Guild Wars 2

Let me start with a question in the AMA with Chris Whiteside:

46. Are we going to see an increase to the regularity of community communications, like a weekly newsletter? Is it possible to have more direct involvement with fansites or non-commercial sites with this increase of information flow? A regular release of insights and info may help relieve some of the need to do a 10 hr AMA in the future.

“i love the goal here and it is an area i have been thinking about a lot today. Specifically a more frequent conversation between the community and the team. Still brainstorming around it, so watch this space.”

This is just my take on what the game needs badly right now.

Communication.

Unless it is a common belief from the company as a whole that the forum community is an unimportant minority then i do feel we deserve to have some overdue questions answered. There are some very, very active threads out there which people are trying to keep alive, in order to pass a point across. We do know the point is made and that it is read. Moderation is strong in the forums, so someone definitely reads these threads. But for a reason unknown to me, answers are very very selective.

Where are the answers? Where are the patch notes regarding buffs, nerfs, changes in mechanics? What we get is a very very abstract representation(if any) of what we see in the game. Show us more details, let us theorycraft about the things we love in the game.

Where is your long lost communication on the forums?

And most importantly: Where is your transparency?

EDIT:
Thanks for the Mod.

I would wish to specify my concerns and would like others to also do that but i don’t want this post to be merged under a thread 10-20 pages long since this will render it practically unreadable.

Who ever posts below, please be constructive. This is not a whine with cheese and wine post
EDIT: Changed the title to be more relevant to the subject

And while you’re at it, mind communicating from places other than Reddit? Most people don’t use it. Try your own website, please, ArenaNet.

Chuo.4238:

And while you’re at it, mind communicating from places other than Reddit? Most people don’t use it. Try your own website, please, ArenaNet.

This, i wholeheartedly agree with.

Chuo.4238:

And while you’re at it, mind communicating from places other than Reddit? Most people don’t use it. Try your own website, please, ArenaNet.

They do put some stuff in News and Announcements, but you are correct they spend too much time passing info along on Reddit and not via their own websites.

Its ridiculous. They said they want to communicate more and what are they doing? Zero communication since AMA….reddit doesnt count for me, i never used it and i never will…

Well We need info ! Its what keeps a lot of people clinging onto hope things will get better

The forum community is a minority. Certainly not an unimportant one, but a minority nontheless.
Once a thread is posted, a point is made, the interaction is fulfilled. Don’t wait for devs to answer you, that is not the purpose of this forum, and it never was.

Granted, more regular announcements wouldn’t go amiss.

Naqaj.6219:

The forum community is a minority. Certainly not an unimportant one, but a minority nontheless.
Once a thread is posted, a point is made, the interaction is fulfilled. Don’t wait for devs to answer you, that is not the purpose of this forum, and it never was.

Granted, more regular announcements wouldn’t go amiss.

I am definitely not asking for a response to this thread. Just merely expressing some sentiments. All that i am personally asking for is transparency.

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to inform you that your concerns have been noticed and forwarded to the team. Please, keep your feedback and opinions coming, anything you can provide us is welcome.

Thanks for your understanding

Dying to see their comments on loot and DR lolol.

My question is: Will DR be removed and loot buffed dramatically or should I just go ahead and quit the game indefinitely, this is a serious question for many I think.

Until a satisfactory answer me, my friends and family will remain in pandaland.

No monthly fee doesn’t save you from horrible design.

Also along the lines of communication: WvWvW shutdowns…how about a 10 minute IN GAME warning. 3 nights (NA time) this week, the servers were reset. Towers, keeps, etc were under siege, siege equipment lost, etc…pretty crappy.

I also agree that i would like to hear more about the changes in the game, especially every time there is a patch that changes things in my gameplay.

Also, i would like to see more communication on what the company feels about the current state of the game in terms of some areas such as orr which is really hard for me to go since i die a lot, the state of the tradepost and how things are so expensive nowadays for new players and some other issues.

Thank you

Rukia.4802:

Dying to see their comments on loot and DR lolol.

My question is: Will DR be removed and loot buffed dramatically or should I just go ahead and quit the game indefinitely, this is a serious question for many I think.

Until a satisfactory answer me, my friends and family will remain in pandaland.

No monthly fee doesn’t save you from horrible design.

Lets keep it constructive. Everyone is affected by this but there are many reasons to keep playing even with DR.

Naqaj.6219:

The forum community is a minority. Certainly not an unimportant one, but a minority nontheless.
Once a thread is posted, a point is made, the interaction is fulfilled. Don’t wait for devs to answer you, that is not the purpose of this forum, and it never was.

Granted, more regular announcements wouldn’t go amiss.

I don’t think you know what a forum is for…

b : a public meeting place for open discussion
c : a medium (as a newspaper or online service) of open discussion or expression of ideas
2
: a judicial body or assembly : court
3
a : a public meeting or lecture involving audience discussion
b : a program (as on radio or television) involving discussion of a problem usually by several authorities

I agree, more communication is needed, and through official channels.

I would like to add that we need straight and onest answers, not PR bullkitten and half-thruts.

Ath.2531:

Lets keep it constructive. Everyone is affected by this but there are many reasons to keep playing even with DR.

I think so too but each time I log I start to see this game more like a boring job then entertaiment. Heavy DR is ruining the joy of playing for many, not only those who want to make some gold or are on a hunt for Legendary.

I bet many people would be glad if they had at least few sentences about current situation with DR/loot tables/whatever written by ANet official. At least after some explanation few tinfoil hats would fall off and people would become less paranoid. Unless, ofc, there is something wrong with DR/loot (personally I think there is).

I thought the communication was good in the start, they showed themselves a lot and spoke to the fans, but after the release they have become more subtle about things and do not speak to us as much as before.

I don’t think websites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit should be used too much. Fine to some degree but not as your main source.

Especially not Reddit, the layout is horrible and it’s hard to navigate.

Even though you might not communicate as much as before, we still want pictures of Colin Johanson’s smile.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi All,

Thanks for your feedback. I am currently out of the office and return in the New Year, at which time i intend to do another Q and A with the community. In the interim rest assured that we constantly look at the forums, evaluate feedback, discuss opinions and work toward many of the issues and suggestions communicated therein. We very much appreciate both your feedback and support, as it is integral to the evolution of the game and our relationship with you all as a community of people that care very much about Guild Wars 2.

I am looking forward to getting the chance to connect with you all again soon. Until then i hope you are enjoying the Wintersday Celebrations and the holiday season in general.

Chris

An Unexpectedly received and wholeheartedly appreciated response.

Looking forward to the AMA Chris!

Chuo.4238:

And while you’re at it, mind communicating from places other than Reddit? Most people don’t use it. Try your own website, please, ArenaNet.

I second this post. I don’t use Reddit; I can’t stand how it’s formatted. It would be really nice to be able to find out everything that I will want to know on the official site rather than having to go hunt down the information elsewhere.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi All,

Thanks for your feedback. I am currently out of the office and return in the New Year, at which time i intend to do another Q and A with the community. In the interim rest assured that we constantly look at the forums, evaluate feedback, discuss opinions and work toward many of the issues and suggestions communicated therein. We very much appreciate both your feedback and support, as it is integral to the evolution of the game and our relationship with you all as a community of people that care very much about Guild Wars 2.

I am looking forward to getting the chance to connect with you all again soon. Until then i hope you are enjoying the Wintersday Celebrations and the holiday season in general.

Chris

Thanks, Chris. Can I suggest that you encourage an arenanet employee to post some updates on this thread:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Change-in-loot-parameters-or-a-bug-Merged/

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi All,

Thanks for your feedback. I am currently out of the office and return in the New Year, at which time i intend to do another Q and A with the community. In the interim rest assured that we constantly look at the forums, evaluate feedback, discuss opinions and work toward many of the issues and suggestions communicated therein. We very much appreciate both your feedback and support, as it is integral to the evolution of the game and our relationship with you all as a community of people that care very much about Guild Wars 2.

I am looking forward to getting the chance to connect with you all again soon. Until then i hope you are enjoying the Wintersday Celebrations and the holiday season in general.

Chris

Merriest of wishes for your holiday and we look forward to chatting with you when you get back

Moderator.1462:

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to inform you that your concerns have been noticed and forwarded to the team. Please, keep your feedback and opinions coming, anything you can provide us is welcome.

Thanks for your understanding

At first, I struggled with how to best express the feedback I want to give. I think there are a few things.

#1, Don’t give us room to worry about “stealth” changes.

If you are loading a patch to fix an exploit, put out patch notes that say “fixing exploits.” We understand that there are certain areas where you can’t get into specifics (you don’t state exact exploits so that you don’t enourage hackers to look for a patter, for example.) If you are adding instrumentation to the code, or making a change to make a setting configurable, let us know those things in vague terms.

If you are going to make a change that I’m going to notice, let me know in the patch notes. If you have to keep separate patch notes per area so that it’s concise, that’s fine.

#2, Silence isn’t golden.

There are times that something is going to happen that a number of members of the community are concerned about. It is common for a company to become defensive and go through the effort to issue a “statement.” Other times it is decided “we’ll let our code do the talking.” And in other times, it may just be that the same issue has been brought up multiple cases. All of these situations lead to significant periods of silence. That silence saps the community’s spirit. Give us early “We’re looking into it” and regular “We’re working on it.” And if it’s something you want to put out major communication on say, “We’re putting something together to respond to this and will have it together by.” For this one instance, I would expect you to give us a date and stick to it.

#3, (but most important) Build relationships

In Dev Tracker, I see some of the designers jumping into discussions on a regular basis. Literally, they are posting every day. I would encourage the rest of the design team to set aside time for this as well. Your engagement with the community is as valuable as your other work. It’s not just that you’re quieting the “squeaky wheel.” If you take the time to build engagement with us, you will also build trust to remove some of the tinfoil hat nonsense. Additionally, you will slowly build a team of folks who are your advocates in the larger community, instead of your detractors. I see players on these forums every day who are completely disillusioned. There are various reasons they stay in contact, but I believe a number of the them stay because they know that this game has amazing potential and they want to be its advocates. Building relationships through regular interaction is going to go far in turning discontented customers into word-of-mouth sales-people.

I could likely say more, but the wall of text is probably well large enough, so… Thanks.

I miss the communication we use to get with the developers back when the game was in alpha and beta testing, they really cared about what we thought and changes were made very very quickly. I remember playing the Beta weekends and seeing big changes made within the month between the last Beta weekend.

Now that the game has launched things have significantly declined rapidly, communication between players and developers feels very robotic, lots of very obvious copy paste responses. Lots of questions being ignored and problems going months with out a fix.

I would love it if we could return to a pre-launch style of communication where it felt like we were talking to fans of a great game and not just workers behind a desk.

The last Q and A done on reddit ignored almost all of the most signification questions that were gathered on these forums, questions that to this day go un-answered, im glad that another Q and A is being planned but if its anything like the last one i dont think its worth doing.

Dont make the same mistake other MMO’s have made, be honest with us, admit your mistakes, shout them from the rooftops, talk to us like you would talk to a friend face to face.

I think that perhaps the promise to release big patches every month has become to overwhelming for the developers, i would personally prefer to wait longer for patches if it meant better quality and more thought put into gameplay…. the last thing we need is another epic failure like the Karka patch.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

I am looking forward to getting the chance to connect with you all again soon. Until then i hope you are enjoying the Wintersday Celebrations and the holiday season in general.

Chris

Thanks, Chris. Will you PLEASE not do it on Reddit or some other third party website? Please do it on your own site so more people know where to go to find it.

I’ve given up entirely on the forums, and the Reddit community. Questions and concerns pretty much never get answered, and if they do, it’s usually by some elitist jerk who doesn’t even bother to read the entire post. VERY rarely, an ANet employee will reply, and that’s great, but why have an ENTIRE TEAM of community managers when we get, at most, two responses to legitimate concerns a day, one of which is either a repeat of information already posted elsewhere, or simply a dodge?

Recently, I’ve become irritated by the lack of guesting. I understand that it wasn’t ready for launch. That’s perfectly cool with me. However, we were told, back in August, that guesting was coming “soon”. After three months, I think it’s not unreasonable to ask for a status update, but there is simply no way to ask this question in a way that has any chance of getting an official response.

I talked some friends into buying the game, but it is completely impossible for us to play together at this time, because my server is full. Yes, I have checked at all hours of the day, and yes, it’s always full. I could server switch, true, but doing so would mean abandoning a second guild of pretty good people just so my friends and I can play together. The way that server population limits work necessitates a solution like guesting, and its’ absence serves to further fracture an already very divided community.

I’ve mentioned this elsewhere today, but instead of a big content patch next month, I’d much rather see some attention paid to these kinds of orphaned features. Guesting, minigames, extended experience (iOS/android apps), personal instance, etc. I believe that we, the community, really want better information on the status of features that have been explicitly promised to us by the dev team. Heck, even saying, “We’re actively working on it, but don’t have an ETA at this time” would at least acknowledge that these features haven’t been forgotten about/given up on. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like we can even expect that.

EDIT: Chris Whiteside’s post in this thread, while appreciated, highlights this problem even more. I assume that a sizeable number of people will be getting Guild Wars 2 for xmas. Given the recent win of “game of the year” from gamespot, and likely others to come, I think this is a reasonable assumption. These new players are going to face these exact same problems, only on a potentially much larger scale.

Ath.2531:

Chuo.4238:

And while you’re at it, mind communicating from places other than Reddit? Most people don’t use it. Try your own website, please, ArenaNet.

This, i wholeheartedly agree with.

I do too. Since starting this game wondering what’s going on people have directed me to Reddit, wiki, news interviews, facebook, twitter everywhere but the official forums for valuable much needed communication about major issues.

I would also like to add that we are despirately in need of an answer regarding drop rates, Diminishing Returns, and Magic Find. in this forum post specifically

Yup, guesting is the top issue concerning our guild/players union. The leader created a cross server guild specifically because guesting was supposed to be part of the game. And we would also like to know whenever guesting happens, can na and eu players get together? Half of us are in the States, the other half not

Chuo.4238:

And while you’re at it, mind communicating from places other than Reddit? Most people don’t use it. Try your own website, please, ArenaNet.

I’ve never even understood why places do that.

I don’t go to reddit. Probably never will.

I fully expect a company to use it’s own website as it’s communication base. If it wants to post something here first, then repost it to another site that’s fine, but every user of this game should be able to come to the official site of the game and expect all public communications to be found there.

Moderator.1462:

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to inform you that your concerns have been noticed and forwarded to the team. Please, keep your feedback and opinions coming, anything you can provide us is welcome.

Thanks for your understanding

Thank you for inviting us to submit feedback, Moderators.

One of the feedback I would like to leave is to improve communications with your players, especially in large threads such as the one at

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Change-in-loot-parameters-or-a-bug-Merged/

Please don’t delete this message as “off topic” like my earlier message, this is fully on topic as far as communication goes, and it is a feedback, as the moderators asked for.

Forgot to mention also that the practice of merging tangentially-related threads into huge megathreads that are impossible to follow HAS to stop. It makes people with legitimate concerns feel like they matter much less than keeping the forums looking neat.

just keeping this alive so that more posters can see this as a positive sign of communication to come

Well Bless my Blade and soul another year in the Survarium that is MMO world and once again we see that communication is the key, its not enough to rest on your Lineage and hope for Repopulation of your servers you need a Pathfinder before you end up like Everquest.

A lot of people will have some spare cash does it end up int the BLTC or is another box a better investment?

here is a statement made at the end of another thread by Mark Katzbach a Community Special Operations person for Anet:

Okay everybody, this argument is getting a bit circular now. What’s important is the following.

The forum population is not a majority, but does provide valuable feedback which we do take into account, along with feedback from other sources.
The silent majority is not all in-favor or against. Their opinions vary as much as any group of people’s opinions tend to.
They are players just like you. They voice their opinions by either playing or not playing.
Others not on the forums show their opinions on their personal blogs, fansites, twitter and facebook.
Everybody’s opinions are important and valuable.

I hope this clears some things up. I’m going to close this thread now. Please continue to provide us with feedback to help us to continue improving Guild Wars 2.

Krosslite.1950:

here is a statement made at the end of another thread by Mark Katzbach a Community Special Operations person for Anet:

Okay everybody, this argument is getting a bit circular now. What’s important is the following.

The forum population is not a majority, but does provide valuable feedback which we do take into account, along with feedback from other sources.
The silent majority is not all in-favor or against. Their opinions vary as much as any group of people’s opinions tend to.
They are players just like you. They voice their opinions by either playing or not playing.
Others not on the forums show their opinions on their personal blogs, fansites, twitter and facebook.
Everybody’s opinions are important and valuable.

I hope this clears some things up. I’m going to close this thread now. Please continue to provide us with feedback to help us to continue improving Guild Wars 2.

The point of this thread…

Your head…..

Seriously, they should be gathering data/comments/etc… from outside this forum. However, they should be using their official site(s) for communicating outward more often. It’s pretty sad when game changes are on Reddit before they pop up on the official site.

Also, maybe if the mods were not so heavy handed in the forums, more people would be willing to post in the official forums. Most of my guildmates refuse to post on Anet forums because of the moderators.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi All,

Thanks for your feedback. I am currently out of the office and return in the New Year, at which time i intend to do another Q and A with the community. In the interim rest assured that we constantly look at the forums, evaluate feedback, discuss opinions and work toward many of the issues and suggestions communicated therein. We very much appreciate both your feedback and support, as it is integral to the evolution of the game and our relationship with you all as a community of people that care very much about Guild Wars 2.

I am looking forward to getting the chance to connect with you all again soon. Until then i hope you are enjoying the Wintersday Celebrations and the holiday season in general.

Chris

As Chris has responded here, we’re going to close this thread. Once Chris is back from his vacation and more details are fleshed out about his aforementioned Q&A, we will post an update to the forums.

Cheers, and enjoy Wintersday!