added, and everything will start from the beggining.

I think Anet needs to stop a little bit put the papers on the table and see what can be done, and tweak in a simple way so their balance patch arent a disgrace most of the time..
This game is a fork from its previous engine i believe some stuff could be re-dezigned(as in re-introduced/re-used) with what we already have from gw2.

Neve.3145:

If a friend texts you some info do you also expect them to send a whatsapp, facebook msg, email, handwritten letter, leave a msg on your answering machine and mailbox and come by in person to make sure you got the msg?

ANet is not my friend: they are company with whom I do business. If they want me to do more business, they need to communicate in a way that ensures that I get the message, without feeling like spam.

So no, they shouldn’t send a lot of types of mail (voice, electronic, or via other app mail).

They could, however, use all the ‘broadcast’ tools at their disposal. It’s cheap, it’s easy enough to program a bot to do it, and it ensures that as many of us learn about what’s going as possible.

Successful bloggers know to update their blog regularly and to update twitter/fb etc to keep the eyeballs. Successful advertising attempts to address people in all the places they might be found, not just in the first place people are likely to be.

I get why it doesn’t happen. It seems like busy work and they don’t exactly have a huge communication team. The folks they do have are extremely busy already and do some amazing stuff in their areas of focus. They each already have some pet projects. This is among those “one more things” that just keeps getting pushed off, because it’s important, but not urgent. “We really should update the twitter feed about this…um, well next time.”

All the same, there are plenty of people who are looking to spend cash on the gem shop, if only the right thing shows up — it’s a minor tragedy that the only way the have to find out that there’s a sale is to logon (and look at the gem shop) or be lucky enough to see a forum/reddit thread mentioning it.

tl;dr ANet can (and should imo) cross post more often, to easily reach more of its intended audience.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

DeceiverX.8361:

The difference is they need to communicate intent and actively discuss how to improve the game rather than just pushing changes with no interaction.

No, they really don’t “need” to do anything. A lot of us want them to communicate more information more often and in more depth. A lot of us want them to engage in back & forth, about details of the game important to us.

But they can, and have, pushed out changes to their games for, oh, the entire duration of the franchise, without that. And we’ve not always been pleased with the results regardless.

DeceiverX.8361:

Major successful companies take the feedback and in particular, provide justification on why or why not they made or didn’t make changes.

There are plenty of major successful companies that never worry about customer feedback or only about the feedback from a tiny minority. Other companies stick to gathering feedback in very controlled ways, via surveys and focus groups, and the general public never hears a word about it.

---

I’m all for better communication by ANet. In particular, I think they miss out on some low-cost, high benefit types of things (for example: consistently cross-posting on Reddit, the forums, their official blog, their official Twitter, and official Facebook).

But let’s not pretend that they are somehow required to do this by some rules of commerce laid down at Harvard Business School or set in stone by the Alliance of MMO Producers.

tl;dr some of us would like better communication; it’s up to them to decide how important that is.

Unless the company has direct access to mass-market data such that the direct interaction can be bypassed, and then fully utilizes analytic tools to determine what to do based on this data (a la Google), or is in an economic situation where there’s a dependency on their goods/services (grocery stores, military contractors, ISP’s, etc.), that feedback and communication is critical to running a business well today given our inter-connectivity. It’s not an ethical responsibility, but strictly a business one. It’s why companies outsource their support; so long as the job gets done, even if the quality drops, it doesn’t matter as long as customers are at least retained.

They’re not obligated to doing anything; you’re absolutely right. But we’re also not obligated in any way shape or form to care about the success of their company or buy their product, nor should a consumer base anything on a company’s past performance/brand loyalty when making the decision to buying a new product. If they want more money, they’re going to need to improve in this area. It’s just that simple.

That simple? Are you guaranteeing more income if ArenaNet, once again, talks about future plans that may or may not materialize?

I wouldn’t, but then, I don’t have the education nor experience with marketing or running a MMORPG studio.

DeceiverX.8361:

But we’re also not obligated in any way shape or form to care about the success of their company or buy their product, nor should a consumer base anything on a company’s past performance/brand loyalty when making the decision to buying a new product.

No, certainly we’re not obligated. Fact is: people do care about past performance, people do have brand loyalty, and a lot of people simply don’t care about what a company says.

DeceiverX.8361:

If they want more money, they’re going to need to improve in this area. It’s just that simple.

You keep saying that they need to — they don’t. ANet, like many companies, has thrived without it.

There are lots of ways for companies to be successful; engaging in back & forth with customers is one (and that doesn’t always work). Having a dedicated team with bold vision is another (and sure, that doesn’t always work either).

Neve.3145:

As you said – there was mention of it.
If a friend texts you some info do you also expect them to send a whatsapp, facebook msg, email, handwritten letter, leave a msg on your answering machine and mailbox and come by in person to make sure you got the msg?

As I said before, Anet did mention this upcoming change. It’s that in my opinion, they choose a form that did not adequately communicate that to many people. A lot of us missed that message and as a result lost something of considerable value. It’s not the end of the world, but it is very disappointing and I would just like to avoid a similar situation in the future.

You are asking for better communication from a company who’s employees spend most of their time posting on reddit and tumblr or whatnot.
They’ve been criticized for the amateurish communication for years now, doesn’t look like anything is going to ever change.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

^I’ve always loved that post. It should be required reading for all.

Sacrificing my 1 post per half hour for this, but yes, it’s a good read. (the whole post)

Some days the devs get the best of me but I’m certain it’s because of my high expectations of them, I played more than 7,400 hours for a reason.