Guild Wars 2

Hey there.

I hope this won’t get infracted because of calling out devs, it’s not my intention to flame or something like that, I just want some answers.
If you guys take a look on the professions subforums, severals months ago there were some devs posting there a bit (not every day, even not every week but they were there).
What did happen that changed that? Where are the transparency you always talk about?
I’m not telling you to post every single day, I just want (at least) the same level of talk that we had in the past, is that asking for so much?

What do you guys think about this?

PS.: Sorry if my English is bad, it’s not my natural language and I’m still learning it

State of the Game interview last week:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCUvIrH2BlU

I’d say that there were multiple issues:

1) You have to find a dev for each class which the forum population considers to be “competent”. Sometimes a dev would post something in a class forum and the regulars of that forum would erupt with laughter as they teased / mocked the dev for not understanding their class.

2) Then you’d have to find a dev who had thick enough skin to get those kind of verbal barbs from the player base. Fair or not, they will become the target of any dissatisfaction that a player has with that class.

3) At this point, people would expect the class dev to answer questions that ArenaNet isn’t willing to publicly respond to. Or players would want to debate class philosophy with the dev. Basically they’d want the dev to get drawn into conversations that ArenaNet wouldn’t want to get into as a company policy (since people could confuse that dev’s specific opions with ArenaNet’s company opinions on a given subject).

4) As if this isn’t bad enough, it doesn’t even touch the cliche dev posts that people expect. “What do you think can be improved in this class.” Those threads always get insane. People can’t even agree with each other, let alone a dev. The amount of moronic ideas, attempts to power trip, or general verbal toxicity are just too great. You never want to ask for someone’s opinion if you don’t want it, especially from people who could be considered fanatical. Yet this is exactly the kind of question that the community wants a dev to ask, which creates a weird paradox.

5) Some class forums are just emotionally toxic. The forums of some of my classes are so bad on this site that I will rarely visit them. They are filled with verbal insults and people with very narrow ideas about how their class should operate. These people then get into large “debates” about various class subjects and attempt to verbally bludgeon their opponents into submission. (I’ve read those threads and most of them have clearly move beyond the “lively debate” stage.) What kind of ArenaNet employee would voluntarily choose to enter that kind of work environment as part of their job? I know that I wouldn’t want that kind of burden.