Guild Wars 2

As one of few but many, i have spent countless hours in guildwars 2. So much that i literally have everything i want (skin wise/equip wise).

You might consider me as a hardcore player.

The few things i enjoy at this moment is getting weapon ticket skins, guild runs, pvp and organised wvw.

I have never liked the farming mentality and only done it a few times to spend time waiting for updates and so on. So in general there is no need to farm if you just like playing and set your sights on some goals equipment wise to get.

There are a few things that bother me, the balance in general and a lack of goal (since i have already achieved it and i feel theres not much else).

But thats not what i wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about how everyone in this game seems to want something different then the next bloke around, if there is someone saying Yay theres always someone saying Nay. There are people who loved the living story 1 ,there are people who hated the living story 1, there are people who love the hardcore mentality and there are people who only abide by the cassual laws of maximum 1 hours a week play.

I have always wondered why there is such a diverse group of people still in guildwars 2 with such different goals. It is all because the game has the potential to become anyones dreamgame because there is somuch that could be done. But having the hope and potential from a cassuall player who hopes he too can get a legendary some day, in the upcomming week… Or the hardcore who wants that 6th legendary because it was such a road to get to collecting so many… those people will never agree, Guildwars 2 is in my eyes in a stalemate situation, trying to catter all various different people who play there game whilst still making the game Anet/NCsoft wants to make.

I always wondered why there was never an option to ‘vote’ for new content, ofcourse we all remember the cutthroat politics voting but thats not exacly what i mean.

There are so many complaints, why cant we do this on an actuall political level, make votes about the biggest wants in guildwars and see who backs it up or wants it totally different, give out polls every week, and if its possible every day to figure out what the brunt of the community wants from this game. This way people will not live in the illusion of ‘hope’. But will know what they get, ofcourse some people will leave due to this. But i dont feel after all these years that guildwars shouldnt set straight what it wants to achieve WITH its community. so the game can trully flourish.

In the end a happy customer will always return. So instead of trying to hook us on something that will eventually fail due to us, the community, having too many different hopes let the people decide and get a great succesfull game with much profits instead!

There are several issues with content voting.

• If most vote for content A, people that wanted the content B will feel frustrated and will pass the impression that content B will never happen, even if that may not be true
• Development takes a LONG time, and after the voting, players will keep asking about said content, also it may not be as viable as the developers thought it could be and if the idea get dropped the players will go crazy.
• It would be even worse if the player base was the ones saying what Anet should do, some popular ideas are impossible or really bad idea financially, and hear Anet refusing those popular ideas would make them look as a bad company.

Those are points from the top of my head.

GW2, at its core, is a beautiful game, but it’s been a long, long time since the devs have really acted like they give a care about it.

And right now, getting everything up and running for China is probably taking any effort they have left to give.

In Season 2 we’ll see the results of that silent period, I hope for the best, otherwise gain back the hopes of the players will be a really hard task.

#CatalansWantToVote !

Jokes aside, I think Belzebu gets your answer. It gets really frustrating when you see that the thing you vote didn’t win, and people would complain like “Why is everyone so stupid that voted yes to that thing?”, thus making those players to enjoy less the game.

And I’m really sure the dev’s get in this forums to check what people think of the game/releases. But:
1. The player’s opinion is not the only point they have in mind when developing new stuff. Remember that they’re a company so they have to make some profit, not only by encourage players to pay, but also spending less resources on it, while keeping a good playerbase happy (which takes us to the second point). If they only took the player’s opinion, I can tell you this game would be dead long time ago.
2. The big problem about a MMO is that you will never have everyone happy for something. There are so many players that’s practically impossible to have everyone agree. So everyone has reasons to “why GW2 is not as good as they said”.

I would say if you don’t agree with something, just write it in here. The devs come check it once every while as feedback and it helps them. There are F2P games that if you try to complain in the forums you get your post deleted (they think that’s a better solution…)

Some of us simply want the game we were paying for.

1. open world focus (where one never had to enter a dungeon for anything)
2. metas/DEs added monthly to every zone, and stayed there.
3. removal of DR so that if you chose you could actually play as a legit farmer without stigma
4. the restoration/balance of all roles in PVE (CC, Healing, Condition builds)
5. the restriction of all Ascended armor to fractal use only. (armor not weapons, because that’s what we were told it was for, fractals with agony resist requirements)
6. making the home customizeable and extremely useful, while adding elements that allow for one to be social easily
7. additions of cosmetics monthly that are not all focused in the store and won’t be restricted to make them cost 500 gold in the TP
8. the restoration of the projects that allow certain functions to occur outside of the game like the mobile/web projects (to track guildies, to see global activity timers, to craft/sell using a web interface)

I don’t think voting will solve the problem because the last time they had a vote it was on topics they pretty much controlled they had very few real concerns that the players had in the forums at the time and the development time on the concerns they did look into took a long time.

DR is necessary or farmers would become overprotective about their spots and then you get the kind of abuse players got from champ train devotees if they took down a champ out of order. And now since megaservers generate underflow maps you aren’t guaranteed to find some deserted map you can farm at your leisure relatively unmolested guesting on a low pop server.

Majority of the playerbase consist of people that are unable to complete simple events that require you do something else than spam attack #1 in a huge blob. Sounds insane to let them have power over anything significant in game

Were you around for the one voting they did, the Kiel/Evon vote with the fractal path as a win? That generated a lot of threads with people upset that they didn’t get the Abbadon fractal and upset with the people who didn’t vote “right.” I still see one or two posters whose signatures are about this. Multiply that by the flavor of the month voting controversy and there would be a steady stream of upset people, which I doubt ANet wants.

Because then Anet would probably be forced to start making real content expansions. Content we don’t burn through in a few hours every 2 weeks.

tigirius.9014:

1. open world focus (where one never had to enter a dungeon for anything)

You do realize that every update from the living story focus in open world and the rest of the game barely get any update, so that already happens.

tigirius.9014:

2. metas/DEs added monthly to every zone, and stayed there.

That would be nice, of course not monthly since it would get just too many soon enough, but regularly get new metas would be fun.

tigirius.9014:

3. removal of DR so that if you chose you could actually play as a legit farmer without stigma

Welcome to the Bot paradise.

tigirius.9014:

4. the restoration/balance of all roles in PVE (CC, Healing, Condition builds)

Agree

tigirius.9014:

5. the restriction of all Ascended armor to fractal use only. (armor not weapons, because that’s what we were told it was for, fractals with agony resist requirements)

That is a really bad idea in general, if someone wants to play in fractals and PvE he should have 2 separated sets?
If you can’t make one you don’t need to suggest that anyone can have it, and the advantage of ascended armor over exotic is really small.

tigirius.9014:

6. making the home customizeable and extremely useful, while adding elements that allow for one to be social easily

Agree

tigirius.9014:

7. additions of cosmetics monthly that are not all focused in the store and won’t be restricted to make them cost 500 gold in the TP

The living story brings that, there are some cool masks, back pieces, etc … that you can get for free by playing the game.

tigirius.9014:

8. the restoration of the projects that allow certain functions to occur outside of the game like the mobile/web projects (to track guildies, to see global activity timers, to craft/sell using a web interface)

Also agree.

I don’t think we paid for the right to vote when we bought the game.

It is interesting to read what most of you say regarding voting where priority is needed. In the instance what people are saying here means that the communitys only reall role is to point out big issues where everyone agrees on.

I mean, balance is hard to get to so that will definatly take a while before thats fully settled i feel.

I do hope housing is an important part at anet since thats what ive been looking for in gw2 for some time, playing other ‘lesser’ mmo’s with housing just for that feature. Hope the community can make a point there.

Isn’t this basically what the CDI threads were? Only allowing people to go more in-depth than simply voting.

Of course we haven’t seen the results of them yet (as someone said earlier development takes a long time), other than we know all upcoming content will be permanent or regularly returning festivals. But they’re still basically the same idea, letting players say what they want from future updates.

Important : don’t do votes in the forums, else we end with an open world where all solo mobs are champions and champions will need 10 hours to kill while one-hitting 50% of the players in the zone, and at the end drop 20 copper, because people here only want hard challenges all the time and are not interestet in rewards.

And after that 95% or more leave the game.

I’d rather rather have a benevolent dictator…

I don’t see why we, the players, should have any right to vote. The writers and designers, and the publishers do take what we say in game and on the forums as feedback, and hopefully, apply that feedback into their next project.

Do TV shows have an option to vote on what the next season is going to be about? Do writers take a vote on what their next book is going to contain? I’m pretty sure if GoT took a vote, you’d still have a huge cast of characters still alive. Dumbledore would still be alive, and Malfoy would have been killed in book 1. Even in this setting we are the audience. The only decision we have to is play or not. And unless you are on the board of directors, we don’t have any say at all. The fact that they listen and act is more then fair enough.

I agree if votes were allowed, you’d be able to solo Tequatl, and have a guaranteed legendary/precurser drop everytime. Everybody would automatically be given every skin, 10,000g and a pet Quaggen upon character creation. Beserker gear would be abolished, as well as rangers in general. You’d pretty much end up with people on mounts running around dueling each other and that would be the whole of the game.

Anet let the players vote for the Captain’s Council, and the majority got it wrong. Had Evon won, our game would probably be twice as good as it is now. I know this, because Evon is the charr of the people!

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Anet let the players vote for the Captain’s Council, and the majority got it wrong. Had Evon won, our game would probably be twice as good as it is now. I know this, because Evon is the charr of the people!

OT: LOL probably. But I personally felt that Evon was shady. I mean why is he doing all the things “for the people” and where is his funding coming from?

pdavis.8031:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Anet let the players vote for the Captain’s Council, and the majority got it wrong. Had Evon won, our game would probably be twice as good as it is now. I know this, because Evon is the charr of the people!

OT: LOL probably. But I personally felt that Evon was shady. I mean why is he doing all the things “for the people” and where is his funding coming from?

Further OT: from our trading post fees, of course.

On topic. ANet does not let us vote for everything because it’s never a good idea to give the inmates control over the asylum.

IndigoSundown.5419:

On topic. ANet does not let us vote for everything because it’s never a good idea to give the inmates control over the asylum.

That made me laugh. Thank you.

Belzebu.3912:

tigirius.9014:

1. open world focus (where one never had to enter a dungeon for anything)

You do realize that every update from the living story focus in open world and the rest of the game barely get any update, so that already happens.

And you do realize that all of the updates they did for LS were not what they had originally planned were not permanent and did not change the face of Tyria for very long save for 2 right? Thus it wasn’t what we were told the updates to the open world would be, in fact Fractals were never meant to be originally, neither was Ascended to go with Fractals. I would count those two as really big content updates into the game that really weren’t meant to be in there and thus took away development time that could have been put into the open world for a more permanent content setting. As it is when the new system loads it will have none of the previous LS updates in it only capturing the ones from the time it launches onward. So it’s still not what we were buying.

Yeah… the biggest problems have already been mentioned. You let players vote, they’ll start kittening at each other as well as the developers. Anything we get to vote for has to be minor in effect, or non-binding – the ranger CDI for example.

Because if you got a choice between A, B and C, if A gets picked, the ones who picked B and C will either a) accuse Anet of fixing the vote, b) complain that it’s the wrong choice and they’re not listening to the majority, c) both of the above.

There really isn’t any new content beside living story. And they did let us vote for it, (Evon, Ellien etc).

tigirius.9014:

And you do realize that all of the updates they did for LS were not what they had originally planned were not permanent and did not change the face of Tyria for very long save for 2 right?

Right, I agree with you.
But you asked for focus in Open World, and the LS always focused there, I’m not saying that those updates was any good or anything (LS1 was ok at best), but the focus was there, you have to agree.

tigirius.9014:

Thus it wasn’t what we were told the updates to the open world would be

I really don’t remember what was promised about open world updates, can you link or just write what the devs originally promised?

About Fractals and Ascended gear, well … MMOs are huge projects, it is impossible to plan everything from the very beginning, I know they planed that exotic would be the “ultimate” tier and they thought that get full exotic gear would be hard and now they released the ascended to cover that hole, that happens.

Belzebu.3912:

There are several issues with content voting.

• If most vote for content A, people that wanted the content B will feel frustrated and will pass the impression that content B will never happen, even if that may not be true
• Development takes a LONG time, and after the voting, players will keep asking about said content, also it may not be as viable as the developers thought it could be and if the idea get dropped the players will go crazy.
• It would be even worse if the player base was the ones saying what Anet should do, some popular ideas are impossible or really bad idea financially, and hear Anet refusing those popular ideas would make them look as a bad company.

Those are points from the top of my head.

Yea, those are the problems with majority vote and democracy. As far as I remember it is considered the most civilized form of human cooperation.

You allow it to determine your life on global scale, but not the direction of a computer game.

Someone hold me.

Consistency just achieved 500,000 RPM in its grave. You could thow it in the Kola Borehole and it would drill it down to Hell.

The question is, what would produce a better game: a focused plan worked on by a dedicated and experienced team, or a popularity contest voted on by a bunch of random players who don’t even know what they want half the time?

I think ANet is remarkably good at listening to feedback from fans and adapting to concerns from the community — but there is a reason they are the game devs and not us.

chronus.1326:

Yea, those are the problems with majority vote and democracy. As far as I remember it is considered the most civilized form of human cooperation.

The difference is that in politics, if the people vote “wrong”, the people will pay the consequences while the politicians will remain the same, in game players can take decisions that will make the company lose money.

Also in politics not everything are voted publicly, just a small part, the huge majority of the decisions are made internally, just like we have here, Anet decides internally what to make, and they use the CDI as a form of “election”, by showing some options and getting the feedback of what the players want.

Once Anet made people choose between Abaddon and Thaumanova. Almost a year later, we still here people complaining about it from time to time (and I agree with them :p).

On a lot of things, Anet shouldn’t have to ask what they should do.
But on some things, for example WvW seasons, it’d be nice if they asked “hey do you want this now ? and for that long ? knowing we barely changed anything to WvW”.

It is cause Anet always has had a disconnect with the community in Guild Wars 2. They have their own plans and what the community thinks about it be kitten ed.

The thing is is that I do not know if they do this because they want too or if Ncsoft makes them do certain things (like megaservers) and community input would be null anyways.

Fyrebrand.4859:

The question is, what would produce a better game: a focused plan worked on by a dedicated and experienced team, or a popularity contest voted on by a bunch of random players who don’t even know what they want half the time?

I think ANet is remarkably good at listening to feedback from fans and adapting to concerns from the community — but there is a reason they are the game devs and not us.

It’s already a mixture of both. The decisions of ArenaNet have changed throughout the game developement phase mainly due to demand from here and demand from there. The difference is that they were taken into consideration mainly out of fear and not because they were agreed with.

Due to this a lot of people, including founding members have let the company, effectively leaving about 300 new developers in a dead caracass of a former company, trying to emuate life by copying the deisions and actions of those who came before, but not really understanding the principles behind why Guild Wars became popular or successful or whatever.

Maybe they never considered it successful. I do not know how they saw the numbers. I consider proving the b2p model to the industry a colossal success. But games that do not operate by creativity-principle fail today.

Greatest games are built on simple systems that have an outstanding capacity to create complexity. Such as the TES games through mods, or Minecraft. It’s all simplicity through complexity. GW2 is just simplicity through simplicity.

A better game would require a team that understand the principles of creation in that sense. How simplicity can create complexity. It requires a set of relationships between the simple compartments, as well as a general understandng over how different they have to be. The beauty of it is that if done correctly, it does not close out simple-minded people who lack creativity, just like Guild Wars didn’t either. It’s just that those who don’t understand it see this as “luck”, while others get rich over creating things like LEGO.

MMORPGs operate differently than other genres. They want to emulate life. They operate like life:

The only ones having fun are addicts and artists.

Anet “already” let us vote. They let us vote for Ellen or Evon.

If you mean players should come up with their own list such as -better dungeon or -living story….

Well chance are Anet made the decision to go living story regardless what we vote for.

If you seen the vote for ascended jewelry… people hate it right? That dont’ stop Anet from adding ascended armor.

Belzebu.3912:

In Season 2 we’ll see the results of that silent period, I hope for the best, otherwise gain back the hopes of the players will be a really hard task.

You mean more zergfests that are populated for 2 days and then become a ghost town?

Living Story has been mostly nothing but zerg content and that’s bad for the game. Season 2 of living story won’t change it.

Travis the Terrible.4739:

Belzebu.3912:

In Season 2 we’ll see the results of that silent period, I hope for the best, otherwise gain back the hopes of the players will be a really hard task.

You mean more zergfests that are populated for 2 days and then become a ghost town?

Living Story has been mostly nothing but zerg content and that’s bad for the game. Season 2 of living story won’t change it.

quite honestly I like the zergfest rather than those open world events which almost always fail unless you play like an instanced raid(which is really hard to organize to get all the dedicated players in the same instance and kick the pug out)

Belzebu.3912:

tigirius.9014:

And you do realize that all of the updates they did for LS were not what they had originally planned were not permanent and did not change the face of Tyria for very long save for 2 right?

Right, I agree with you.
But you asked for focus in Open World, and the LS always focused there, I’m not saying that those updates was any good or anything (LS1 was ok at best), but the focus was there, you have to agree.

tigirius.9014:

Thus it wasn’t what we were told the updates to the open world would be

I really don’t remember what was promised about open world updates, can you link or just write what the devs originally promised?

About Fractals and Ascended gear, well … MMOs are huge projects, it is impossible to plan everything from the very beginning, I know they planed that exotic would be the “ultimate” tier and they thought that get full exotic gear would be hard and now they released the ascended to cover that hole, that happens.

The problem isn’t that they needed to plan from the beginning the problem is 2 months in they didn’t even keep the promises they made in interviews they were doing during the Beta weekends just before headstart. That’s the problem. People love to keep bringing up the manifesto it’s not even that, it’s things that were said that made casuals like me buy this thing only to find out after that it would become a gear treadmill with a permanent dungeon focus with grinding as a thing.

That’s not what I paid for and I’m sure other casuals would agree. And the open world focus I was talking about was about adding new permanent metas/DEs monthly to every zone even if it were only 1 per zone per month that would have been miles better than the system we have now.

Didn’t read, don’t care but Anet did let us vote once – Captains Council – Ellen Kiel or Evon Gnashblade remember? You got a new fractal, some cheap waypointing for a little while, etc.

The vast majority of humans are uninformed about EVERYTHING except their favorite things which makes it dangerous when they vote (e.g. U.S. elections). Even though games are some of our favorite things, gamers in general are uninformed about the very games they play; a very small minority of the total gamer base of gw2 reads these forums/twitter/facebook. Allowing people to vote on things they know nothing about is like the blind leading the blind, or again, the U.S. government elections.