Guild Wars 2

So here we go… As a dedicated ANet and GW2 fan I was shocked when I saw the HoT’s pre-order option was already available. I was equally shocked to see the community’s reaction to the latest ANet/NCSoft decisions, when reading all the rage that has been flowing on the forums these couple of days. And before people start lashing at me, whiteknigthing ANet (which is something I really don’t get) let me just clarify that I’m a big ANet fanboy myself. I’ve been playing GW2 since release, been supporting the game through sporadic gem perchauses and by trying to lure everyone I know into the game, as well as defending it whenever the “which is the best mmorpg right now” argument pops. I also own a GW Platinum Edition account.

From what I’ve been reading in the forums, it’s very obvious that the community is not happy, but because some points have been extensively debated, I feel that we are loosing sight of what really are the core issues here. And because of that I won’t be discussing:
– The fact that ANet has lately engaged in some dodgy, poorly thought and very questionable marketing decisions, that have dented the playerbase’s trust in it.
– Or the fact that there is a big difference between the abstract pure consumer value perchaused by a new and a vet player, when pre-ordering the HoT expansion pack (Standar Edition).
– Or the fact that ANet should include a character slot in the standart edition, since a big part of the new content is playing the new profession (This is just silly).
– Or the fact the ANet have made the pre-order available for an expansion pack that doesn’t even have a release date (Something I’ve never seen before).
– Or even the fact that 45€s is a steep price tag for a feature-heavy expansion pack, when the core game was only 10€s more expensive, at release. And when so little has been shown about the content in it.

What I would like to focus everyone’s attention on are the following 3 points:
1 – FPS/Sound Bug -> Imagine this scenario: It’s Friday night, reset night for WvW. You’r from a top tier server and because you’ve arrived a bit late you have to wait in a 1+ hour long queue to enter the EBG map. When you finally get in you get the bug and the game goes from awesome to unbarable in a matter of 5-10 minutes. Your client finally crashes and you’r forced to reenter the 1+ hour long queue again. Not to metion the random disconnections and latency issues, when it comes to 3-way figths, that everyone has been complaining about, since the release of the game. Is this what ANet classifies as a fun WvW experience?

2 – Mid-Air Immobilize Bug -> Anyone who enjoys sPvP knows immediately what I’m talking about. Another well documented and exposed bug that randomly benefits one side in a small scale engagement and that in a competitive gamemode, heavily influences the outcome. Is this what ANet classifies as a skillbased fair PvP experience?

3 – HoM Rewards Beeing Unacessable -> A major GW2 game feature that not only made the transition from GW to GW2 easier and rewarding, but also is an incentive for any GW2 players to buy ANet’s first game. Has been disabled, for months now, due to a bug in the bridge between both games. As a result, noone has acess to the rewards they are entitled to.

Now, due to all the points I’ve made, my position towards the HoT expansion pack is a very clear and straigth-foward one. I will not be pre-ordering the expansion pack, I probably won’t be buying the expansion anytime soon and I will stop all gem perchauses until I see these game-breaking bugs and issues fixed in the live version.
To all the ppl, that have been having issues making the decision of whether to buy or not the HoT expansion pack, let me suggest a simple analogy:

“You buy your first car. You don’t have a lot of money so all you can afford is an old rusty 1985’s Rover. It’s far from perfect, has a lot of issues but you learn to live with them. You get to know the car, your start figuring out all the tricks to start it up and keep it going. You fall in love with your 1985’s Rover a bit more, everyday. Then one day, suddenly, the engine goes so you take it to your mechanic. That guy that has always helped you, when you’r in a rough spot. You consider your mechanic an honest friend, someone who has always put your consumer interest before his profit. But when you tell him about what happened to the engine, he answers back: “Don’t worry about the engine mate! What your Rover needs is a couple of supercharged turbos, a spoiler and shinny bodykit! Those will keep your mind off the engine issues… Just give me your money and I’ll take care of everything for you!”

I know it’s a bit crude, but this feels exactly what ANet is doing to their playerbase… Trying to milk their pockets for an expansion pack, when the core base game they are trying to expand on is still broken. (Something for the both the new and the vet players to reflect on)

I’m very sorry for the text wall, but as a final appeal I’d like to say this: There has been very little common sense in these forums these last couple of days. Worse then that, it seems there is even less common sense in the corporate world that runs big MMO’s, like our beloved GW2, these days. Don’t forget that, as a video-game consumer, the only real choice u can make is when you’r about to perchause the produt. So all I can hope, is that everyone will be able to make a well-informed and responsible decision, as well as vote with their wallets. Your money migth not mean much on it’s own, but a collective conscience has no price tag.

Edited: My most sincere feelings to the person responsible for today’s PoI stream and the people moderating twitch’s chat. You’r gonna be chewed up.

Please feel free to correct any missinformation I might have posted, in a polite and constructive manner. Also share your thougths…

I like your honesty, and I’m sure those a big issues (i’m not a big WvW’er or pvp’er), but I feel other issues with the core game should also be up here. COUNTLESS amounts of bugs and inadequacies. Solo instance loss upon Dc’s, no personal story revamp which did not go down well, Lupicus wall bug? lmao. The list could go on forever with fixes that quite obviously should have much more priority than perhaps the questionable marketing strategy of the living world, which wasn’t a great success, nor an abject failure – I really, really hope they got the picture of what players want for the story, and that the previous presentation and lore just wasn’t up to scratch for us. There’s another ridiculous one I’ve seen with Tazza at the end of SE. Do whirlwind into the wall where people commonly pull here (actually much much closer, in range of the commander also). Movement and whirlwind causes the game to break and her aggro to be lost and reset. Meanwhile, I see Anet trying to cripple and stop people from doing meaningless things like hopping over the walls of a finished fractal, really shows where priorities lie? I honestly don’t understand how the companies resources are being allocated.

You’ve made three points here, and in another thread, you referred to these points as “game-breaking”:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Pre-Purchase-Community-Address/page/9#post5193019

I’ll start with the last one, since if we go to Page 3 in the Dev Tracker, we can see Arenanet talking about it:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Kimmes-the-Historian-Disabled-Skin-Unlocks/first#post5136645

“Last I checked, the fix was being tested against everyone’s account that was affected by the issue. The fix isn’t something that we can rush out in a hotfix, it’s really complicated and really risky. Sorry about the inconvenience.”

That’s how Bill Friest, one of the gameplay programmers, put it.

So the third problem you list is under current (and constant) investigation and repair, because it’s got to be done per account, and there are a huge number of accounts.

That aside, not having access to a number of skins you earned is a bummer. I only have 11 HoM points myself, but I know I’d be upset if I hadn’t already unlocked all of my skins to use. However, not having access to them doesn’t break the game or stop me from having fun. It just limits my access to striped pants and a nice set of boots, among other things.

How that’s game-breaking, I’ll never know. It sounds like an extremely minor inconvenience.

But let’s talk about your other two points: There’s a bug where you get immobilized in midair, fall to the ground, and you’re still registered as in the air for the duration of the immobilize, so your skills won’t activate.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Immobilized#Notes

That’s a serious bug. However, the way you frame it- “Is this what ANet classifies as a skillbased fair PvP experience?” That’s a ridiculous thing to say. One bug, connected to one condition, under one set of circumstances, is not an accurate portrayal of the “PvP experience.”

The fact that the bug hasn’t been addressed yet is a genuine problem, and nobody in their right mind will deny you that. But at the same time, your willingness to look at a single bug and go “is this what you call balance?” is essentially the same- since you like analogies so much, here’s one you’ll appreciate- as looking at some unwanted relish on your hotdog and saying “is this what you call food?”

The hotdog is still a food product. Functionally, it’s still a hotdog. It will digest like a hotdog. There’s just something nasty on it, that needs to go.

But is that game-breaking? Well, I certainly agree that it needs to be examined and patched, because if players are taking unfair advantage of a bug to turn the tide of fights, that is a legitimate issue with balance. So I’ll give you this one. This bug is a problem if it’s causing whole teamfights to turn around, and Arenanet’s PvP devs need to give it a look.

Moving onto your first point, now- the FPS/Sound bug.

This one’s a doozy. I’m well-acquainted with it. I play on an excellent, modern PC now, but I used to play on a red-hot toaster of a laptop. And I had the FPS/Sound bug ruin some nights for me, when I was just trying to grind out Symbols of Koda. Honor of the Waves is not a very graphically intense place. Lot of wood, lot of ice. Five players, some particle effects. And yet, there I was, stuttering out at 7FPS, with no sound, and the performance steadily getting worse. I remember it taking 35 minutes for my game to close so I could restart it.

However for you, it’s a WvW thing. Which I can only imagine is a really big pain, especially with the queue. But you do that awful, pointless thing again, where you pose an enormously slanted question after dumping out your grievances. To quote, “Is this what ANet classifies as a fun WvW experience?”

Surely they don’t. But they also don’t build their WvW mechanics around anticipating a bug in their game’s engine. You should know that, you seem like a pretty perceptive player.

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Look, you spent two posts making a speech about responsible decisions and consumer choices, making insinuations about Arenanet taking money from us.

Over these three things. These three problems you detailed, that I’ve responded to one-by-one, are what illustrate to you that Anet is “milking us.” Two legitimate engine bugs and an exploit that requires a long-term, manual fix.

If these are the collective “straw that breaks the camel’s back” for you, then I mean, fine. That’s your prerogative. It’s a little pointlessly extreme, but it’s your prerogative.

But there are games out there that people consider functionally perfect- Dark Souls, for example, gets an extreme amount of praise- and those games have a laundry list of bugs, exploits, and unusual engine behaviors. And yet it’s never likened to a rusty, 60’s model automobile for them.

I have my own complaints about GW2. Like how the webapp services ingame- Gem Store, Currency Exchange, Trading Post- sometimes lag out and become inaccessible. Or how if you don’t have an SSD, loading screens even on a good computer can be a little long, especially if the player population is high. Or how I can’t dress my characters the way I want a lot of the time, because armors tend to be designed as sets, so they clip with each other a whole lot, all the time.

But even though I have my own, legitimate complaints, shaped by how I choose to play the game, just like yours, I don’t consider the game itself broken, and certainly not to the point that I’d make an impassioned, meandering speech about it, rife with analogy and allegory to explain my (not very complex) position to the reader.

You’re dissatisfied for two very legitimate reasons and one arguably frivolous reason, and anyone who actually bothers to read your posts will understand that. But what I’m asking you to understand is that you’re letting your frustration and dissatisfaction with these two bugs paint your perception of the entire game. And there’s a lot of video game here, beyond those issues, that needs tweaking and tuning and work.

What I’d suggest to you is that you focus on the actual problems you’re experiencing, and talk specifically about them, to the devs, in their appropriate forums. Go to the PvP and WvW forums and bring these issues to the devs’ attention, because these are extremely specific, engine-based problems that they can address.

What I wouldn’t suggest is using these bugs, which have given you so much trouble, as a deterrent to keep people from buying the game. You’re asking people to be dissatisfied for the same reasons you are, “Is this what Anet calls X gameplay,” because rather than go and talk to the people who can fix it, you’re in this position to play the part of an ardently dissatisfied consumer, staging a gem store protest because you’re so passionate about the unfixed state of these bugs.

Engage with your community. Engage with the devs. Your problems can be solved, when they finally have a spotlight shone on them. Why swing these problems around like a big deterrent, demonstrating to people, “these are why I’m not buying HoT, who agrees with me,” when you could instead see the video game you’ve been playing fixed, and go have a good time with your friends?

Animism.9803:

I honestly don’t understand how the companies resources are being allocated.

Unfortunately, the feeling I get, is that, nowadays, big MMO companies always pour all their resources into aspects of the game that can generate the most revenue. Developers are not trying to make their game the best game they can make; instead, we the players get out pockets milked dry, while the in-game experience still lacks quality…

I’ve always defended ANet with passion! I’ve always been a huge ANet fanboy! And I felt embarrased when I saw the pre-order option going live. My true honest opinion.
Ty for your opinion and constructive reply.

Robotmoxie.4025:

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What I’d suggest to you is that you focus on the actual problems you’re experiencing, and talk specifically about them, to the devs, in their appropriate forums. Go to the PvP and WvW forums and bring these issues to the devs’ attention, because these are extremely specific, engine-based problems that they can address.

Ty Robotmoxie for your honest and constructive input. I do agree with a lot of points you just made. But I’d also like to remind everyone, what my point was, when I created this thread. I know that, a game with this dimension, all these gamemodes and experiences, to be 100% bug and issuefree, it’s close to impossible. But the truth is that ANet is “trying to put the carriage in front of the horses”.
My point is, that i can’t justify paying 45€ for an expansion, when the core game still has serious issues (I know the HoM issue comes down to a few skins and minis that are not accessable and I know how small this issue is).

Btw, the MidAir Immob bug has been exposed and documented, in the bug forums, for almost a year now. Ppl are still wating for an official dev reply, on a bug that is randomly but constantly damaging GW2’s sPvP community. Either they don’t have the resources to fix it, or they simply don’t care… That’s how it comes across…

If it’s been standing that long without a fix, I’d wager on it being like, an engine problem. Which makes sense, since GW2 runs on a version of GW1’s engine, and this is a Z-axis (you are in midair, after all) problem, when GW1 didn’t even have a Z-axis. But I’m just speculating.

I guess what I can’t see is that specific problem, bad as it is, indicating a broken core game. Like, entirely. To the point that you’d recommend that someone not purchase GW2, or that you wouldn’t pay for it yourself.

There are extensive issues with the core game- as I said, I have my own, specific list of grievances- so we’re totally on the same page as far as that goes.

Buuuuut, I’ve spent so much time in my life playing MMOs, that… I guess I’m well and truly over it? I’ll give you an example:

World of Warcraft (ugh, I know, right?) updated from Wrath of the Lich King to Cataclysm. And when it did, we got +5 levels, five levels of content, and, infamously…

Talent Revamp 1.0.

Remember “Prime” glyphs? Remember how weird builds felt? What was it, like, 31/10/0? Nobody knew how to work it, building was really complicated, and the meta of the moment was an absolute mess.

And that was just Cataclysm! A totally intermediary, arguably unnecessary expansion, which I still think was pushed out to spend time while they worked on MoP, a much bigger and better piece of work, with many more features.

What I’m really trying to say is that I spent money on that expansion, just like I bought HoT, because, well… I’m used to games in my favorite genre having problems.

And I get it, these problems can be a big deal for you. Especially the Immobilize bug. As I said in my big, flagrant essay, I totally understand and sympathize. It’s real bad.

But… my experience with HoT is shaped by my experience as someone who’s been playing MMOs for like a solid decade. I love MMOs. I even bought the collector’s edition of RIFT. Who the hell plays RIFT? I sure did.

And… yeah. Like, your complaints are entirely legitimate, but bugs like that aren’t what stop people (who love the genre) from playing MMOs. They’re not a “genre problem.”

Am I saying you’re barking up the wrong tree? …Probably. A little bit.

But I sympathize with you. And I really do hope those bugs get fixed. I just think your image of Arenanet, and GW2 as a whole, has been… extremely skewed by how these specific bugs have shaped your experience.

Which I guess is reasonable. I just wish it wasn’t that way, because when HoT drops, I wanna play it with lots and lots of people. Including you and people like you.

Robotmoxie.4025:

I guess what I can’t see is that specific problem, bad as it is, indicating a broken core game. Like, entirely. To the point that you’d recommend that someone not purchase GW2, or that you wouldn’t pay for it yourself.

I am not recommending anything to anyone! Ppl are free to do whatever they please with their hardly earned money. What I’m doing, is appealing to everyone’s common sense, hoping that ppl will be capable of making a well informed and responsible consumer decision. Just because i decided to share mine, doesn’t mean I’m imposing it to anyone…

Robotmoxie.4025:

But I sympathize with you. And I really do hope those bugs get fixed. I just think your image of Arenanet, and GW2 as a whole, has been… extremely skewed by how these specific bugs have shaped your experience.

Which I guess is reasonable. I just wish it wasn’t that way, because when HoT drops, I wanna play it with lots and lots of people. Including you and people like you.

Thank you Robotmoxie. I really mean it. It’s so refreshing to read a well constructed and honest reply, when all i’ve been reading, in these forums, the last week, are rage fuelled irracional reactions. A little bit of common sense goes a very long way.

The problem with encouraging everyone to make a responsible consumer decision, in this context, is that you’re providing them with a speech about your own position in the process of doing so.

And I understand that impulse. I’ve done it before, because I had a feeling that I was making the right decision, and I didn’t want anyone to fall into a trap, or make a mistake.

But please understand, when you appeal to everyone and tell them to make their own decisions, but then follow up with, “and this is my decision,” plus an allegory for the sake of describing caveat emptor, it… kind of paints your entire appeal with your position.

Which is unfortunate, if that isn’t what you wanted, but even in text, it provides tone.

Be careful, Truska. I can tell you’re well-intentioned, but how you word these things will shape the kind of responses you get. That’s why I keep getting stuck making essays, because after a decade of messing around on MMO forums, I… am really careful about how I say anything.

Robotmoxie.4025:

The problem with encouraging everyone to make a responsible consumer decision, in this context, is that you’re providing them with a speech about your own position in the process of doing so.

And I understand that impulse. I’ve done it before, because I had a feeling that I was making the right decision, and I didn’t want anyone to fall into a trap, or make a mistake.

But please understand, when you appeal to everyone and tell them to make their own decisions, but then follow up with, “and this is my decision,” plus an allegory for the sake of describing caveat emptor, it… kind of paints your entire appeal with your position.

Which is unfortunate, if that isn’t what you wanted, but even in text, it provides tone.

Be careful, Truska. I can tell you’re well-intentioned, but how you word these things will shape the kind of responses you get. That’s why I keep getting stuck making essays, because after a decade of messing around on MMO forums, I… am really careful about how I say anything.

I totally get what your telling me. And now that u brought it up, I see that, maybe, I shouldn’t have mixed facts with my own biased opinion. I just trully believe that the only way u can make the right decision is to base it on a lot of facts and a bit of common sense. Everyone is responsible for what they bring to the table.

Having said that I also believe these forums are the easiest way, for players to reach out and share what’s in their minds. As long as it’s done constructively and rationally.