Guild Wars 2

Serious post.

I’ll simply copy-n-paste the best ever made post in this rubbish forum.

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I really get tired of making these long posts because no one ever reads them, and for some reason I always get called bad, or an elitist. But here are some of my thoughts because sata asked me to:
1) this game shouldn’t get mass promoted until these things are implemented:
- private servers
- weekly/monthly/yearly tournaments
- dueling without having to join an empty server, or a private server.
- rating system (when it’s done being tested + has a place where people can view the ladder that is updated consistently. You can’t do what you did with QPs and have a forum post with a list that’s updated for a few days straight, and then a week later. Needs to be consistent. Having it instantly update would be even better.)
- Tutorials that show people the difference between running a stun break + not running a stun break. Something that takes you into your own private instance, similar to the storyline for pve. This instance has an instructor that teaches you some of the fundamentals about the game. You’ll have different instances for different things. One thing is showing the importance of a stun break, and it’s shown by having a glass cannon warrior use bull’s charge > frenzy > hundred blades on you. The instructor will say “use mist form when the warrior charges you to break the stun.” or whatever stun break it is that is provided for you. This will help solve the issue of new players getting destroyed by these types of builds.
For this game to succeed you either have to implement these type of tutorials, or nerf these builds so that new players/hotjoin players don’t get destroyed and quit. If you want this game to be a skillful game, then you need to teach people.
End of story.

The goal here is to get new people as well as older people back to the game, but you need them to stay. Nothing is going to change if you don’t have these things in place. The game itself is amazing, but these things need to be introduced.

You should be learning from your mistakes
You should be learning from your mistakes
You should be learning from your mistakes
x1000000!
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- When you released the game (which I realize was rushed due to forces out of your control, where you had to release it before WoW hit, but learn from this.) there was so much hype about the pvp, yet there were so many things lacking. You can’t do this again, which is why you need to have things in place before you try to promote this game’s pvp, whether it’s new players, players that quit, or even the PvE/WvW players.
- YOU NEED TO BE ABSOLUTELY kittenING TRANSPARENT ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE DOING.
I can’t say this enough, it’s simply infuriating that you don’t do this. Making people guess in-game and on the forum if there’s a rating system in place? Don’t take this the wrong way, but what the kitten are you thinking? This is simply unacceptable and a big reason why people are quitting + unsure about when to come back. You need to say what you’re doing, why something isn’t coming when it’s planned, and what happened. You need to be specific. “Our coders couldn’t solve this issue as fast as we planned.” It doesn’t matter what it is, you need to say what the problem is.* If you think it’s that bad and don’t say anything, then people, as a whole, are going to think of the worst thing they can think of.*
For example, look at all the people that say/think things like “X is never coming out, they have no progress on it, this game will be dead before it comes out.”
Lets say you have a meeting at 12:00. You’ll probably want to get there at 11:45 or something to give you enough time in case something goes wrong, right? Lets say something does go wrong, you’ll probably want to give the person a call when this happens, and tell them you’ll be late, right? If you know it’ll be 10 minutes, but maybe more, until you get there, you don’t say you will only be 5 minutes, right? You don’t say you will only be 10 minutes, right? You’ll say it will be 10-15 minutes. This is the kinda kitten you need to do with this game.
In marketing there’s a concept where if you mess up, admit to it + try to correct the mistake, then people will like you more than if you never made that mistake at all. Similarly, if you say “x has been done so far, Y is what we were working on, however we made some mistakes so it’s taking longer than the when we told you; The October Patch. In the mean time, this is our plan: ’whatever your plan is” then that’s a lot better than saying nothing at all, or saying “it’s coming soon,” or “it will be done when it’s done.”
Even on the current ranking system, tell people what you’re testing and why. You can’t just say “it benefits us if we keep the same map for the whole week.” You need to explain why.

- You also need to look for advice from the community about everything. Everything. Balance changes, changes to the tournament system, what features/options people want on private servers. Everything you can think of. Every time you have a meeting and bring up a topic you should be able to have at least a little bit of feedback from players.
Look at the success of the 1v1 format. People liked it, you extended it. People disliked the 3 ticket price, you made it 1 ticket, and people loved you for it. This is what you need to do, except even better.
- 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.
Fast forward to now.
You have bugs like necromancers, vengeanced warriors, and illusion of life not rallying the other team when they die. You did this to fix a different bug, but this is 1000% worse. You can’t figure out how to fix it yet, and that’s perfectly ok. The problem is you just leave it as it is until you figure out how to fix it. Completely kittening unacceptable. You need to revert this change. You needed to disable the mace for guardians, and svanir rune from spvp (when this bug existed). You cannot leave these things in the game for more than a day of knowing about them and expect people to be ok with it.
You also need to get rid of this closed test client and these secret meetings. Not only does this make the game unfair for players that aren’t invited to this, but you’re missing out on a ton of feedback from other players. You need to make this test client public. You can have private meetings with certain people that are invited, but you can’t JUST have that.
- You need to be playing the game in more than just hotjoins and the occasional free tournament. (No offense to people that just do hotjoins, but the game changes so much when you go from hot joins to paid tournaments. They should be playing both somewhat equally.) You need to do this, or at least tune in to a stream for more than 10 minutes to say hi to gasmask. (I do think it’s cool that you pop in to say hi though).
This is because you don’t have knowledge about what is going on in the game other than what people tell you in your closed test meetings. You can’t make a game-breaking buff to mesmers because you didn’t realize 90% of competitive mesmers run a shatter build at the time. You can’t not know about game-breaking bugs like teleporting through walls spots, or bugs with silent/unattackable trebuchets until we show you when you pop into a stream months after they’ve been out. It’s unacceptable if you want this game to thrive and be competitive.
finally, i’m almost done
I really want to see this game succeed, and I realize no one important is probably going to see this message, which is a different thing entirely. You can’t post 10 times in 2 days to show people you look at the forum, and then be silent for a week. You need to be consistent.
But anyways, I know there’s lots of people that want to see this game succeed, and I’m sure a lot of them can offer a lot of advice/strategies on how to help make this succeed. So let us join in the conversation. You need to show how much you care, because people aren’t mind readers. You need to be specific, and you need to interact with people because believe it or not, you are not perfect game designers.
Making a blog post that takes 3 months to write because it needs to be revised 18 times and translated into 72 languages is unacceptable. Put it in English, and it will be translated by players by probably the next day. You can work on translating it yourself later since it’s important, but I really don’t see how it can even take that long in the first place. You shouldn’t have everything be held up because the translator you use for Asuran is on vacation. No, you don’t need perfect grammar. You aren’t making super important press releases that go to investors. U r giving info to ppl that talk like dis on the internet.
With love,
Holly Jolly Folly
Also, realistically all you need to do at this point to get people to come back to the game is by throwing money at it. The vast amount of people that have played + quit will take notice. You have real tournaments with cash prizes, and you just promote the tournaments when you login like league does. That way everyone that plays this game is at least aware of it. Sending an in-game mail, and even an email to everyone about it will only help.

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Props to Follidus for this magnificent post.

Have a nice day.

aint nobody got time to read this! useless

I don’t know, ArenaNet have been very transparent in comparison to other companies, they don’t talk about features until they’re very sure it’s going in; the only exception really is release, but that’s long passed and there are still plenty of people into spvp, there is hardly a crisis.

I don’t know how tutorials about how to build (IE, Bringing a stun break) is going to help anything. It’s better to learn from experience than heavy handed tutorials telling players “This is how you should build”, it also stifles experimentation a bit. Vendors should be explained a bit better, but that’s about it if I’m being honest.

I doubt they have ever put out a blog post that has taken 3 months to translate.

I could nit pick this wall of text for a while. Follidus makes a lot of assumptions about ArenaNet’s internal process, and in the end it makes it read off like whining.

Tangent Edit: I also don’t understand using “Kitten” as a way to get around cursing. It just sounds childish when I read it aloud, and I got to wonder who started that because it’s quickly becoming a pet peeve of mine on these forums. There are already so many substitutes for swears already, why use “Kitten”? It’s freaking dumb. Just a tangent.

“-weekly/monthly/yearly tournaments”

I think this is the most important thing A-net could do right now. If these tournaments had unique rewards and required certain criteria to sign up (minimum MMR, Qualifying Points, or whatever [potentially require a Weekly win to sign up for Monthly, Monthly win to sign up for Yearly]) then I believe this could be all that is required to give people something to strive for, which is currently missing from sPvP (a major complaint of many players).

Not to mention these would be the “televised” events you need if this game is to ever become an e-sport.

Obviously, other changes are required for this game to really grow, but I believe this is the first and most important step that A-net needs to take.