Guild Wars 2

forum bug fun…

Robert Devine.3087:

vesica tempestas.1563:

They do it to drum up business for gw2 = more people playing = a greater return then 200k = more investment.

I fully understand why they do it. I am just saying that money allocated to other advertising outlets and well anything at this point would probably go a lot further any place else.

If it’s already making them money (and they’ve said it is) then there’s no point in cutting it. Yeah, maybe there’s a more effective way they could be advertising, but if esports is more than paying for itself, then they’ll still be able to afford those other hypothetical advertising campaigns.

E-Sports is the death of this game

If you want a game for E-sports you do so at the start and build a game for it from the ground up. GW2 on the other hand has undergone many balancing patches in the name of E-sports destroying the game for the lifeblood of any game the casuals this isn’t League or a Moba. Sure E-sports may make them money but they’re not investing it into this game all those Youtube videos where they pretend their youtube celebrities obviously don’t pay for themselves.

People interested in E-sports are fickle as well this game obviously wasn’t designed for it while you have another NCSoft game Blade and Soul that is not only more geared for such a thing but even has a WPvP system taking advantage of those changes. E-sport balancing doesn’t do nothing for the zergfest known as WvW.

Constant characters, classes, roles, and updates keep E-sport titles going as well as being it’s primary focus which isn’t something I’d say about GW2. The population has been in decline for sometime and the people I talk to blame two things E-sport balancing without taking into consideration PVE and the awkward gating system. If you complete the masteries then your done with nothing to do so you leave or if you have a single toon then the mastery system gets boring that gates are high because it’s supposed to be done once but some people would have prefered the gates be smaller and made individually to the character. Though those are the people that leave without making posts the people makign posts never leave regardless all these Sab, Mounts, 2h Axe, (Raid)posts have been up for 2-3 years and those people never left and they never will leave this game meanwhile Anet caves to these people who will never leave and the silent majority rushes out the back door.

Coulter.2315:

psyt.9415:

My sentiments exactly. You have a portion of the game that people love and enjoy and is paying your bills but instead of keeping them happy you chase after a much smaller segment of your playerbase kittenimn off your core market in the process. Learn from FFXIV figure out what is making you money and stick with it. FFXIV don’t give a crap about no arenas its in the game but they aren’t dumb after 1.0s failure they know now to keep their fans happy which in that game is dungeons. There is a huge hole in the market for wvw players that guild wars could be eating it but instead they let all those players walk away unadressed so they can chase after arenas. Just stick to pve expacs and wvw and call it a day. It’s like taking your wife’s money and spending it on another woman what anet is doing.

I think you’ve mixed up 2 (possibly more) issues;
1) a marketing budget for tPvP tournament
2) WvW new borderland wasn’t popular
If anet didn’t spend money on a PvP tournament (for marketing purposes) do you think 2) gets solved by a wizard?

I don’t think you understood any of what I said apparently.

1) The fact is the wvw update is almost a year out no one likes the new bl and they are quitting the game. Does that mean they should wait that long to address it?

2) Any budget is capital that could be allocated to developing other resources ie making those changes or completing living story sooner.

3) definitely not a wizard

psyt.9415:

Coulter.2315:

psyt.9415:

My sentiments exactly. You have a portion of the game that people love and enjoy and is paying your bills but instead of keeping them happy you chase after a much smaller segment of your playerbase kittenimn off your core market in the process. Learn from FFXIV figure out what is making you money and stick with it. FFXIV don’t give a crap about no arenas its in the game but they aren’t dumb after 1.0s failure they know now to keep their fans happy which in that game is dungeons. There is a huge hole in the market for wvw players that guild wars could be eating it but instead they let all those players walk away unadressed so they can chase after arenas. Just stick to pve expacs and wvw and call it a day. It’s like taking your wife’s money and spending it on another woman what anet is doing.

I think you’ve mixed up 2 (possibly more) issues;
1) a marketing budget for tPvP tournament
2) WvW new borderland wasn’t popular
If anet didn’t spend money on a PvP tournament (for marketing purposes) do you think 2) gets solved by a wizard?

I don’t think you understood any of what I said apparently.

1) The fact is the wvw update is almost a year out no one likes the new bl and they are quitting the game. Does that mean they should wait that long to address it?

2) Any budget is capital that could be allocated to developing other resources ie making those changes or completing living story sooner.

3) definitely not a wizard

As people have said before its the marketing budget (WvW development’s staff and money doesn’t come from the marketing dpt).

Colin has said “From a marketing standpoint, it (and the ESL weekly cups and WTS tournaments before it) has been extremely successful so far, among the most successful projects our marketing team has ever launched to grow our title in the history of the Guild Wars franchise in return for the cost.”

I still think you’re expecting a wizard.

I think people are mainly complaining about GW2’s PvP. Not really about budget.

It’s probably like Google vs Yahoo, or Facebook vs Twitter. It’s not really about budget, but one is better than the other on running the company.

I think people are more complaining about the decision making. Which may or may not be better if more money or people is on the job.

But the way I see it is player’s set GW2’s pvp standard really high. I’m not sure if it’s just people’s expectation are too high, or the developer should do better job.

Kattenpootjes.4291:

We all known esports is a joke but we’re not supposed to talk negative about the game on the forums, It’ll get you banned. It’s best to just ignore it ^^

It would be much easier to ignore if the icons for it were not so in-your-face everywhere!

Even in PvE where they make no difference. This blatant “advertisement” is one of the reasons I only do my daily (most days) now.

Coulter.2315:

psyt.9415:

Coulter.2315:

psyt.9415:

My sentiments exactly. You have a portion of the game that people love and enjoy and is paying your bills but instead of keeping them happy you chase after a much smaller segment of your playerbase kittenimn off your core market in the process. Learn from FFXIV figure out what is making you money and stick with it. FFXIV don’t give a crap about no arenas its in the game but they aren’t dumb after 1.0s failure they know now to keep their fans happy which in that game is dungeons. There is a huge hole in the market for wvw players that guild wars could be eating it but instead they let all those players walk away unadressed so they can chase after arenas. Just stick to pve expacs and wvw and call it a day. It’s like taking your wife’s money and spending it on another woman what anet is doing.

I think you’ve mixed up 2 (possibly more) issues;
1) a marketing budget for tPvP tournament
2) WvW new borderland wasn’t popular
If anet didn’t spend money on a PvP tournament (for marketing purposes) do you think 2) gets solved by a wizard?

I don’t think you understood any of what I said apparently.

1) The fact is the wvw update is almost a year out no one likes the new bl and they are quitting the game. Does that mean they should wait that long to address it?

2) Any budget is capital that could be allocated to developing other resources ie making those changes or completing living story sooner.

3) definitely not a wizard

As people have said before its the marketing budget (WvW development’s staff and money doesn’t come from the marketing dpt).

Colin has said “From a marketing standpoint, it (and the ESL weekly cups and WTS tournaments before it) has been extremely successful so far, among the most successful projects our marketing team has ever launched to grow our title in the history of the Guild Wars franchise in return for the cost.”

I still think you’re expecting a wizard.

Not sure how I can explain this any clearer. Spvp Marketing = expending capital on spvp and being spvp balance centric means using development resources and unbalancing the other modes. I think that the marketing capital and the development resources behind spvp is better spent on wvw and pve content. Still not a wizard. I’m saying consolidate and refocus the scope of the game to streams that have the most players.

I agree that spending on their crazy Esports notion is incredibly harmful to the game. This is an MMO, it will NEVER be a big esport because not only is the game type not suited for it but the players clearly don’t want it to be a big esport with the outcry on this very topic appearing very frequently both on the forums and reddit. And of course the balance team is very much not up to the challenge with a balance patch every three months and their idea of balancing is nerfing something into the ground or buffing something too high. They really don’t know what they are doing.

In all honesty that money could be better spent at working on Living season and World v World which is the most unique gamemode I’ve seen in an MMO to date. Not to mention that WvW also functions as a gold sink which is perfect for Anet’s economy goals.

They can SAY that their esports campaigns are successful but so does every other company when something isn’t really all that successful. Companies NEVER admit that something isn’t working when it is done at this scale. There is no way of tracking who joins specifically for PvP and if they spend money because of it or if they joined and happened to like PvP and play it.

But I’d like to give a bit of advice. If your playerbase doesn’t support your PvP overwhelmingly as an esport you will never be an esport. Look at the numbers of update videos and compare them to what the views are on say a PvP video. Or look at how many upvotes a general PvP topic will get on reddit. The only time it ever gets any notice is if it is a complaint about something being OP “please nerf”. And even then it isn’t a lot.

did you read the posts in this thread? it was a marketing spend and has already reaped profits, i.e they gained more than it cost.

vesica tempestas.1563:

did you read the posts in this thread? it was a marketing spend and has already reaped profits, i.e they gained more than it cost.

So what would happen if that marketing went towards promoting WvW or more living story instead. Wouldnt it also have a positive effect on the game and make a larger percentage of players happy.

psyt.9415:

vesica tempestas.1563:

did you read the posts in this thread? it was a marketing spend and has already reaped profits, i.e they gained more than it cost.

So what would happen if that marketing went towards promoting WvW or more living story instead. Wouldnt it also have a positive effect on the game and make a larger percentage of players happy.

I can’t agree more. And this is the budget that went to living story…

psyt.9415:

vesica tempestas.1563:

did you read the posts in this thread? it was a marketing spend and has already reaped profits, i.e they gained more than it cost.

So what would happen if that marketing went towards promoting WvW or more living story instead. Wouldnt it also have a positive effect on the game and make a larger percentage of players happy.

Explain how you would make WvW an event with winners of a prize pool, the event needs to be viewable live and on twitch. I’ll give an example below but it has a glaring flaw.

First the easy and control option tPvP needs 5 people per team to fight games that last about 7mins. Easy peasy to get them to an event and film it, ggs solid marketing endeavour.

WvW would go like this imo:

WvW has 3 servers full of people randomly entering and exiting 4 maps 24/7 doing random stuff (sometimes even buying 25 badges worth of stuff then leaving) over weeks and months. Obviously useless so we need to condense it into a viewable event, I guess you have a monthly tournament then the top 3 servers are found to play a 6hr WvW marathon LIVE on reset maps. (choosing those who participate might be picking active guilds on the server and then a server wide call to arms to fill the maps)

We would invite 5 commanders from each of the top servers to the event and have them command live with them as our PoVs and maybe throw in some invuln devs taking footage too. This would give best angles for action, commentary and strategy.

Fabulous time trying to offer the best view of WvW, BUT the problem is there are people outside the controlled environment, people who can watch the stream and contact those playing but not at the event (this is where WvW falls down, you cannot invite 3 entire servers to come play live). This means people can whisper or call their friends and say “Blue commander is making a stealth push for X.” I realise WvW has had to deal with this before but if money is on the line could be iffy.

I guess money rewards go to commanders and give gem prizes and maybe a unique outfit for those who participated?

This is the best show I can think of, and it should run parallel to the tPvP tourny.

What do you guys think? I’d watch it but I’m not sure how legit it would be with easy spying, guess you could block people’s chat but you’d then still be unable to stop mobile phones or w/e communication, and if it looks like a team is cheating could be weird.

I’d give it a go if anet wanted to bring life back to WvW. But notice this is using the same model as the esports because its a good working and profitable marketing model. Don’t bash the esports, if anything try to ask for WvW to be included.

Personally, I don’t mind them spending time fleshing out the esports side of the game. In general it is always good to have new players moving towards the game.

That being said let’s clear some things up:

WvW is NOT esports.
Spvp is partly esports, but certainly not with this terrible design of a league system.
Pve is no esports (this one is kind of obvious to most, but spvp and wvw get mixed up a lot).

Now where do things go wrong?

Once the entire game gets balanced around 1 of these aspects. We’ve seen this in the past with pve and arenanet balancing the game around this game mode. The spvp crowd, no matter how big or small, was up in arms, rightfully so, and we are now almost 3.5 years into a game where 3 years of this time was spent on mostly only pve.

The last few months post HoT (and slightly before) have been heavily focused balance wise towards the spvp segment while the trying to grow the pve game (content and mechanics wise). We’ve gotten:

- raids
- fractal redesigns
- harder open world maps
- new skins and pve movement skills
- masteries

It does not take a genious to notice that balancing and focusing on spvp instead of pve, while expanding the core game might be a bad idea. Get the new stuff fixed first, then move on to other projects. Cue the people who say: but there are multiple developer teams working on different parts of the game. True, but what they’ve done so far is mediocre at best, and terrible at worst.

At least they’ve started trying to improve their communication on the official forums. Baby steps I guess.

People might notice that I have completely omited WvW from my argumentation. Well for me to talk about WvW, there would have to be WvW to talk about. The neglect that game content has seen (yay new maps, which were more a design orgy than actually play tested) is very sad.

Here would be my 3 main advices:

- The marketing department is NEVER right. Marketing is a tool to be used which when used properly will greatly enhance the strengths of your product. Once you let them run the show though, you lose.

- have 1 person half the numbers the balance team throws out there. Literally do the same things as before, then at the very end, have 1 person go through ALL the numeric changes (no matter if good or bad) and cut them in half. This excessive over the top balancing back and forth (while done in most MMOs) is really hurting a game with 3 game modes.

- other games have had to deal with similar problems (matchmaking and Elo, pvp rankings, pve rewards, wvw, etc.). Stop trying to reinvent the wheel (new league system for example). Go and take a look how others have solved the problem, then addapt that approach to GW2.

Can’t believe A net spent 0.5% of their sales into esports. Those money are better of making Wildstar, NCsoft’s baseball team, executive’s pocket, or NCSoft’s shareholder dividend.

Cyninja.2954:

Personally, I don’t mind them spending time fleshing out the esports side of the game. In general it is always good to have new players moving towards the game.

That being said let’s clear some things up:

WvW is NOT esports.
Spvp is partly esports, but certainly not with this terrible design of a league system.
Pve is no esports (this one is kind of obvious to most, but spvp and wvw get mixed up a lot).

Now where do things go wrong?

Once the entire game gets balanced around 1 of these aspects. We’ve seen this in the past with pve and arenanet balancing the game around this game mode. The spvp crowd, no matter how big or small, was up in arms, rightfully so, and we are now almost 3.5 years into a game where 3 years of this time was spent on mostly only pve.

The last few months post HoT (and slightly before) have been heavily focused balance wise towards the spvp segment while the trying to grow the pve game (content and mechanics wise). We’ve gotten:

- raids
- fractal redesigns
- harder open world maps
- new skins and pve movement skills
- masteries

It does not take a genious to notice that balancing and focusing on spvp instead of pve, while expanding the core game might be a bad idea. Get the new stuff fixed first, then move on to other projects. Cue the people who say: but there are multiple developer teams working on different parts of the game. True, but what they’ve done so far is mediocre at best, and terrible at worst.

At least they’ve started trying to improve their communication on the official forums. Baby steps I guess.

People might notice that I have completely omited WvW from my argumentation. Well for me to talk about WvW, there would have to be WvW to talk about. The neglect that game content has seen (yay new maps, which were more a design orgy than actually play tested) is very sad.

Here would be my 3 main advices:

- The marketing department is NEVER right. Marketing is a tool to be used which when used properly will greatly enhance the strengths of your product. Once you let them run the show though, you lose.

- have 1 person half the numbers the balance team throws out there. Literally do the same things as before, then at the very end, have 1 person go through ALL the numeric changes (no matter if good or bad) and cut them in half. This excessive over the top balancing back and forth (while done in most MMOs) is really hurting a game with 3 game modes.

- other games have had to deal with similar problems (matchmaking and Elo, pvp rankings, pve rewards, wvw, etc.). Stop trying to reinvent the wheel (new league system for example). Go and take a look how others have solved the problem, then addapt that approach to GW2.

I would have to agree, focusing only on PvP is going to get the game killed with how they’ve been going about it.

What they are essentially telling their playerbase is that “if you don’t play PvP we don’t care about you and you don’t deserve much” when the opposite is true. The people who spend the MOST gems are those in PvE and WvW because skins are actually somewhat visible in those modes. In PvP generally nobody should really care about skins or anything on the BLTC store because well…Nothing benefits them. If they are pure PvP players they don’t need gear to look good or really care. They play the game and don’t contribute at all to profits because there is nothing you can sell them besides the expansion that will make their PvP experience better or more convenient.

Meanwhile PvE brings in gold and contributes to profits because they need convenience items and generally want skins. WvW overlaps with PvE in this regard but with the added bonus of actually being a gold sink which is good for an MMO economy so overinflation doesn’t happen. Aka, it is the correct way to go about a gold sink by giving players a mode that they want to put time in for fun but have to invest something to play. It isn’t overly expensive by any means for an individual player but it is definitely taking money out of the economy because people buy stuff off the TP and pay the tax. It rarely brings in money too.

Thea Cherry.6327:

vesica tempestas.1563:

They do it to drum up business for gw2 = more people playing = a greater return then 200k = more investment.

That may be the intantion, but it isn’t working at all. Half of my Guild has left the game and has not come back not even for HoT (me included). GW2s problem lead to people joining other games, WS has become F2P, ToR got a really good story based addon (well, not really mmorpg anymore) and now B&S is fishing the people who wanted Cantha since Day 1.

Anet seriously needs to get their heads together and just drop the whole eSports thing and should focus on a way longer Addon Story (not this LS episode nonesense) and on the WvWvW, because lets face it: the game looses so many people because they did nearly nothing for the WvWvW community…

If i made some gramma mistakes iam sorry, English is not my first language. :*

A huh, Just like how Champions Online (Created by Cryptic Studios) an MMO lost 90% of the Playerbase because a lot threaten in world chat that they would leave because of Alerts being added to the game killing 90% of all content in the game, Why run quests to level up when you can just do alerts.

In GW2 I call it #ebolaSports because it’s not fun to watch and has a pitiful amount of viewers compared to any other eSport game out there.

Too particle effects heavy, not enough strat, just cap points over and over and anything beyond a 1v1 is , like I said , just billions of particle effects going on and no one knows wtf.

Imagine being an outsider to GW2 and then watching an ESL conquest match lol you’d altf4 that tab pretty quickly and move on to something else.

They had their chance to make a true eSport worthy game mode, GvG (from GW1, not the blob stuff in WvW) but instead made some crappy LoL / GvG hybrid that doesn’t have enough of either to come anywhere near to being successful.

Part of the ‘problem’ is there are no real healers & even the ones we do have are just spamming aoe mindlessly and spreading boons without a thought. There is almost no strategy involved, no jukes needed, no skill, just spam.

Just my opinion on why this game isn’t eSport and why it never will be. I mean ANet can throw money at it all they want, it’s their money, but they must understand that it just isn’t that type of game. You had your chance in GW1, but you straight up abandoned that game for this one.

In the original GW it was much slower and more thought provoking, easy to follow, more strategy, and epic battles, and you never once thought “wow these particle effects are crazy over the top!”

If you want true eSport then go back and support the GvG scene… people are still playing it in GW1 after all these years of no updates or support from the devs.

Doam.8305:

E-Sports is the death of this game

If you want a game for E-sports you do so at the start and build a game for it from the ground up. GW2 on the other hand has undergone many balancing patches in the name of E-sports destroying the game for the lifeblood of any game the casuals this isn’t League or a Moba. Sure E-sports may make them money but they’re not investing it into this game all those Youtube videos where they pretend their youtube celebrities obviously don’t pay for themselves.

People interested in E-sports are fickle as well this game obviously wasn’t designed for it while you have another NCSoft game Blade and Soul that is not only more geared for such a thing but even has a WPvP system taking advantage of those changes. E-sport balancing doesn’t do nothing for the zergfest known as WvW.

Constant characters, classes, roles, and updates keep E-sport titles going as well as being it’s primary focus which isn’t something I’d say about GW2. The population has been in decline for sometime and the people I talk to blame two things E-sport balancing without taking into consideration PVE and the awkward gating system. If you complete the masteries then your done with nothing to do so you leave or if you have a single toon then the mastery system gets boring that gates are high because it’s supposed to be done once but some people would have prefered the gates be smaller and made individually to the character. Though those are the people that leave without making posts the people makign posts never leave regardless all these Sab, Mounts, 2h Axe, (Raid)posts have been up for 2-3 years and those people never left and they never will leave this game meanwhile Anet caves to these people who will never leave and the silent majority rushes out the back door.

And that is where I said in my defense like others, Don’t make masteries per character. I already have World Completion which is more than enough, why add extra more hours on top of it, I have 9 Characters in Total doing that 9 times from start to finish is time consuming, If players hate Alts remove the ability to have only 1 Character and no more than 1.

Those that wanted Masteries Account Wide we got what we wanted.

Robert Devine.3087:

Does anyone else agree that spending as much resources they do on an aspect of the game the clearly are failing at is a waste? The money could be spent in other places, sad to say because I joined this game for pvp but they are really blowing it. Pro players manipulating matches, tt is hardly watched by anyone, they refuse to do anything about purposeful trolling. I am sorry but this is not Esports not even close.

Agreed, nobody cares about GW2 as an esport, it’s a complete waste of valuable resources.

Ohoni.6057:

Robert Devine.3087:

Does anyone else agree that spending as much resources they do on an aspect of the game the clearly are failing at is a waste? The money could be spent in other places, sad to say because I joined this game for pvp but they are really blowing it. Pro players manipulating matches, tt is hardly watched by anyone, they refuse to do anything about purposeful trolling. I am sorry but this is not Esports not even close.

Agreed, nobody cares about GW2 as an esport, it’s a complete waste of valuable resources.

Guys.. Devs have said it is profitable can you stop pretending it wastes resources when it generates them.

Coulter.2315:

Ohoni.6057:

Robert Devine.3087:

Does anyone else agree that spending as much resources they do on an aspect of the game the clearly are failing at is a waste? The money could be spent in other places, sad to say because I joined this game for pvp but they are really blowing it. Pro players manipulating matches, tt is hardly watched by anyone, they refuse to do anything about purposeful trolling. I am sorry but this is not Esports not even close.

Agreed, nobody cares about GW2 as an esport, it’s a complete waste of valuable resources.

Guys.. Devs have said it is profitable can you stop pretending it wastes resources when it generates them.

Source? I haven’t heard anything about the esports wing being profitable. The closest I’ve heard is that at times it’s “fastest growing,” but that’s a relatively meaningless buzzword, since it could mean anything from 500K players to 700k, to just meaning 20K players to 40K, while other modes have way more players but are more stable.

Colin Johanson sez:
From a marketing standpoint, it (and the ESL weekly cups and WTS tournaments before it) has been extremely successful so far, among the most successful projects our marketing team has ever launched to grow our title in the history of the Guild Wars franchise in return for the cost. If you don’t like it more power to you, don’t watch, but it’s absolutely helping our marketing folks make Gw2 a bigger game which I’d hope we’re all excited about. If you want to see the game fail I’m not sure what you’re doing here, but rooting against programs like pro league is basically rooting against Gw2 growing. When folks come here and rip on stuff like PvP, you’re basically hurting the games ability to grow – and personally I would say shame on you, if you truly love the game, be constructive and give awesome feedback and suggestions: but don’t knock it just cause it’s not PvE. And let’s be honest, it beats spending marketing funds on taxi confession ads or people spray painting wall cinematics if you ask me.

Such a flawed statement, just because pro league is the most successful doesn’t mean it’s good, it just means that the rest of the game is a joke, ofc he’s gonna try to justify it, it makes the best income, pve doesn’t so they don’t put any effort into that..

CptTrips.6512:

Colin Johanson sez:
From a marketing standpoint, it (and the ESL weekly cups and WTS tournaments before it) has been extremely successful so far, among the most successful projects our marketing team has ever launched to grow our title in the history of the Guild Wars franchise in return for the cost. If you don’t like it more power to you, don’t watch, but it’s absolutely helping our marketing folks make Gw2 a bigger game which I’d hope we’re all excited about. If you want to see the game fail I’m not sure what you’re doing here, but rooting against programs like pro league is basically rooting against Gw2 growing. When folks come here and rip on stuff like PvP, you’re basically hurting the games ability to grow – and personally I would say shame on you, if you truly love the game, be constructive and give awesome feedback and suggestions: but don’t knock it just cause it’s not PvE. And let’s be honest, it beats spending marketing funds on taxi confession ads or people spray painting wall cinematics if you ask me.

So basically what I said, nothing about it being profitable, just that they believe it’s drawing people into the game on some level.

I honestly don’t care where they spend their marketing dollars, all I’d like is for them to stop focusing class balance and skills around their usefulness in PvP, and refocus their efforts 100% into making everything fun and useful in PvE situations.

Lol, did I miss the post where actual factual numbers were used to debate the usage of time and labor to produce various types of content in the game? If I did then everyone else here seems to have missed it too.

Tell me just how much imaginary budget is too much imaginary budget for Esports development? If they reduced their investments in Esports by umpteen percent then how many extra gemstore outfits do you think they could produce with all those liberated wads of cash floating around?

Ohoni.6057:

I honestly don’t care where they spend their marketing dollars

Liar or just wrong thread?

Coulter.2315:

Ohoni.6057:

I honestly don’t care where they spend their marketing dollars

Liar or just wrong thread?

None of the above. As I said in the bits of my post that you didn’t quote, I don’t care where they spend marketing money, I do care that in their focus on succeeding at eSports, they have chosen to focus developer time and attention on making skills/traits/etc. balanced and useful for PvP matches, in many cases without considering whether they have any use in PvE, or at best it’s a secondary concern for them.

A simple example would be Thief downstate’s stealth ability. It’s a 1s stealth with a 1/2s cast time, that you have to do instead of other things like self-healing or attacking. Is this useful in PvP? Very. If an enemy tries to stomp you and you have this up, you can waste a couple seconds of his time, which might be enough for someone to rally you. Is this useful in PvE? Pretty much never. If you’re being attacked by one or more mobs, the 1s of reduced agro is not worth the time wasted trying to DPS one of them down, or healing yourself up.

This is just a small, specific example, of course, but it runs through every class in numerous ways, abilities that were nerfed because they presented too much of an issue in PvP (even if the class was already not that great in PvE), or that never had any useful role in PvE in the first place because the thing they did well was not something PvE content demanded. The game would be far better off without this split focus.

E-sports has been a thorn in this game’s side since the beginning. This could have been one of the best MMO’s out there, but instead we have dozens of abandoned systems, poor PvE balance and a slow release of content because Anet funnels all the money into E-sports.

Of course Anet knows this, but obviously some higher up is forcing it on them. They have to put a positive spin on it, like when they launched F2P then claimed PvP was the “fastest growing segment of GW2”

Well obviously, you just added in 500k new players, you had 2 million people playing PvE and 100 players in PvP, so it was inevitable that PvP would grow the fastest. Doesn’t make it good.

anet approach to esport is wrong
esport games do not have balance changes with so much differences
what colin want is to DISTURB the meta, not balancing the game

esport games need consistency to the skill sets.
if anet really wants esport, they need to look into their balance approach

psyt.9415:

Coulter.2315:

psyt.9415:

My sentiments exactly. You have a portion of the game that people love and enjoy and is paying your bills but instead of keeping them happy you chase after a much smaller segment of your playerbase kittenimn off your core market in the process. Learn from FFXIV figure out what is making you money and stick with it. FFXIV don’t give a crap about no arenas its in the game but they aren’t dumb after 1.0s failure they know now to keep their fans happy which in that game is dungeons. There is a huge hole in the market for wvw players that guild wars could be eating it but instead they let all those players walk away unadressed so they can chase after arenas. Just stick to pve expacs and wvw and call it a day. It’s like taking your wife’s money and spending it on another woman what anet is doing.

I think you’ve mixed up 2 (possibly more) issues;
1) a marketing budget for tPvP tournament
2) WvW new borderland wasn’t popular
If anet didn’t spend money on a PvP tournament (for marketing purposes) do you think 2) gets solved by a wizard?

I don’t think you understood any of what I said apparently.

1) The fact is the wvw update is almost a year out no one likes the new bl and they are quitting the game. Does that mean they should wait that long to address it?

2) Any budget is capital that could be allocated to developing other resources ie making those changes or completing living story sooner.

3) definitely not a wizard

I think you’re laboring under the assumption that throwing more money at a problem will fix the problem. I can tell you first hand that’s not necessarily the case. Even if they hired more developers for WvW, they’d have to stop to train those developers.

It would likely create a delay in release. Not speed it up.

There’s an old saying, too many chefs spoil the broth. That seems to work in programming as well.

They have a team that’s working on it. They have a group of testers testing it. They will release it when they feel confident it solves the problem. Adding money to what they’re doing will not likely change a kitten thing.

Robert Devine.3087:

Does anyone else agree that spending as much resources they do on an aspect of the game the clearly are failing at is a waste? The money could be spent in other places, sad to say because I joined this game for pvp but they are really blowing it. Pro players manipulating matches, tt is hardly watched by anyone, they refuse to do anything about purposeful trolling. I am sorry but this is not Esports not even close.

I don’t think you understand how a marketing budget works. That money is already earmarked for marketing. Either it goes towards eSports promotion or it goes towards banner ads, displays, print advertising, events, pretty much anything marketing related. It does not take away from development budgets, it is completely separate.

Clearly they felt that some portion of their marketing budget should go towards promoting their attempt at eSports. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s completely normal. They want to try to make it a legit eSport, so marketing funds will be required. Pretty standard procedure here.

Robert Devine.3087:

Does anyone else agree that spending as much resources they do on an aspect of the game the clearly are failing at is a waste? The money could be spent in other places, sad to say because I joined this game for pvp but they are really blowing it. Pro players manipulating matches, tt is hardly watched by anyone, they refuse to do anything about purposeful trolling. I am sorry but this is not Esports not even close.

Yea agree. Now its just clearly beating of dead horse no matter how pvp players ‘increasing’. Ofc they do it you add there new achievments and shiny back.

It just is absurd that they can claim that “it is working” when there is no real way to determine if it really is working to bring in new players. You don’t exactly have players signing up because they were watching GW2 PvP very often and I’m sure the number of viewers on stream supports that.

Harny.6012:

Pandaman.4758:

At the end of the day, ANet’s a business. If the eSports investment really is doing that badly, then they’ll cut it; that they haven’t yet either means they’re seeing growth that justifies continued investment or it’s doing much better than you think it is.

That might not be true.
It looks like someone at Anet is trying to push it even though it just doesn’t work well.
It often looks like they realize how the scene looks, but try to push it more and more, coming out with new things…
I mean, look at some esports games and at the whole scene. There’s tons of money and there will be much much more in the future. Why wouldn’t you try anything you can to support your game in this field?
Oh wait, we know why.

They did the same with GW1, $100.000 tournament (think it was the one where some found out I_ _ _e’s “buddies” had been give early access to the new skill set before the tournament, I have screenshot’s of the conversation on GW guru)

Senario.2038:

It just is absurd that they can claim that “it is working” when there is no real way to determine if it really is working to bring in new players. You don’t exactly have players signing up because they were watching GW2 PvP very often and I’m sure the number of viewers on stream supports that.

Except that ANet can track every player in the game. If a player starts and plays PvP and later buys HoT if they were P4F, that counts toward success. If players returned to participate in the leagues, that’s a success because players just playing is MMO content for PvP.

Behellagh.1468:

Senario.2038:

It just is absurd that they can claim that “it is working” when there is no real way to determine if it really is working to bring in new players. You don’t exactly have players signing up because they were watching GW2 PvP very often and I’m sure the number of viewers on stream supports that.

Except that ANet can track every player in the game. If a player starts and plays PvP and later buys HoT if they were P4F, that counts toward success. If players returned to participate in the leagues, that’s a success because players just playing is MMO content for PvP.

Which does not invalidate Senario’s point.

The point being:

- a stream with maximum of 2-3k viewers will not be bringing in hundreds of thousands of players

The move to free to play did because a lot of people tried the game out.

Where do most people try the game out first if they want to check out the mechanics? In pvp since you have all your skills unlocked.

Thus to the untrained marketing eye:

“Oh look, so many f2p players play pvp.” -> pvp must be the main draw.

At the same time, the pvp part of the game has the absolute lowest income longterm as was pointed out by others earlier in this thread. The gem store is mainly a pve/wvw thing. The same gem store sales they’ve been shoving down the communities throught more and more aggressively since HoT.

I don’t think you understand how a marketing budget works. That money is already earmarked for marketing. Either it goes towards eSports promotion or it goes towards banner ads, displays, print advertising, events, pretty much anything marketing related. It does not take away from development budgets, it is completely separate.

Clearly they felt that some portion of their marketing budget should go towards promoting their attempt at eSports. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s completely normal. They want to try to make it a legit eSport, so marketing funds will be required. Pretty standard procedure here.

If we’re going to focus on marketing cost, lets look at other games. Rather than promoting esports, another game recently ran a promotion in which five tickets could randomly drop from any ingame activity, and each was worth $5,000 cash money to anyone who found one. That seems like a better use of a marketing budget than giving it to PvPers.

Imagine how many players they could draw in if they took the PvP prize pool and just gave it out to random players for playing the game in $5-10K increments? Not only would more players benefit, because it would be spread more thinly, but more players would be engaged enough to chase it, since any player could potentially get it, as opposed to PvP tournaments where 99.9% of players know that they have absolutely no shot at that prize (or at least should).

Ohoni.6057:

…snip
Imagine how many players they could draw in if they took the PvP prize pool and just gave it out to random players for playing the game in $5-10K increments? Not only would more players benefit, because it would be spread more thinly, but more players would be engaged enough to chase it, since any player could potentially get it, as opposed to PvP tournaments where 99.9% of players know that they have absolutely no shot at that prize (or at least should).

Unfortunately that is the whole point behind esports currently. ANet no longer wants to reward you if you are not one of the 1%, at least that is how I see it. I used to think the game had 3 completely separate yet fun areas that you could enjoy if you liked that kind of content, but now I feel there are only 2 left. And sadly one of them is encroaching on the others now.

Why this was moved to PvP section is beyond me, but it does show there is bias IMO. This discussion was posted for everyone to give their opinion, but when posted into this area it only gets feedback from one side of the player base (the most favorable).

vesica tempestas.1563:

They do it to drum up business for gw2 = more people playing = a greater return then 200k = more investment.

it’s unlikely that ppl going to join after reading and hearing this much shlt about current pvp balance state.

vesica tempestas.1563:

They do it to drum up business for gw2 = more people playing = a greater return then 200k = more investment.

Yes but given the actual no. of viewers its very doubtful they are receiving a return on their $400K

PvP is really lacking in a lot…..

-Queue times are very bipolar… they are rather very very short or you have enough time to finish a novel or two.

-The Lobby is so huge that you feel like no one is pvping because 50-60 people idle within a very tiny area of it.

-There is no more Team Q and Solo Q … both of which need to return with restrictions on each. No Premades in Solo, no solos in Team.

-There is nothing to do while you wait for your Queue to pop.

-They refuse to add anything to the Heart of the Mists for us to do ((crafting areas, mystic forge, practice dueling pit, what ever else))

-There is nothing new cosmetically for PvP players to purchase, the last finisher we saw that was New to the game was the Revemant Finisher from preordering.

-Balancing isn’t happening enough, not just on classes but on sigils, runes and amulets.

-Rewards from reward tracks are very very sub par and require a great deal of luck to get anything on par of PvE or WvW. Even though this is not the main objective of PvP (to make money) most PvP players would like to save up for content that can be used in all 3 areas of GW2. ((Legendaries, Unique Skins, mini pets, super rare particle infusions like ghostly, Chak, Bee, Polys etc))

- PvP is NOT separated from PVE.. .until it becomes separated, PvP will NEVER be a major esports success. PvP is constantly suffering from what ever content the devs want the players to focus on within PVE. We can see this with the Tank Meta and the direct correlation of Raids.

Some things in Guild Wars 1 that made PvP awesome:
-PvP only weapon skins, something that couldnt be earned in PVE or WvW
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Gallery_of_Envoy_weapons

-Zaishen Keys and Zaishen Chest
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Zaishen_Chest

Would be nice if they made the Zaishen Chest return, put it in the kitten lobby to eat up some of the empty space. Adjust the loot tables to be more GW2 aligned, make winning 3 matches a day in unranked/ranked reward 1 key, and make it repeatable.
Keys can’t be sold or mailed. The Loot in the chests can be sold or traded though.

It’s frustrating when the developers ignore the very obvious and when they forget about all the successful content they had in Guild Wars 1. The PvP issues in GW2 can be fixed and resolved, and the ideas they had in GW1 can EASILY be imported to GW2.

The Problem is in my opinion, is that the higher ups do NOT want to let the developers work on PvP. The Developers do NOT want to separate PvP from PVE since that would be more work for them to do.

The way PvP is ran now, is along the lines of a Turnkey operation…. start a season and wait till the devs have time to balance classes for PVE content and start another season. Rinse and repeat.

Wolfey.3407:

-Rewards from reward tracks are very very sub par and require a great deal of luck to get anything on par of PvE or WvW. Even though this is not the main objective of PvP (to make money) most PvP players would like to save up for content that can be used in all 3 areas of GW2. ((Legendaries, Unique Skins, mini pets, super rare particle infusions like ghostly, Chak, Bee, Polys etc))

I agree with everything you wrote except for this. The PvP rewards are significantly greater than WvW in my experience, more skins, finishers etc and more gold. Both modes significantly lag behind PvE though, would love for more specific PvP cosmetic rewards like special PvP infusions.

ANet still fails to realize that you do NOT MAKE A GAME ESPORT.

The community does elevate a good pvp game to esport level.

Sadly, still more relevant than ever even after 3+ years:

Wolfey.3407:

PvP is really lacking in a lot…..

-Queue times are very bipolar… they are rather very very short or you have enough time to finish a novel or two.

-The Lobby is so huge that you feel like no one is pvping because 50-60 people idle within a very tiny area of it.

-There is no more Team Q and Solo Q … both of which need to return with restrictions on each. No Premades in Solo, no solos in Team.

-There is nothing to do while you wait for your Queue to pop.

-They refuse to add anything to the Heart of the Mists for us to do ((crafting areas, mystic forge, practice dueling pit, what ever else))

-There is nothing new cosmetically for PvP players to purchase, the last finisher we saw that was New to the game was the Revemant Finisher from preordering.

-Balancing isn’t happening enough, not just on classes but on sigils, runes and amulets.

-Rewards from reward tracks are very very sub par and require a great deal of luck to get anything on par of PvE or WvW. Even though this is not the main objective of PvP (to make money) most PvP players would like to save up for content that can be used in all 3 areas of GW2. ((Legendaries, Unique Skins, mini pets, super rare particle infusions like ghostly, Chak, Bee, Polys etc))

- PvP is NOT separated from PVE.. .until it becomes separated, PvP will NEVER be a major esports success. PvP is constantly suffering from what ever content the devs want the players to focus on within PVE. We can see this with the Tank Meta and the direct correlation of Raids.

Some things in Guild Wars 1 that made PvP awesome:
-PvP only weapon skins, something that couldnt be earned in PVE or WvW
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Gallery_of_Envoy_weapons

-Zaishen Keys and Zaishen Chest
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Zaishen_Chest

Would be nice if they made the Zaishen Chest return, put it in the kitten lobby to eat up some of the empty space. Adjust the loot tables to be more GW2 aligned, make winning 3 matches a day in unranked/ranked reward 1 key, and make it repeatable.
Keys can’t be sold or mailed. The Loot in the chests can be sold or traded though.

It’s frustrating when the developers ignore the very obvious and when they forget about all the successful content they had in Guild Wars 1. The PvP issues in GW2 can be fixed and resolved, and the ideas they had in GW1 can EASILY be imported to GW2.

The Problem is in my opinion, is that the higher ups do NOT want to let the developers work on PvP. The Developers do NOT want to separate PvP from PVE since that would be more work for them to do.

The way PvP is ran now, is along the lines of a Turnkey operation…. start a season and wait till the devs have time to balance classes for PVE content and start another season. Rinse and repeat.

Nothing against PvP as a mode but lemme ask you this question…Can you imagine a hypothetical situation where Anet spent less resources on esports which benefits a small subset of players and spent those resources (organizing, inviting people, getting a prizepool together) on actually fixing basic things of the game so people could LIKE THE GAME first then play it as an esport later. All current Esport games are successful because the community AT LARGE supports the game because they honestly think it is a great game. Any fighting game has groups of players who LOVE the competitive aspect, any Moba same thing. But then you get to GW2 which is an MMO and the best ways to get people to love the game are always delayed. Any PvP balances are woefully underdone and not separated between modes, most of the PvE content updates are delayed almost without fail, and lets just say that Anet doesn’t understand one thing about WvW and is too stubborn to ask and would rather not support it. Remember that WvW is probably the most unique mode the game has to offer.

If they made players love the base game for the most part first then you could see an accurate representation of if people wanted to play it as an Esport as esports games are only successful if the community has fun and wants it to become one. What you have now is esports being shoved down everybody’s throats without fixing basic issues with the game. Some players will say “oh no, it is FINE nothing is wrong” but in general those players are the small subset of players who are willing to tolerate the sillyness that is Anet and their updates in order to try and get some of that prizemoney.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Ordered-list-of-OP-classes-after-patch/

the game is proved that pay2win. Why we should go esports as game is pay2win?

It is also proved that no one wants to join in any league stuffs since they know that the game is unbalanced. As a result of that this game lost huge numbers of its twitch viewers in return.

Never esports with this state. as a player i would deny esports.

-There is no more Team Q and Solo Q … both of which need to return with restrictions on each. No Premades in Solo, no solos in Team.

Actually, having played last season, I don’t think this is the right solution, but they do need a solution. I think the actual solution is more in just knowing that team A is a five-man squad and team B is two people duoing and three singles, so adjust expectations accordingly, and even if team B loses with 400+ points it is counted as a win.

-There is nothing new cosmetically for PvP players to purchase, the last finisher we saw that was New to the game was the Revemant Finisher from preordering.

If this is true, it might be a sign that the existing finishers were just not selling. I have a feeling that when people buy a thing on the TP, ANet makes more of that thing.

-Rewards from reward tracks are very very sub par and require a great deal of luck to get anything on par of PvE or WvW. Even though this is not the main objective of PvP (to make money) most PvP players would like to save up for content that can be used in all 3 areas of GW2. ((Legendaries, Unique Skins, mini pets, super rare particle infusions like ghostly, Chak, Bee, Polys etc))

I can totally agree with this, and would second it, that PvEers would like to have ways to save up for those rewards as well, and also for rewards currently only available through PvP. All players should be able to save up for good rewards in all modes.

The whole problem is that they should be focusing on improving their game so more people would play it instead of selling out to esports for fast but very shot lived profits, what then when its dead and they’ve screwed up all the aspects of the game?

The servers will close.

Wolfey.3407:

The Problem is in my opinion, is that the higher ups do NOT want to let the developers work on PvP.

PvP has had at least 2 major face lifts in its 3 years, not to mention many smaller updates. Perhaps not as much attention as PvE but DEFINITELY more than WvW. ANet has given ALOT of resources to PvP.

Sacrx NDA leak highlighted that any decisions made for WvW had to go through the PvP team first. He also mentioned that, back in the day, ANet would listen to groups like Team Paradigm and make changes that kept them happy.

Internally I don’t think much has changed, ANet gives a lot to PvP, your just seeing different names/teams involved.

ANet has focused on PvP alot and it shows. ANet had to work hard to reverse the trend of WvW being more popular than PvP. PvP hasn’t necessarily benefited or been managed correctly however.

I don’t mind Anet spending on esports really. But to drop $400k on such a small niche segment of the playerbase, with such a noncompetitive field of pro league teams, you have to question is it worth it? I can’t imagine this was a good investment spending that much when you already know it’s pretty much the same handful of teams that’ll make it to the top, and most could already call 1 or 2 teams that’ll win and they won’t be wrong.

$100k or even $50k would be enough for such a small playerbase with low competition and low viewership. The money part doesn’t make sense to me. On top of it, Anet’s refusal to separate balancing between PvE, PvP, and WvW. That part also doesn’t make sense to me, to have such large balance patch that changed classes 99% based on esports alone.

Again I don’t mind Anet wanting GW2 to be esports. But they’re honestly hurting their game making this push imo, because they’re spending too much for such a small segment of the playerbase, and they’re balancing classes based on 5v5 PvP.