I am afraid that the survey provided will not result in positive changes to the game. The way the questions were asked will more than likely result in ANet coming to conclusions, but without knowing why.
For example, one of the questions was:
“Of the features you disliked above, what did you not enjoy? (Select MULTIPLE from list):
- It was not fun
Now, what does that even mean? Was fun a feature? What are the reasons I agree or disagree with that? Was it not fun because I’m playing it on a 7 year old laptop? Was it not fun because I enjoy flight simulators more? Was it not fun because it just wasn’t interesting?
For me, the event was “fun” in theory. I enjoyed the idea of the event, but found it extremely not fun because of technical issues, time crunches, lag, disconnects, Zergs, invisible enemies/players, etc.
The survey also asked:
“It was too hard”
Ya, it was crazy hard….but not because the enemies were hard. It was hard because I was getting killed by invisible creatures. It was hard because bugged events didn’t allow me to progress, thus requiring me to put in extra time I didn’t want to spend trying to squeeze in a completion before the event ended. I found it hard because the lag and the AoE spam was so crazy I could barely move. I found it hard because my group members and myself got booted to overflows which were not as full. It was hard because the jumping puzzle was full of Norn and I couldn’t see my character.
Was it too hard in terms of gameplay? Not really….but I don’t think this will give an accurate representation of why the game was hard.
The final line of questions was totally absurd.
“One-time-only events are something I look forward to and plan to login for”
“One-time-only events are a unique feature to Guild Wars 2 that I enjoy”
“One-time-only events allow me to impact the world of Tyria”
“The final battle against the Ancient Karka should only happen once”
“The final battle against the Ancient Karka should happen multiple times”
What? How can I accurately answer these questions using "agree to disagree?
These are not “agree / disagree” questions. These all require some sort of context to be relevant. For example, yes, I look forward to events very much, but do I agree with them being held over a three day period and requiring a lot of hours to complete?
Yes, I think the battle should have happened multiple times, but not for individual players. Each player should have had a chance to experience the content once, but not on ANets schedule. I would have loved to sit down with my girlfriend and 20 other players and worked my way through the content to effect the server I selected. But what I got was booted to some random overflow, multiple times, and had no idea if what I was doing would effect anything, or have any meaning.
I think you get my point. This survey will do little to actually address the concerns of these one time events. ANet needs to select a random sample of their player base and ask them if they would be interested in completing an in depth survey regarding the event.
If the sample is large enough, random, and the questions asked are well formed and concise, the ANet will get a much better idea of what needs to be improved. An open survey, online, with no context, will provide junk data and false positives/negatives.
I really like what this company wants to do, and I feel for them. As someone who owns their own company I feel for them. They want to offer the world, but get smacked with reality more often than not. The problem is they continue to make avoidable mistakes by assuming they know what’s best in all situations.
Until they are humbled a bit and realize that they need to take a step back and evaluate the situation with a logical and skeptical eye, they will continue to make uninformed and brash decisions that will confuse and annoy their players.
If you took the survey, then please post your actual thoughts here. Below I will quote the questions so you can provide your feedback. If you haven’t taken the survey, I encourage you to not do so. Spend your time writing a clear, and well worded response to each of their questions here.