Guild Wars 2

people lets keep it real. mainline pvpers are the loudest, whiniest, angriest, kitteniest, forum rantingist crowd in any mmo. they demand the devs make instant sweeping changes to anything that isnt in perfect harmony and if it doesnt happen by noon tomorrow they flood the forums with defeatist boohoo about how anet is garbage and the devs are idiots and that the entire game is unplayable.

just read the majority of childish kitten posts in the pvp section and maybe that will give you a hint as to why this aspect of the game is being relegated to the fringe.

furthermore there is no monthly fee so imo anet does nothing but win as the rabid tearspewing pvp crowd diminishes, cause it allows them to better focus on the sane portion of players who arent trying compensate for their lack of masculinity by being overly-competitive in a video game.

and also im a pvper

Baldric.6781:

It’s amazing how people can fool themselves, the game is great! we just don’t have enough players. Sure, sure.
It reminds me of that dude who tries to sell the house for 200.000 but can’t, so instead of accepting reality itself, he tries to reason why he cant do it, it must be the economy, you know, the bubble, the employment, etc etc. Sure, sure, just wait 1 year and everything will be fine.
But hey, i’m not ur mother, so if u want to keep playing and believing in the second coming of guild wars 2 pvp, our saviour, it’s ok. I mean, it could be way worse, you could be in a park getting high with LSD.

Second coming?? Why???
This is best game with best mechanics and (soon) best eSport infrastructure.
We dont have player base atm, we dont have any good game mode. To be honest we dont have anything except unfulfilled promises….

But, soon (soon when its done) we gona have cool new Esports features (about which we cant talk until they are ready), we cant talk about that but just be patient as you can see so far we can promise alot, and if you wish we can promise even more.

Let’s face reality: GW2 is dead, worst pve game in the World (with one unfinished and boring game mode, without players).

Lets, just move on….

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Nice post Folly. I agree with your points overall, though I’m going to speak primarily to your points about communication, community involvement and transparency.

The trick with our communication, is to find a good balance, on multiple levels.

First, we have to be conscious of the balance between how much time we have to be posting on the forums and writing blog posts, with how much time we have to be working on actual development: bug fixes, profession balance, designing new features, implementing new content, etc.

Next it’s important for us to be conscious of the balance between saying too little, leaving people pessimistic about when things are coming out and guessing about how those things will work, and saying too much, harming our ability to later change, postpone or abandon something that we’ve already publicly committed to.

Finally we need to consider the balance between relying on community feedback too heavily, where it’s super time consuming for us to process and leaves us feeling unable to make a change without first asking for a community vote, and relying on community feedback too little, where we might miss some key information that could impact the success of our future releases.

Hopefully we are getting this balance pretty close most of the time, and if not, it’s always something we are working towards improving.

Anyway, keep up the good, constructive posts!

can i have what you smoke please? If this is how you guys see the things, good luck to you, i rather play tetris.

Well, tetris does indeed have very good music.

@tyler; your transparency is frankly disgusting. How could you possibly say you’ve reached a decent balance between transparency and ‘’free developer will’’ when you sneak in MASSIVE changes to the game without giving us any clue?

The utility/weaponswap stuff, I remember our team being stuck on horrible weapon sets (guardian with hammer on legacy because he intended to stack might before we entered mid point for example) and having absolutely no clue why.
You guys sneaking in the matchmaking instead of announcing it made a ton of teams go inactive (like oni, for example) because they had no clue about you guys actually implementing mmr and got bored of the first day with temple when they did nothing but stomp random pugs.

lol only oni? after that patch, from DI like 30+ members quited. To make a bit of history, we started with 150ish members and we ended today with 20 that play 2-3 hours maximum. And till friday noone will be left imo. Arenanet, you are not even able to patch PVE properly, how can you promise evryone you’re able to grow a e-sport game.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Nice post Folly. I agree with your points overall, though I’m going to speak primarily to your points about communication, community involvement and transparency.

The trick with our communication, is to find a good balance, on multiple levels.

First, we have to be conscious of the balance between how much time we have to be posting on the forums and writing blog posts, with how much time we have to be working on actual development: bug fixes, profession balance, designing new features, implementing new content, etc.

Next it’s important for us to be conscious of the balance between saying too little, leaving people pessimistic about when things are coming out and guessing about how those things will work, and saying too much, harming our ability to later change, postpone or abandon something that we’ve already publicly committed to.

Finally we need to consider the balance between relying on community feedback too heavily, where it’s super time consuming for us to process and leaves us feeling unable to make a change without first asking for a community vote, and relying on community feedback too little, where we might miss some key information that could impact the success of our future releases.

Hopefully we are getting this balance pretty close most of the time, and if not, it’s always something we are working towards improving.

Anyway, keep up the good, constructive posts!

The problem I see is you are doing it too slow. There are serious bugs with skills that have been here since closed beta even, point in case – Flamethrower’s skill #2.

You should imo pay more attention to underused skills and make them little more powerful and interesting and leave good skills as they are. It will naturally evolve over time and give birth to new possible builds that utilize new buffed skills.

I know balancing is a very time consuming mind bending task that takes a lot of thought, time and data but by being too careful sometimes game gets stagnant quickly and does not feel fun anymore.

You should do more daring changes (but not too big ofc) while there are no big tournaments, leaderboards etc. Experiment while you can because when these features are in game you will have to be a lot more carful.

Wooyadeen.6491:

Baldric.6781:

It’s amazing how people can fool themselves, the game is great! we just don’t have enough players. Sure, sure.
It reminds me of that dude who tries to sell the house for 200.000 but can’t, so instead of accepting reality itself, he tries to reason why he cant do it, it must be the economy, you know, the bubble, the employment, etc etc. Sure, sure, just wait 1 year and everything will be fine.
But hey, i’m not ur mother, so if u want to keep playing and believing in the second coming of guild wars 2 pvp, our saviour, it’s ok. I mean, it could be way worse, you could be in a park getting high with LSD.

Second coming?? Why???
This is best game with best mechanics and (soon) best eSport infrastructure.
We dont have player base atm, we dont have any good game mode. To be honest we dont have anything except unfulfilled promises….

But, soon (soon when its done) we gona have cool new Esports features (about which we cant talk until they are ready), we cant talk about that but just be patient as you can see so far we can promise alot, and if you wish we can promise even more.

Let’s face reality: GW2 is dead, worst pve game in the World (with one unfinished and boring game mode, without players).

Lets, just move on….

Oh oh, oh! I get it! “I don’t like the game so it must be dead”. Cool strawhat argument.

Please, do move on. Like you said.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Nice post Folly. I agree with your points overall, though I’m going to speak primarily to your points about communication, community involvement and transparency.

Excellent, I’m very glad you saw what I think was an incredibly important post by Folly.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Finally we need to consider the balance between relying on community feedback too heavily, where it’s super time consuming for us to process and leaves us feeling unable to make a change without first asking for a community vote, and relying on community feedback too little, where we might miss some key information that could impact the success of our future releases.

I also agree with your previous comments on finding the right balance of communication, but on this particular topic, I would like to chip in there needs to be some very careful consideration in terms of when to rely on community feedback.
For PvE, and possibly WvW, I think the above statement will hold true, but for PvP, and given an assumption you wish this to become a competitive arena for eSports, then the dialogue between PvP game designers and community must be super tight.

Relying too little on community feedback goes without saying, you probably end up designing something only a minority will want to use anyway. So the key strikes me as just what you comment is very time-consuming, but unless you want PvP to become hugely successful part of GW2, it needs heavy investment in community feedback like Folly previously pointed out.

I may be wrong drawing a line between SPvP and PvE/WvW in terms of finding this balance, but I think you have a much more accepting/“forgiving” community on the latter and already enjoy much-deserved credit there, whereas for taking the step to become a popular platform with eSports on the SPvP side, the game still has yet to achieve penetration into the majority of that community.

Sorry for any language issues as English is not my main.

dreztina.4820:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Nice post Folly. I agree with your points overall, though I’m going to speak primarily to your points about communication, community involvement and transparency.

The trick with our communication, is to find a good balance, on multiple levels.

First, we have to be conscious of the balance between how much time we have to be posting on the forums and writing blog posts, with how much time we have to be working on actual development: bug fixes, profession balance, designing new features, implementing new content, etc.

Next it’s important for us to be conscious of the balance between saying too little, leaving people pessimistic about when things are coming out and guessing about how those things will work, and saying too much, harming our ability to later change, postpone or abandon something that we’ve already publicly committed to.

Finally we need to consider the balance between relying on community feedback too heavily, where it’s super time consuming for us to process and leaves us feeling unable to make a change without first asking for a community vote, and relying on community feedback too little, where we might miss some key information that could impact the success of our future releases.

Hopefully we are getting this balance pretty close most of the time, and if not, it’s always something we are working towards improving.

Anyway, keep up the good, constructive posts!

I’m sorry, but no, you are not getting the balance anywhere near close. How can you think that you are communicating effectively when the dev tracker would be almost dead if not for all the support/moderation posts? How can you say it’s fine when there’s a company like Riot where devs post constantly every day and regularly have huge discussions with the player base? How can you say you’re doing well when no one has any idea what you are doing except for the extremely minimal press releases?

Sorry to jump down your throat when you are at least here and trying, but you shouldn’t be looking at the amount of communication the company does and thinking ’Ya, we do a pretty good job." You should be looking at your communication and saying, “Holy crap, this is one of the biggest problems we have and we need to make major improvements.”

I don’t know what the operation hierarchy is at ArenaNet, but I’m sure your project manager can do the posting based of meeting agendas (since he will usually be taking notes or get the notes) and meetings with individual developers.

This creates transparency, allows developers to work unhinged, and gives your PMs slightly more work to do.

A while back I made a post called “Transparency is paramount to success”

It got a whole lot of ArenaNet attention, reassuring the community they were trying their best etc. etc. Yet in that time frame very little has changed in terms of transparency.

Killyox.3950:

Wooyadeen.6491:

Baldric.6781:

It’s amazing how people can fool themselves, the game is great! we just don’t have enough players. Sure, sure.
It reminds me of that dude who tries to sell the house for 200.000 but can’t, so instead of accepting reality itself, he tries to reason why he cant do it, it must be the economy, you know, the bubble, the employment, etc etc. Sure, sure, just wait 1 year and everything will be fine.
But hey, i’m not ur mother, so if u want to keep playing and believing in the second coming of guild wars 2 pvp, our saviour, it’s ok. I mean, it could be way worse, you could be in a park getting high with LSD.

Second coming?? Why???
This is best game with best mechanics and (soon) best eSport infrastructure.
We dont have player base atm, we dont have any good game mode. To be honest we dont have anything except unfulfilled promises….

But, soon (soon when its done) we gona have cool new Esports features (about which we cant talk until they are ready), we cant talk about that but just be patient as you can see so far we can promise alot, and if you wish we can promise even more.

Let’s face reality: GW2 is dead, worst pve game in the World (with one unfinished and boring game mode, without players).

Lets, just move on….

Oh oh, oh! I get it! “I don’t like the game so it must be dead”. Cool strawhat argument.

Please, do move on. Like you said.

Yes, yes, you’re right. I’m all about lies they do great job, and you r free to wait 2013 years for someone to resurect.

Im not gona believe in lies anymore…..

But for believers i have great news:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/structured-pvp-iceberg/

Great news. Lets wait…

First of all, I haven’t really been playing for about a month, but I’m not against ever coming back.

Here are my Ideas how to increase the number of PvP-Players:

Reach out to established e-Sport Insitutions:
1) ESL (MLG, IGN and other Tournament-Organizers): They wanted to create an Amateur-League, but it simply wasn’t possible, cuz GW2 has no “create own game-Function”. C’mon guys: If I was Anet and wanted to create an e-Sport-Game, I’d have immediatly reached out to them and kept them up to date what they are planning to do with PvP and planned an Amateur-Season with them. Simply by GW2 being on the ESL-Site, just a small notice like (GW2 Amateur Season 1 coming up insert date here, it would’ve put GW2 on the Map, because ESL is huge in EU and I know from personal contacts that many players where eager to compete in it)

2) Sponsored Teams like AZUBU: C’mon guys – AZUBU, one of the Top Multigaming-Organizations atm. with Top-Players in LoL, SC2 etc. signed “The Last Pride [EvIL]” and made it clear that they wanted to be a Top-Contender in GW2 e-Sport. But really, teams like that don’t play if it’s just randoming for a few hours a day. LastofMaster and Soul Wedding and some others were actively playing GW2, just not PvP, probably only w8ing for PvP to be set into high gear, but if nothing happens and ANet doesn’t communicate with them, they’ll leave, which is IMHO what they’ve done now.

Get the streamers into the public eye:
There are some great sites that feature a List of Streams on their Site. Mostly, it’s a Site dedicated to one certain Game with only showing Streamers of that particular game. But there are some extremely popular Sites (for example a popular SC2-Site…. thats kinda “teamish” and “liquid”. Since they’ve started to also feature Dota2-Streams, the number of Viewers has drastically increased. GW2 is very niche, as GW1 was as well. No1 outside the community really got in contact with it.)

Introduce it to the competetive Community:
Best way to do so is with a nice Showmatch and some good casters. If you can’t get Observer-Mode rdy, make sth. happen with several PoV’s from different Streamers – edit a kitten video, put some voice-over on Top of it and write IGN (they already feature e-Sport related content) a mail saying: "put this video in the Spotlight and NC-Soft will give you some exclusive preview-deals or demos on certain games or we will give your Site Hits by mentioning you on our Site or whatever, get creative; I’m sure you have some guys that know about all this public relations stuff…

More e-Sport Featured Stuff on the GW-Homepage:
Get Interviews of current Top-Players: e-Sport is about hype and about the ppl behind the ingame-Chars and acknowleding that they bring a certain expertise to the table. Get an Interview with freaking Hellseth and put his beautiful Head of Hair on the mainpage or get an Interview with Teldo talking with his awesome Accent: It’s also the people that bring in new Players and make the Game interesting.

If ANet really wants to start e-Sport big, they need to get the necessary stuff in place and then start a global PR-offensive.

Tellah.8073:

people lets keep it real. mainline pvpers are the loudest, whiniest, angriest, kitteniest, forum rantingist crowd in any mmo. they demand the devs make instant sweeping changes to anything that isnt in perfect harmony and if it doesnt happen by noon tomorrow they flood the forums with defeatist boohoo about how anet is garbage and the devs are idiots and that the entire game is unplayable.

just read the majority of childish kitten posts in the pvp section and maybe that will give you a hint as to why this aspect of the game is being relegated to the fringe.

furthermore there is no monthly fee so imo anet does nothing but win as the rabid tearspewing pvp crowd diminishes, cause it allows them to better focus on the sane portion of players who arent trying compensate for their lack of masculinity by being overly-competitive in a video game.

and also im a pvper

I agree. PvPers tend to take things way too serious, including and expecially themselves. Time to realize sPvP is a niche and PvPers aren’t some kind of MMO masterrace.

Killyox.3950:

Wooyadeen.6491:

Baldric.6781:

It’s amazing how people can fool themselves, the game is great! we just don’t have enough players. Sure, sure.
It reminds me of that dude who tries to sell the house for 200.000 but can’t, so instead of accepting reality itself, he tries to reason why he cant do it, it must be the economy, you know, the bubble, the employment, etc etc. Sure, sure, just wait 1 year and everything will be fine.
But hey, i’m not ur mother, so if u want to keep playing and believing in the second coming of guild wars 2 pvp, our saviour, it’s ok. I mean, it could be way worse, you could be in a park getting high with LSD.

Second coming?? Why???
This is best game with best mechanics and (soon) best eSport infrastructure.
We dont have player base atm, we dont have any good game mode. To be honest we dont have anything except unfulfilled promises….

But, soon (soon when its done) we gona have cool new Esports features (about which we cant talk until they are ready), we cant talk about that but just be patient as you can see so far we can promise alot, and if you wish we can promise even more.

Let’s face reality: GW2 is dead, worst pve game in the World (with one unfinished and boring game mode, without players).

Lets, just move on….

Oh oh, oh! I get it! “I don’t like the game so it must be dead”. Cool strawhat argument.

Please, do move on. Like you said.

No strawman just look at queue times and servers

PowerBottom.5796:

First of all, I haven’t really been playing for about a month, but I’m not against ever coming back.

Here are my Ideas how to increase the number of PvP-Players:

Reach out to established e-Sport Insitutions:
1) ESL (MLG, IGN and other Tournament-Organizers): They wanted to create an Amateur-League, but it simply wasn’t possible, cuz GW2 has no “create own game-Function”. C’mon guys: If I was Anet and wanted to create an e-Sport-Game, I’d have immediatly reached out to them and kept them up to date what they are planning to do with PvP and planned an Amateur-Season with them. Simply by GW2 being on the ESL-Site, just a small notice like (GW2 Amateur Season 1 coming up insert date here, it would’ve put GW2 on the Map, because ESL is huge in EU and I know from personal contacts that many players where eager to compete in it)

2) Sponsored Teams like AZUBU: C’mon guys – AZUBU, one of the Top Multigaming-Organizations atm. with Top-Players in LoL, SC2 etc. signed “The Last Pride [EvIL]” and made it clear that they wanted to be a Top-Contender in GW2 e-Sport. But really, teams like that don’t play if it’s just randoming for a few hours a day. LastofMaster and Soul Wedding and some others were actively playing GW2, just not PvP, probably only w8ing for PvP to be set into high gear, but if nothing happens and ANet doesn’t communicate with them, they’ll leave, which is IMHO what they’ve done now.

Get the streamers into the public eye:
There are some great sites that feature a List of Streams on their Site. Mostly, it’s a Site dedicated to one certain Game with only showing Streamers of that particular game. But there are some extremely popular Sites (for example a popular SC2-Site…. thats kinda “teamish” and “liquid”. Since they’ve started to also feature Dota2-Streams, the number of Viewers has drastically increased. GW2 is very niche, as GW1 was as well. No1 outside the community really got in contact with it.)

Introduce it to the competetive Community:
Best way to do so is with a nice Showmatch and some good casters. If you can’t get Observer-Mode rdy, make sth. happen with several PoV’s from different Streamers – edit a kitten video, put some voice-over on Top of it and write IGN (they already feature e-Sport related content) a mail saying: "put this video in the Spotlight and NC-Soft will give you some exclusive preview-deals or demos on certain games or we will give your Site Hits by mentioning you on our Site or whatever, get creative; I’m sure you have some guys that know about all this public relations stuff…

More e-Sport Featured Stuff on the GW-Homepage:
Get Interviews of current Top-Players: e-Sport is about hype and about the ppl behind the ingame-Chars and acknowleding that they bring a certain expertise to the table. Get an Interview with freaking Hellseth and put his beautiful Head of Hair on the mainpage or get an Interview with Teldo talking with his awesome Accent: It’s also the people that bring in new Players and make the Game interesting.

If ANet really wants to start e-Sport big, they need to get the necessary stuff in place and then start a global PR-offensive.

I also have a suggestion for anet: hire this guy.

Iruwen.3164:

Tellah.8073:

people lets keep it real. mainline pvpers are the loudest, whiniest, angriest, kitteniest, forum rantingist crowd in any mmo. they demand the devs make instant sweeping changes to anything that isnt in perfect harmony and if it doesnt happen by noon tomorrow they flood the forums with defeatist boohoo about how anet is garbage and the devs are idiots and that the entire game is unplayable.

just read the majority of childish kitten posts in the pvp section and maybe that will give you a hint as to why this aspect of the game is being relegated to the fringe.

furthermore there is no monthly fee so imo anet does nothing but win as the rabid tearspewing pvp crowd diminishes, cause it allows them to better focus on the sane portion of players who arent trying compensate for their lack of masculinity by being overly-competitive in a video game.

and also im a pvper

I agree. PvPers tend to take things way too serious, including and expecially themselves. Time to realize sPvP is a niche and PvPers aren’t some kind of MMO masterrace.

Has nothing to do with being special players it has to do with what was promised during beta and before release

Follidus.8027:

- You need to fix game breaking bugs. There is absolutely no excuse for this. Again, if we look at history, a lot of people quit when the block bug, svanir rune bug was prevelent. You couldn’t do a paid tournament without running into it, and this caused a large majority of at least the NA competitive community to die out. We lost so many teams, and so many players.

I think this was the most important thing that Follidus has said, which had echoed many peoples sentiments at the time of Svanir + Block bug. I remember the public complaints were responded to in a PvE manner “it is not stopping anyone from playing the game so it will be fixed with the next month content patch”. As Folly has said, when a balance breaking bug for PvP that can be exploited for an edge is found you have to be able to disable the ability (could just make it not do anything until it is fixed) or disable the weapon/sigil/rune. I still find it hilarious that svanirs never got a hotfix, but in the same time “area” the dyes dropping too often was gamebreaking and required its own patch.

With that said the patching methods used for PvP are operating incorrectly. I am not saying I do not mind small tweaks to try and balance things this approach is fine. The problem is with this scheme it is almost required to make minor PvP class tweaks weekly to attempt to better balance the game. Sometimes the balance changes might not be fully thought through in the impact they will have, but at worst you would wait is 7 days to have the change reverted. If they had taken this approach when the game was first released, class fluctuation in strength would have been all over the place, however the community would have seen Dev’s actively attempting to balance the game, instead of getting frustrated with no changes for a month.

sidenote: Test server patch notes are never set in stone, I still don’t understand the policy that you guys have that says everything you write down must be implemented. No other game I can think of treats test server patch notes in this way. If you show people a rough idea of what is planned for the future patch and you change something, I don’t believe it will be the nuclear fallout you think it is. In fact I think people react worse when a nerf is sprung on them with no warning or time to prepare for it.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Nice post Folly. I agree with your points overall, though I’m going to speak primarily to your points about communication, community involvement and transparency.

The trick with our communication, is to find a good balance, on multiple levels.

First, we have to be conscious of the balance between how much time we have to be posting on the forums and writing blog posts, with how much time we have to be working on actual development: bug fixes, profession balance, designing new features, implementing new content, etc.

Next it’s important for us to be conscious of the balance between saying too little, leaving people pessimistic about when things are coming out and guessing about how those things will work, and saying too much, harming our ability to later change, postpone or abandon something that we’ve already publicly committed to.

Finally we need to consider the balance between relying on community feedback too heavily, where it’s super time consuming for us to process and leaves us feeling unable to make a change without first asking for a community vote, and relying on community feedback too little, where we might miss some key information that could impact the success of our future releases.

Hopefully we are getting this balance pretty close most of the time, and if not, it’s always something we are working towards improving.

Anyway, keep up the good, constructive posts!

We are not your boss. Anything you say to the community is not set in stone. Every sensible person knows things aren’t set in stone and things can change. You aren’t winning any awards or gaining more players by being tight lipped. We don’t care if your plans change or if something gets pushed back. We care about knowing if “update #2” is going to bring “eSport” or if we have to wait until “update 22”. Trust me; you can stay tight lipped and provide “eSport” in “update 11” but most of your serious players will be gone because you lost their trust long ago.
Every aspect to the game shouldn’t be decided based on user feedback, but your timetable of updates\additional content\bug fixes should be. I’m sure many players would have appreciated bug fixes\another game type\additional class balance tweaks over obtaining an additional map.
Players aren’t jumping up and down raving over the quality of GW2’s PvP development. Ask a group of players what they like and dislike about the game and if there are more points on the dislike spectrum then its safe to assume something isn’t quite right. How many players have commented about portal and timewarp? Quickness? Thief trollage? OP bunker Eles & guards? Unkillable rangers 1v1? Playing on the same tPVP map for an entire week?
How can you say you listen to the community at all? How can you say you communicate effectively?
The player base never knows what tricks you have up your sleeve until we log into the game. The patch notes aren’t even released on patch day until the game is back online.
Not sure where you developers are getting your assumptions on communication from. How can anyone be angry at you for being honest and trying to develop and support the competitiveness of GW2?

SAtaarcoeny.8476:

So what is Anet’s plan on promoting this game now that its getting better?

so we all know Anet is doing a awful job getting more ppl into the community so if they don’t want to help then we as a community shouldn’t be pushing more ppl away but if they do respond with a way they are helping then we need to keep the new ppl around.

are you trying to get them back or are you going to reach out into the gaming world and try and get new ppl?

Go look on any mmo website and GW2 is the number one game. It also has a 90 meta-critic score and has sold more boxes than any recent mmo game.

GW2 does not have a visibility or a marketing problem.

As others here have pointed out, spvp is simply not appealing to most gamers. Its not like a marketing campaign is going to make competitive players ‘see the light’ and start playing 40 hours a week when the mode itself is incomplete and not up to standard.

A lot of hardcore people tried the game in the first 2 months, but there was no reason for them to stick around because:

1) Basic competitive features that are available in other games, including free2play games are not in GW2
2) Conquest mode x5 maps is incredibly boring after a month or two for most people
3) The meta is stale and uninteresting
4) Hot join is only appealing to the extreme casual players who will never play much

I agree with current players that the combat is better in GW2 than any other MMO, but that isn’t enough to get people to keep playing when everything else is missing.

We are 7 months in and we still can’t even create a private match, which was promised over 5 months ago, and was displayed at a gaming event well over a year ago.

Outreach to who?
They had large population to begin with and chased them away by bad design.
Now you want to reach for them without fixing anything in essence?
Game is dominated by downstate management and aoe spam and people decided to ‘spread out’ (on other games).

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Nice post Folly. I agree with your points overall, though I’m going to speak primarily to your points about communication, community involvement and transparency.

The trick with our communication, is to find a good balance, on multiple levels.

First, we have to be conscious of the balance between how much time we have to be posting on the forums and writing blog posts, with how much time we have to be working on actual development: bug fixes, profession balance, designing new features, implementing new content, etc.

Next it’s important for us to be conscious of the balance between saying too little, leaving people pessimistic about when things are coming out and guessing about how those things will work, and saying too much, harming our ability to later change, postpone or abandon something that we’ve already publicly committed to.

Finally we need to consider the balance between relying on community feedback too heavily, where it’s super time consuming for us to process and leaves us feeling unable to make a change without first asking for a community vote, and relying on community feedback too little, where we might miss some key information that could impact the success of our future releases.

Hopefully we are getting this balance pretty close most of the time, and if not, it’s always something we are working towards improving.

Anyway, keep up the good, constructive posts!

I am not to sure if you answered what this post was about.

is there any way we can help you with a outreach program to get more ppl?

what is anet’s plan to get more ppl?

can we get a free 2-4 week trial were they can only be in the mist?

how are u coming up with balance? anet should let more players into the PTR so we can “TEST”. is that a possibility?

you dont want to say little and leave us pessimistic, but we have no idea whats coming with next balance patch but most us believe its going to be very bad. im ver optimistic and i have been pro gw2 sense day one but with how you guys have destroyed classes it worries me what your PTR process is.

If you guys talk about possibilities with us how does that ruin your chance to change it? we would rather know your thought process then be left in the dark until the update then the game is ruined for 2 months while we wait for the next patch to fix the previous one ruining the future ones? it doesnt make sense.

fix the bugs please.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Nice post Folly. I agree with your points overall, though I’m going to speak primarily to your points about communication, community involvement and transparency.

The trick with our communication, is to find a good balance, on multiple levels.

First, we have to be conscious of the balance between how much time we have to be posting on the forums and writing blog posts, with how much time we have to be working on actual development: bug fixes, profession balance, designing new features, implementing new content, etc.

Next it’s important for us to be conscious of the balance between saying too little, leaving people pessimistic about when things are coming out and guessing about how those things will work, and saying too much, harming our ability to later change, postpone or abandon something that we’ve already publicly committed to.

Finally we need to consider the balance between relying on community feedback too heavily, where it’s super time consuming for us to process and leaves us feeling unable to make a change without first asking for a community vote, and relying on community feedback too little, where we might miss some key information that could impact the success of our future releases.

Hopefully we are getting this balance pretty close most of the time, and if not, it’s always something we are working towards improving.

Anyway, keep up the good, constructive posts!

There is no such thing as too much communication. I haven’t heard of one person say that they would like to be kept in the dark about what’s going on with the game, especially when it comes to bugs, game development, and class balance. I understand the staff needs to spend the majority of their time working on the game, but it doesn’t take much time to skim the forums to see what the major problems are. Players are posting about the same issues since launch. Everyday there’s a new post about same issues, e.g. Thief culling issue, Necro pet AI, other game modes, etc.

Since January I’ve been peaking my head in to see how this game is doing, sadly I have found more and more pvp’ers leaving to never return. Some of the latest interviews that I’ve read/watched on ign/gamespot/any other random game site I have noticed the dev’s won’t even mention the pvp. Please Anet, if you’ve given up on balancing the pvp, adding ranking systems & dueling, and other types of match making please let us know. Stop playing so safe with giving out information like you’re some to be released game being teased before E3. This is why people still consider your game to be in beta as far as pvp goes. Sataar and folly are right in the points that they have made. Next time I log on I’d like to see the community back, but anymore my optimistic side for this game has fallen to next to nothing.

I will say that this game has lots of potential to be more than just a great time for casual players, it has so much potential to be a competitive esports game. I miss the fun of this game from many months ago and at the rate of teams dropping like flies to be replaced by super pug after super pug, I’m wondering if tournys are going to just stop popping. It’s hard to be competitive with how things are going. This is my opinion but I felt like I had to give my support for those that still cared about this game. I hope to play competitively again soon.

Yeah, I’m pretty much done with this game too. I logged on the other day and saw like 20 people sitting in the mists ( so much for 3 million copies sold)

Klassic.8057:

Yeah, I’m pretty much done with this game too. I logged on the other day and saw like 20 people sitting in the mists ( so much for 3 million copies sold)

its sad to hear this i just been telling everyone to wait until after the 26th to decide.

yeah dude, i’m gonna check in on the game on the 26th. hopefully it will be enough to bring back previous players too

It’s kinda sad where this discussion is heading: Yes, we all know GW2 has great potential and ANet did kinda take their sweet time with necessary PvP-Updates, but thats not the Point of this Topic as far as I know. The Topic is about how to get new ppl into GW2 PvP, completely disregarding the state the game is currently in.

What ANet needs to realize is, that there is a huge competetive Community out there and most of them are playing actively games like LoL, SC2, Dota2, HoN, Shooters. Some of them are looking for new and exciting games to play and ANet needs to make sure that they kow about GW2.

From personal experience, I think that GW2 has good chances tapping into the players of the MOBA-genre: GW2 has certain similarities with LoL, HoN and Dota2 and with all those games being very popular, but also very alike, GW2 sets itself apart. There are ppl that like those MOBA’s, but are also looking for sth. a bit more MMO-like; more spells, more customizable Chars and Team-setups etc. – that’s exactly what I’ve missed in those games.

The competetive GW2-Community (if there really is such a thing) or ANet themselves needs to reach out to those players. So where can you reach them?

- Multigaming-Sites: get the Streams featured on Teamliquid for example
- Popular Clan-pages: AZUBU already made a GW2-Page, why didn’t ANet immediately jump on it or why don’t they do it now?
- Tournament-Organizers: MLG, IPL, ESL, Dreamhack etc. The competetive Community knows about these Institutions and if they make sth. happen with GW2, they’ll hear about it and maybe check GW2 out.
- Popular Streamers: There are tons of streamers that get viewers by being good at a certain game – really good. You won’t really get them to stream GW2… But from what I’ve heard, there are also other types of streamers that get many viewers, like Girls jiggling with their stuff or guys that are just entertaining. Maybe getting one of those to stream GW2 wouldn’t be too bad? How will you do it – Send out free Copies of GW2 to those certain individuals or whatever. If it gets GW2 like 1000+ Viewers on Twitch, it’ll be worth it.
- Twitch.tv: Really; we need to get the numbers of ppl that watch GW2-streams up; GW2 needs to be one of the Top-10 most watched games and it shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish that. How? Make the GW2-Community itself aware of those streams, advertise them on the GW2 frontpage!

It’s really not that hard: Know your target audience -> know where and how to reach them -> do it in a way that is appealing to them.

The good thing is, that once GW2 gets the necessary features (which should happen very soon afaik) the Product is very solid: Ppl from the competetive community will want to play it – show it to them!

@PowerBottom Pretty well thought out ideas. I would really like the developers take more action. Same goes for more of us ( players ) as well.

I would also like to see a designated person from Arenanet give us insight into the development and also delievering ideas much more to the developers. Something like a Community Manager for sPvP. I mean for that money they make ( or have made ), it should not hurt to hire someone professional. :/

Main message here is if youre so afraid of failure and criticism just give us access to the ptr. Make us a part of the balancing process. No secrets need to be kept. Look at the balancing process for dota2

This thread is gold. I hope devs read it.

Maybe first give ideas how to make game fun ok?

Then we talk about esports and outreach programs, Because its freaking pointless when games is booring as kitten

Hope is wonderful, an easy fix to make the game fun would be amazing, but I am a bit skeptical (real surprising, I know…) about much happening in this game.

My guess is that they lost their funding.

The PvP seems like it had solid backing for the first half~ of its creation, then the CEO or whatnot saw how terrible of a money maker it could turn out to be for the costs involved so just cut funding, by like 2/3… that or it was planned from the get-go to do that, just funnel a ton into initial game developement and work out all the kinks in time since its a one time fee sort of game.

The idea fits with the great core concept/setup of GW2, and then just shoddy snail paced developement during/after beta. The guys up top just didn’t like what they were seeing, or didn’t see enough potential in more investment, so pulled out. The GW2 team probably did have large hopes of making it an esport before beta/mid-alpha, and this attempt at a new game style probably would have been great for it, just the ‘building a game from the ground up’, I bet, was soaking up WAAAY too much time/money for it to really seem worthwhile…

At least that’s how i kinda look back on the game.
As a sidenote, I find it utterly hilarious that Dota 2 has roughly a couple dozen times better competitive scene (tragically not even being sarcastic) than GW2 and its only in beta…

3 million copies sold is like 200 million made so far. im sure they can give out free 1 month trials to only the mist.

they lose nothing by doing this.

they get all the ppl waiting for elder scrolls and ff14 plus all the ppl not sure what they are waiting for.

the information were giving out a free month will be all over every major mmo website so we would get so many ppl.

free trials work for every game to attract and get future ppl thats why games do it.

marketing it would be easy. " Can 2012 MMO of the year do it again in 2013 with the help of the 1st 1 month free pvp trial"

i wish folly instead of me or power would write this becuae they dont respond to power’s useful replys and all they do is infract me for trying to help.

SAtaarcoeny.8476:

3 million copies sold is like 200 million made so far. im sure they can give out free 1 month trials to only the mist.

Need to take in development costs.

I would reckon GW2 cost somewhere between 20-40 million.

Then server costs.

Advertising.

Work space costs, and other bills.

Then taxes on the 200 mill made..

I would say when it’s all said and done they made a 70 million profit.

Then there’s salaries and benefits to think about over the course of the last 6 months.

I’m sure they aren’t making a ton of new profit off of the sale of the game itself now.

To be honest, I think they are getting close to being strapped for cash.

A free trial isn’t even needed, tons of people already bought the box for spvp and left.

If you can’t get the people who already paid full price for the game to play, good luck bringing new people in.

All that will happen is some new people play for a bit, realize it isn’t that great and then leave, with the difference being Anet doesn’t get $60.

The biggest outreach they can do is putting an end to “global” combos.

Competitive communities develop when new entrants don’t get killed in 2 seconds from nowhere wondering what the heck happened, then immediately leave never to return.

Burst needs to be toned down in this game, no matter what the cost.

After that, bunkers can be addressed, but ANet sends the wrong message to people when they go ask one-trick mug+backstab thieves how they want to play while taking a sledge hammer to builds used by everyone who do not play thieves to live long enough to experience actual game-play.

plasmacutter.2709:

The biggest outreach they can do is putting an end to “global” combos.

Competitive communities develop when new entrants don’t get killed in 2 seconds from nowhere wondering what the heck happened, then immediately leave never to return.

Burst needs to be toned down in this game, no matter what the cost.

After that, bunkers can be addressed, but ANet sends the wrong message to people when they go ask one-trick mug+backstab thieves how they want to play while taking a sledge hammer to builds used by everyone who do not play thieves to live long enough to experience actual game-play.

Not to be rude, but I don’t think you get the point of this Thread.

This Thread is about reaching People that DON’T play the game yet. It’s about reaching potential PvP-Players and introducing them to the game, it’s basically totally independant from the game itself. The Game itself only comes into play, when you’ve already reached those Players and got them to play it; then stuff like that becomes important.

after the 26th we need a huge outreach program nomatter what they are still working on.

or they need to let us move freely between EU and NA with still getting qp and chests.

free trial would just hurt the game more…

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/save-over-30-on-guild-wars-2/

this was done before the patch and was done before a free mist trial?

im sure this would be more effective if you promoted a free trial in the mist to build ppls interest. and during the whole trial offer the game at a 30% discount.

do you guys understand all your doing with this 30% off is getting PVE ppl. or WVW ppl.

from my point of view you will need a mass amount of ppl to hit the pvp area at once so ppl that come have equal like minded want to do pvp ppl, making the game fun for them all.

There’s no point in mass marketing a pvp in a beta state.

There’s not point in going e-sport unless the devs fully understand how the games plays so they can polish the gameplay to the perfection.

There is no point in getting partnerships with renown names before they know how to structure the game for competition.

Now having said that, how many players will leave before any of these is done? How much valuable feedback from top teams will be lost before they implement the tools for a competitive scene to emerge? Can the pvp community grow to be as amazing as gw1’s after such a questionable start?

You should have realised it by now, but hotfixes even incomplete are much more satisfying than 0 feature for months and months – cf the 1 week 1v1 to replace the 8 team tournaments.

Hugs.1856:

There’s no point in mass marketing a pvp in a beta state.

There’s not point in going e-sport unless the devs fully understand how the games plays so they can polish the gameplay to the perfection.

There is no point in getting partnerships with renown names before they know how to structure the game for competition.

Now having said that, how many players will leave before any of these is done? How much valuable feedback from top teams will be lost before they implement the tools for a competitive scene to emerge? Can the pvp community grow to be as amazing as gw1’s after such a questionable start?

You should have realised it by now, but hotfixes even incomplete are much more satisfying than 0 feature for months and months – cf the 1 week 1v1 to replace the 8 team tournaments.

I agree, and that’s probably why they haven’t made another big push yet. ANet’s using radically different combat mechanics, so breaks in their system are inevitable and will take time to pinpoint and fix. Keeping players in the dark, however, probably isn’t the best way to go about handling the game. Feedback is a two way-street, after all.

ArenaNET give us some weekly tournament with cool prizes so the top teams have something to be excited about and the rest have something to aspire too. We have lost so many of the top players and nothing seems to happen to prevent this or get them back. 1 new map and a ladder wont be enough.

We can then stream those tournaments and create some buzz around pvp…

I’d like to chime in here. I do agree to some extent on the transparency. There are some areas in the game I’d like to see Arenanet discuss and talk about more but they are doing a much! better job than many other developers.

However, I do follow some games where the developers are much more on top of community involvement than this, but those games are not MMO’s either. They focus on one thing, PvP as an example, so it would be easier to maintain a game looking at one aspect of gameplay and one aspect only. Here we have a game that involves an enormous world, World vs World to maintain, Dungeons, PvP etc. It’s essentially everything into one, much harder to manage.

But if you really want to see what transparency and poor community involvement is, just go look at the HaloWaypoint forums (Halo 4 & matchmaking section). There are 3 mega threads: one with 230 pages of replies with one pathetic response, another with 71 pages -same response and one with over 100 pages and not a single response at all.

I’ve never even seen a page reach that amount here, but imagine if it did and Anet still didn’t response, there would be outrage. And that is the entire halo forums at this point.

And please, do not edit my mention of halo forums, it’s on topic and I’m only proving that Arenanet is much better than most developers now a days.

MarcusKilgannon.5048:

I’d like to chime in here. I do agree to some extent on the transparency. There are some areas in the game I’d like to see Arenanet discuss and talk about more but they are doing a much! better job than many other developers.

However, I do follow some games where the developers are much more on top of community involvement than this, but those games are not MMO’s either. They focus on one thing, PvP as an example, so it would be easier to maintain a game looking at one aspect of gameplay and one aspect only. Here we have a game that involves an enormous world, World vs World to maintain, Dungeons, PvP etc. It’s essentially everything into one, much harder to manage.

But if you really want to see what transparency and poor community involvement is, just go look at the HaloWaypoint forums (Halo 4 & matchmaking section). There are 3 mega threads: one with 230 pages of replies with one pathetic response, another with 71 pages -same response and one with over 100 pages and not a single response at all.

I’ve never even seen a page reach that amount here, but imagine if it did and Anet still didn’t response, there would be outrage. And that is the entire halo forums at this point.

And please, do not edit my mention of halo forums, it’s on topic and I’m only proving that Arenanet is much better than most developers now a days.

Back when there were people playing GW2 pvp we had threads just like that. You don’t see them anymore because there are just not that many people playing anymore.

Back when there were people playing GW2 pvp we had threads just like that. You don’t see them anymore because there are just not that many people playing anymore.

I do remember threads like that, but I’ve never once seen a thread here on guild wars hit the 100 page mark.

MarcusKilgannon.5048:

Back when there were people playing GW2 pvp we had threads just like that. You don’t see them anymore because there are just not that many people playing anymore.

I do remember threads like that, but I’ve never once seen a thread here on guild wars hit the 100 page mark.

I’d venture to say it was mostly because ANet staff repeatedly locked and deleted any threads that had the potential to go that high.

Reikou.7068:

MarcusKilgannon.5048:

Back when there were people playing GW2 pvp we had threads just like that. You don’t see them anymore because there are just not that many people playing anymore.

I do remember threads like that, but I’ve never once seen a thread here on guild wars hit the 100 page mark.

I’d venture to say it was mostly because ANet staff repeatedly locked and deleted any threads that had the potential to go that high.

Yep or they would merge them together and give it a new name so no one new what it was.

PowerBottom.5796:

plasmacutter.2709:

The biggest outreach they can do is putting an end to “global” combos.

Competitive communities develop when new entrants don’t get killed in 2 seconds from nowhere wondering what the heck happened, then immediately leave never to return.

Burst needs to be toned down in this game, no matter what the cost.

After that, bunkers can be addressed, but ANet sends the wrong message to people when they go ask one-trick mug+backstab thieves how they want to play while taking a sledge hammer to builds used by everyone who do not play thieves to live long enough to experience actual game-play.

Not to be rude, but I don’t think you get the point of this Thread.

This Thread is about reaching People that DON’T play the game yet. It’s about reaching potential PvP-Players and introducing them to the game, it’s basically totally independant from the game itself. The Game itself only comes into play, when you’ve already reached those Players and got them to play it; then stuff like that becomes important.

Actions speak louder than words.

You can’t generate hype for an online game when the word-of-mouth “viral” aspect of advertising has a much more magnified role than it does in, say, restauranteuring.

You will not generate interest when someone’s friend turns around and tells them “haha, gw2 pvp, where you get killed by one-shot combos before the packets reach your computer”

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Nice post Folly. I agree with your points overall, though I’m going to speak primarily to your points about communication, community involvement and transparency.

The trick with our communication, is to find a good balance, on multiple levels.

First, we have to be conscious of the balance between how much time we have to be posting on the forums and writing blog posts, with how much time we have to be working on actual development: bug fixes, profession balance, designing new features, implementing new content, etc.

Next it’s important for us to be conscious of the balance between saying too little, leaving people pessimistic about when things are coming out and guessing about how those things will work, and saying too much, harming our ability to later change, postpone or abandon something that we’ve already publicly committed to.

Finally we need to consider the balance between relying on community feedback too heavily, where it’s super time consuming for us to process and leaves us feeling unable to make a change without first asking for a community vote, and relying on community feedback too little, where we might miss some key information that could impact the success of our future releases.

Hopefully we are getting this balance pretty close most of the time, and if not, it’s always something we are working towards improving.

Anyway, keep up the good, constructive posts!

literally the most scripted response I’ve seen yet.

anet is unbelievably transparent about everything, we are in the dark so often it’s infuriating.

a little off-topic (kind-of) but, why do we have to go to social media sites like twitter/facebook to get updates on progress about the game? makes no sense to me. half of the time the message/relayed information is so incrypted it’s like you said nothing at all.

every single company does this kitten, we check the game forums for updates, stop using kitten social media sites to relay information to us, hire people to post on the kittening forums and inform us of things. (It’ll make your life a lot better.) and kittening fix spvp.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Nice post Folly. I agree with your points overall, though I’m going to speak primarily to your points about communication, community involvement and transparency.

The trick with our communication, is to find a good balance, on multiple levels.

Let me tell you Tyler, that you most certainly have not found that balance. You have retreated too far away from the discussion and distanced yourselves from developer-player interaction.

The communication process is one-way. Whether that is people dropping into forum threads like this one to tell us how it is, or Colin going round giving interviews with prepared answers to prepared questions on subjects that he wants to talk about. There is never any acceptance of outside ideas or opinion, no matter how valid.

I don’t accept that parsing community feedback would leave you no time to do your day jobs. Surely your community managers are not the ones doing the designing and coding? To my mind, a community manager would have the difficult job of reviewing what the community thinks it wants, stripping away the 99% of bad ideas and leaving only the good, running the surveys and collating the feedback from players to see if they like them, and presenting them as finished articles to the devs.

Yes, you’re going to build up some player’s hopes with this approach, and some people are going to be disappointed. But, let me tell you, that is going to happen anyway no matter what you do.

I think you’re slowly learning this, but the less you say about what’s coming up, the more players will hang on every word and make up their own versions of the truth. Better to have it from the horse’s mouth and let them be disappointed over losing something that you were actually planning to do, rather than something they made up in their imagination. Their imagination will always have much better stuff in it!

You speak of your desire to interact with the fanbase and your desire to respond to the needs and wants of the players, but then contradict yourselves with this pervasive attitude of “Leave us alone, we’re too busy making this awesome game for you guys”.

This is is not going to win you any favour with your critics, and frankly, just adds more fuel to the fire with the rampant speculation it causes.

Further, I think far too much time is spent at Anet discussing the future, the plans, what features are working in the super secret test build and which aren’t. You’re discussing those plans in a vacuum without letting us peek in to see what’s going on, for fear of raising our hopes when a promised feature doesn’t quite make it.

It seems that zero time is spent discussing the now, the present, what players are saying about the features in the release client, how they are responding to them and what they would like to see different. We had one token survey about Lost Shores, but the results have not been published, and nothing has been said about the feedback gathered.

Every patch brings new stuff, and that’s great, but often we’re left asking ourselves: “Who actually asked for this change?” Since you don’t tell us where you get your great ideas from, we can only come to the conclusion that you guys are making it up as you go along, without considering what we want.

This is fine, and a valid way to design a game, but it seems an awful waste to disregard the things your players are asking for. Even simple, little things like a “number of days since last repped” timer on the Guild Roster, or a feature that lets you swap weapons more easily. Stuff like that has been flooding the suggestions forum for months, but you don’t even take the time to reply to the suggestions forum, much less tell us when you’re using feedback from it.

Development can be a 2-way street if you allow it to be one.