Guild Wars 2

This is not directly a thread to discuss the legendary weapon issue. Rather, this is a thread to discuss the broader topic of dev-to-player communication.

For quite some time, we the community have been heckling A-net on their inability to communicate their plans and intentions. We often grew frustrated when we saw so little dev comments in the forums. We asked ourselves “do they even care?” or “The heck is A-net doing?!” We spent so long “in the dark” that when an A-net employee would finally arrive to provide us with details, we would lap it up like a thirsty dog. This lead to the community begging for more communication from A-net so as to know their plans and pathway. This is, understandably, a very difficult thing for them to do because of the lucid nature of game development. Take, for example, this ancient image of what the Tequatl fight was originally planned to look like [see attached] shortly before release.

While I wouldn’t say A-net has exactly completely opened up on their ideas yet, I believe they have taken a step in the right direction by announcing their plans for Legendary weapons. Now, whether or not the plans for said weapons are good/bad is up for another discussion. What I want to ask today is:

What is a good way for A-net to continue to improve being open to the community, but not drop expectations, raise false hopes, or cause unrest through controversial in-the-works decisions?

How about they start by having everything that is included in an expansion actually available upon purchase rather than a year or more down the road? IMO, that would be a really good place to start.

I don’t believe this will ever happen, though.

Celtic Lady.3729:

How about they start by having everything that is included in an expansion actually available upon purchase rather than a year or more down the road? IMO, that would be a really good place to start.

I don’t believe this will ever happen, though.

So, before HoT was announced, would you have been willing to wait an extra year or so for them to finish developing its content?

Or

Would you have rather A-net not included legendary weapons as a selling point?

There are always going to be over expectant false hopers full of unrest. Nature of the beast. How can they mitigate that, or pull the rug out from under it?

Hmm. I don’t frequent the ESO forums but when I do I see a ton of dev communication about what’s coming in the next few months, what they’re working on, Q&A threads that then get picked up in their Friday live stream, etc. They aren’t afraid to be human and admit to typos and overwork, they do scrap systems that aren’t working as they want, but they keep on telling the players what they’re working on and whether it’ll be done on time or delayed.

Sure there are negative threads there (maybe more than I notice as I only dip my toes in when looking for updates). Sure there are cries of incompetence or stupidity. And no they don’t reveal everything in its early stages. Yet overall there is a real sense of ongoing hard work coming out of Zenimax and a lot of hard info for players to discuss.

Now, some of that is because they have a PTR so they do release things for testing before they release them live, so it’s less vital for them to keep it under their hat until the last moment. Even so I think Zenimax does an excellent communication job and maybe the parts of what they do that would work for ArenaNet would be worth studying.

Razor.9872:

Celtic Lady.3729:

How about they start by having everything that is included in an expansion actually available upon purchase rather than a year or more down the road? IMO, that would be a really good place to start.

I don’t believe this will ever happen, though.

So, before HoT was announced, would you have been willing to wait an extra year or so for them to finish developing its content?

Or

Would you have rather A-net not included legendary weapons as a selling point?

I honestly wish they’d finished the expansion before selling it. No question about it.

Razor.9872:

This is not directly a thread to discuss the legendary weapon issue. Rather, this is a thread to discuss the broader topic of dev-to-player communication.

For quite some time, we the community have been heckling A-net on their inability to communicate their plans and intentions. We often grew frustrated when we saw so little dev comments in the forums. We asked ourselves “do they even care?” or “The heck is A-net doing?!” We spent so long “in the dark” that when an A-net employee would finally arrive to provide us with details, we would lap it up like a thirsty dog. This lead to the community begging for more communication from A-net so as to know their plans and pathway. This is, understandably, a very difficult thing for them to do because of the lucid nature of game development. Take, for example, this ancient image of what the Tequatl fight was originally planned to look like [see attached] shortly before release.

While I wouldn’t say A-net has exactly completely opened up on their ideas yet, I believe they have taken a step in the right direction by announcing their plans for Legendary weapons. Now, whether or not the plans for said weapons are good/bad is up for another discussion. What I want to ask today is:

What is a good way for A-net to continue to improve being open to the community, but not drop expectations, raise false hopes, or cause unrest through controversial in-the-works decisions?

I agree that communication and transparency is a good thing, and out of all of this, I will applaud them for being open with us about this. The problem with why people are so angry, however, is past the communication side. This isn’t similar to changing Teq because this is something that has been promised to us since 2013. It was supposed to be finished by end of 2013, didn’t happen. Heard nothing about it in 2014. In 2015 we were told it would be coming, but behind the pay wall of HoT. Now we are being told it isn’t coming. THAT’S the problem at hand here. You can’t market something as part of a product and then after people pay for it say, “Naw, it’s too much work.” It’s one thing to change a random development thing that was never promised as part of a product, another thing entirely to sell something as part of a product, and then pull it after people pay.

Donari.5237:

There are always going to be over expectant false hopers full of unrest. Nature of the beast. How can they mitigate that, or pull the rug out from under it?

Hmm. I don’t frequent the ESO forums but when I do I see a ton of dev communication about what’s coming in the next few months, what they’re working on, Q&A threads that then get picked up in their Friday live stream, etc. They aren’t afraid to be human and admit to typos and overwork, they do scrap systems that aren’t working as they want, but they keep on telling the players what they’re working on and whether it’ll be done on time or delayed.

Sure there are negative threads there (maybe more than I notice as I only dip my toes in when looking for updates). Sure there are cries of incompetence or stupidity. And no they don’t reveal everything in its early stages. Yet overall there is a real sense of ongoing hard work coming out of Zenimax and a lot of hard info for players to discuss.

Now, some of that is because they have a PTR so they do release things for testing before they release them live, so it’s less vital for them to keep it under their hat until the last moment. Even so I think Zenimax does an excellent communication job and maybe the parts of what they do that would work for ArenaNet would be worth studying.

Sounds interesting. I’ll have to browse those forums myself. Maybe I can distill advance to A-net in easier-to-define terms.

eleshazar.6902:

Razor.9872:

This is not directly a thread to discuss the legendary weapon issue. Rather, this is a thread to discuss the broader topic of dev-to-player communication.

For quite some time, we the community have been heckling A-net on their inability to communicate their plans and intentions. We often grew frustrated when we saw so little dev comments in the forums. We asked ourselves “do they even care?” or “The heck is A-net doing?!” We spent so long “in the dark” that when an A-net employee would finally arrive to provide us with details, we would lap it up like a thirsty dog. This lead to the community begging for more communication from A-net so as to know their plans and pathway. This is, understandably, a very difficult thing for them to do because of the lucid nature of game development. Take, for example, this ancient image of what the Tequatl fight was originally planned to look like [see attached] shortly before release.

While I wouldn’t say A-net has exactly completely opened up on their ideas yet, I believe they have taken a step in the right direction by announcing their plans for Legendary weapons. Now, whether or not the plans for said weapons are good/bad is up for another discussion. What I want to ask today is:

What is a good way for A-net to continue to improve being open to the community, but not drop expectations, raise false hopes, or cause unrest through controversial in-the-works decisions?

I agree that communication and transparency is a good thing, and out of all of this, I will applaud them for being open with us about this. The problem with why people are so angry, however, is past the communication side. This isn’t similar to changing Teq because this is something that has been promised to us since 2013. It was supposed to be finished by end of 2013, didn’t happen. Heard nothing about it in 2014. In 2015 we were told it would be coming, but behind the pay wall of HoT. Now we are being told it isn’t coming. THAT’S the problem at hand here. You can’t market something as part of a product and then after people pay for it say, “Naw, it’s too much work.” It’s one thing to change a random development thing that was never promised as part of a product, another thing entirely to sell something as part of a product, and then pull it after people pay.

I would like to clarify: I used the Tequatl example to show how drastically things can change within the industry’s production processes.