Guild Wars 2

Over last couple days we’ve seen more dev posts on this forum than past 3 months altogether. We really appreciate every post Tyler and Evan made.

My question is, can we expect this level of communication with PvP community to keep up? Or are you doing this just to calm us down a bit, after last patch nearly caused riots, and we’ll be back to usual silence soon enough?

Former would of course be preferred, and I’m pretty sure community’s attitude towards devs would quickly improve if you were to keep it up.

100% agree, it’s nice to see some answers in the pvp forums

Dont forget pvpers will be the ones that will stay and support the game after all pvers move to next themepark mmo! Show us some love

They did the same thing last patch.
inb4nextpatch “No-one communicates”

Evan Lesh.3295:

Harrier.9380:

Over last couple days we’ve seen more dev posts on this forum than past 3 months altogether. We really appreciate every post Tyler and Evan made.

My question is, can we expect this level of communication with PvP community to keep up? Or are you doing this just to calm us down a bit, after last patch nearly caused riots, and we’ll be back to usual silence soon enough?

Former would of course be preferred, and I’m pretty sure community’s attitude towards devs would quickly improve if you were to keep it up.

I believe it will be a little of both. Because of how our workflow is setup, right before and after a patch we sometimes have more time to post. Between patches, we’ll all be very busy. We’re always trying to find ways to improve our communication. I’ve been trying to spend more time in HotM to make sure there is some dev presence during primetime.

Its very easy to improve communication – hire someone who’s job it is to communicate. I understand that sounds condescending, but it isn’t meant to be – I understand you guys probably don’t want to spend the money, but its fairly obvious its needed. It needs to be someone’s job, exclusively, to interact with the boards.
Communicate progress to players, comb the boards for good suggestions, explain the logic behind your decision making, and so on. The biggest problem this game has (after a lack of a PTS) is a lack of transparency.

Most players (myself included) were under the impression that this patch was going to be “The Big PvP patch” – a community manager could have easily informed us to the contrary weeks ago, and most of us wouldn’t have felt betrayed. I’ll be the first to admit this patch wasn’t so bad, but the combination of another buggy/broken rollout combined with the sudden realization that it wasn’t the big balance patch instantly soured me – I got over it, but I imagine alot of players didn’t, and didn’t stick around long enough to find out that they were wrong.

A PTS and someone who’s job it is to keep the community informed would go a LONG way in building my (and I assume many others) confidence in Anets ability to eventually turn this into an Esport thats exciting and fun to play.

+1. Up until Evan’s and Tyler’s posts I felt like anet didn’t even read the forums. With each patch we saw JP & JS come to the forums and say “were listening, keep it up” but really didn’t engage in the discussion. The blog posts say nothing about the logic behind any changes or additions. If there isn’t someone to communicate I think it would be better to have programmers take time to fill the community in and see what they think of the stuff that is being worked on. You can spend hours communicating with the community or spend weeks redoing work in an attempt to make it to the communities liking. That’s my take.

need more JS and JP cuz people mostly wanna know about the “big” stuff like balancing changes. or just start allowing other devs to comment on that in more detail.

Anet has pushed the MMO genre forward in a lot of ways, but unfortunately they have been following one of the most archaic strategies in communication.

They don’t want to tell us what they’re working on or the progress because then “we’d yell at them for delays or missed dates because or broken promises”.

Instead they are getting yelled at for perceived incompetence, lack of communication, lack of support, broken promises, and a lack of clear vision.

Perhaps if they shared with us they trials and their triumphs so that the community felt actually engaged in this fledgling PvP portion of the game, they wouldn’t be losing even their most staunch supporters.

Or are you embarrassed by the lack of ingenuity and progress you are making?

Evan Lesh.3295:

Harrier.9380:

Over last couple days we’ve seen more dev posts on this forum than past 3 months altogether. We really appreciate every post Tyler and Evan made.

My question is, can we expect this level of communication with PvP community to keep up? Or are you doing this just to calm us down a bit, after last patch nearly caused riots, and we’ll be back to usual silence soon enough?

Former would of course be preferred, and I’m pretty sure community’s attitude towards devs would quickly improve if you were to keep it up.

I believe it will be a little of both. Because of how our workflow is setup, right before and after a patch we sometimes have more time to post. Between patches, we’ll all be very busy. We’re always trying to find ways to improve our communication. I’ve been trying to spend more time in HotM to make sure there is some dev presence during primetime.

Actual level of communication is what should be as a standard.

Players don’t like to be left in the dark while knowing nothing about what’s coming, because they always think of the worst possible outcome ( it’s a social law, in common dilemmas).

With the recent level of communication, thanks to you and Tyler, we feel a lot more reassured and the raging for the patch calmed down: you shouldn’t keep communicating with the playerbase only when we rage, you should do it BY DEFAULT.

I understand you may be busy and all the stuff, but it’s pretty much needed, especially knowing how the PvP environment is suffering: if you can’t keep this level of communication, just hire more people.

I’m sure there are tons of people among your very playerbase that would be pleased to be paid MINIMUM wage to do it in your place, if you’re so busy.

edit:

And PLEASE, talk with us about the changes you’re going to implement.
You can be vague about them, you can say " we’re thinking to do this, but we’re not so sure, so don’t take our words too seriously" but you really need to discuss it with us, at least a bit.

Especially regarding balance changes.