Guild Wars 2

I’d like to start an honest discussion regarding the state of GW2 and Pro League Tournaments. To be up front and open about my thoughts, I was once what people call a White Knight for Anet. I defended their decisions and game direction with passion, but recently, I’ve felt more and more disconnected to this game company that I love.

E-Sport tournaments for any game company are multi-purpose marketing effort. Fans are provided entertainment, and companies get to try and recruit non-players into the game world. Sponsors team up to expand the draw of the eyes and wallets of players across different revenue mediums: Website hits, stream views, game purchases, microtransactions, etc. E-Sports also offers a way to reward loyal and skilled players who are considered among the top PvPers of that game. It’s a billion dollar industry worldwide.

GW2 E-Sports are really no different than other games (in terms of why we have it). There’s a bit of prestige to having a competitive game that has big worldwide tournaments. But here’s where I think we should have a discussion. Anet is putting up $200,000 in prizes for the upcoming Pro League Tournament. Add in costs to organize and coordinate players from across the globe, and you have a significant investment into a huge marketing event. While all companies must market their products to stay relevant, I personally believe that the marketing budget for tournaments could be better spent on game quality. I honestly don’t watch the streams, so I don’t know what viewership is like. I’ve only heard from others that it’s fairly low. So I feel we should end Pro Leagues, and put a hyper focus on keeping existing customers happy and engaged.

MO came out when Colin left, and he shifted the game more into the realm of quality. Anet reorganized programming teams (i.e. Legendary Weapon developers) with more story content development. If Anet would also shift budget resources from Pro League overhead and prize pools, you could hire a whole new team of Devs for a massive content explosion. By expanding in-game content, the side effect of free publicity comes into play. Gaming industry blogs and news sites would be reporting a healthy expanding game. Content Providers would continue to swoon over all the things we players can do in game. All this then leads to an increase in positive reviews that will naturally draw new players to this game.

Right now, we’re on the back end of a huge content drought. Heart of Thorns didn’t live up to the hype, so that left some players with a “ho-hum” feeling. PvP still has kinks that constantly need ironing. WvW players debate over matchup server sizes, scoring, timezones, etc. GvG is practically non-existent as compared to GW1. And a recent game breaking bug that forced a half day shutdown and rollback was the tipping point for some. All this, yet there seems to be light shining through the storm clouds (new zone hype!).

New content is coming, but do you think more could be released on a constant schedule? What do you think about the idea of sacrificing Pro Leagues for more game polish?

This has been discussed before.

They had a large advertisement budged for adds, commercials, etc. They just stopped their advertisement campaigns and gave that extra budget to Proleagues. It’s technically still “marketing” because like you said, Proleagues can hit a different crowd of people who don’t normally play GW2.

As to whether or not to give this 200k for more content, well, I rather invest it back to marketing. It’s hard to lure in new crowds if they don’t know about the game.

Final thought, GW2 actually makes a lot of revenue believe it or not. They have enough funding to implement additional resources for content, features, etc. They don’t necessarily need 200k for more content.

Saiyan, do you feel that luring new players into this game would outweigh keeping existing players happy? And do you think the benefits of new content would market itself?

On a side note about luring new crowds that don’t know about the game – If a tree falls in the middle of Malchor’s Leap, and everyone is watching something else, does it make a sound?

Theres simply no “esport content” for the average pvp´ers since day 1. Pro league is a great event and all, but nothing the average pvp´er cares about. 8 guilds(i believe?) fight in pro league, all the other guilds worldwide have to fight soloq´ers all day. Lmao, great esport concept… Everything that made GW1 so outstanding has been left out in GW2.

Even if you kill off pro league and fund that money entirely into GW2 I don’t think much would change.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Saiyan, do you feel that luring new players into this game would outweigh keeping existing players happy? And do you think the benefits of new content would market itself?

You’re simply talking about a choice that doesn’t exist. Saiyan is correct in that it’s either banner adds or twitch streams, the portion of ArenaNet’s marketing budget that’s going towards organizing tournaments cannot be diverted from marketing efforts, Josh Davis having said this.

An organization like ArenaNet has a structure to follow in where funds are allocated, and to be frank, what seems like a lot of money to you is complete peanuts to someone with the backing to create an MMO genre leader which has probably tallied $100 million+ in development costs for the core game, Heart of Thorns, and the next expansion in development.

Your idea is based on the fact that cannibalising something like competitive GW2 will be enough salvaged money to bring the game enough polish and new features to change GW2 significantly, and that is just not realistic.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

If Anet would also shift budget resources from Pro League overhead and prize pools, you could hire a whole new team of Devs for a massive content explosion.

Uh, no, you’d get something like one designer, an intern, and a couple more days a week of Grouch since he wouldn’t be busy with esports logistics. You couldn’t even get a single core system programmer at that price point, let alone an entire team.

Im sorry but that isnt how business works. For instance ive worked for a Billion dollar trucking company and now Hotel that brings in 5-10 million dollars of revenue a year.

There is different cut sheets for things such as employee expense, company cook outs, clothing and trucking gear. Each report is sent to a Senior person who then says whether or not its ok to put money in that area and multiple bosses are in charge of multiple things. Like the guy who runs office maintenance doesnt get the same budget as the go fixing the semi-trucks.

The same thing goes for the Hotel, cooking manager is given a X amount of money a month for food and accessorys. Anytime they go over there is a meeting with the boss who checks the reports there report is completely separate from house keeping managers and she/he also has her own report/budget she has to do.

2 things to add on that,

1- ESL league is not suppose to hurt it, Think about S1 when a pro team straight quit after messing up the start since the meta was hot garbage. News gets around when it comes to the best PvP games with tournaments. Anet have been trying to fix the pace of the game since that season but obviously dont know how.

2- The money would then go where? Maybe if Anet put that money into a online clothing store and accessory’s where you can purchase nic-nacks but that costs way more then 200k. Holding a warehouse and purchasing delivery and then shipping it to people is gonna cost 1 million alone not including the labor/equipment/everything else.

So you have to be reasonable, honestly 200k is what 3 more people to work on the game? Are you not a little happy that Anet is at least pretending they care about a aspect of the game that is not PvE?

I wasn’t going to post today, but when I saw this thread I knew that I had to because I am just so afraid that Anet might listen to this suggestion for ending esports events right now.

The esports events are my absolute favourite thing in gw2 right now and I am more excited for them than I ever am for living world, heart of thorns or any other ingame content. Watching the events gives me so much more enjoyment than anything ingame ever could. If they stopped then I would just stop enjoying gw2 because I wouldn’t be able to get the annoyance and anger of esports events ending out of my head. Of course I would still play but I wouldn’t enjoy it. I accept that not many people have this exact view but I do know that a lot of people really do enjoy the esports events and I like having conversations with them about what is going to happen in upcoming events.

If competitive events ended then a lot of high level players would leave the game because they would just have nothing to do other than endlessly farm players much worse than them in ranked, even in legendary division and even if divisions become skill based, because they are just too much better than non-pro league players. It’s good for me I suppose because if they all left I would be one of the best players, lol, but pro players are important to have in game and in esports events. In addition, If these players leave then the competitive scene would have no chance of ever starting up again after it had been stopped, which is terrible.

Another thing is that having esports does not harm the game at all, Anet have said it is from the marketing budget and the money can’t go towards new content. Because of this, having esports does not mean anything bad for people who don’t enjoy it and people like me who absolutely love it can watch it without having to worry than Anet is going to listen to people complaining about it and end these events which I like so much. Even if having pro league meant that we got less or even half the content we would without it, I would still be supporting it this strongly.

Please don’t stop the esports events!

I’d keep it. It is good advertising, and you aren’t going to get much from the resources that are spent on the pro league anywhere else in the game, and any advertising is expensive. I’m not a fan of watching video games, but I though the season 4 finals were pretty good. Plus what message would that send? To me it would be they are giving up and moving on to something else.

Pro League only interests me insofar as it affects pvp balance in the “real” Tyria. It doesn’t seem to be returning much on the investment.

I do watch Helseth’s stream now and again to look for game play tips.

I fully understand how business work. My degree is in Marketing. In the internal war that is corporate business, units fight for a piece of the budget that’s allocated to them. When I was with iHeartMedia (huge radio corporation in the US) years ago, we brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per quarter. Did we employees see any of that? No. I make triple my old salary working for the government.

Having a marketing background, there are times when you need to think outside of the box. GW2 brings in a good amount of revenue for NCSoft over the years, but that doesn’t translate to unlimited budgets. In the last quarterly report, GW2 sales beat only Wildstar. Company wide, labor costs were reduced by 8%, and the marketing budget was slashed 42% (due to no major events).

For the sake of discussion, say Dev budget was allocated an extra $200,000 a year. With the way I’ve heard the industry works, that’s enough to cover around 7 or 8 part-time Devs to assist core programming teams, or 4 to 5 full timers to create a whole new unit. I’m lowballing the salaries because top end salaries are for senior employees.

I love all game types of GW2. I want to see Anet succeed for another 20, 30, 40+ years. It would be a dream to see Anet fill stadiums with 50k fans and 10 million viewers for E-Sports finals. The reallocation of resources is just one idea that I wanted to toss around.

gw2 esports is embarassing, that reason alone is enough to shut it down

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I fully understand how business work. My degree is in Marketing. In the internal war that is corporate business, units fight for a piece of the budget that’s allocated to them. When I was with iHeartMedia (huge radio corporation in the US) years ago, we brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per quarter. Did we employees see any of that? No. I make triple my old salary working for the government.

Having a marketing background, there are times when you need to think outside of the box. GW2 brings in a good amount of revenue for NCSoft over the years, but that doesn’t translate to unlimited budgets. In the last quarterly report, GW2 sales beat only Wildstar. Company wide, labor costs were reduced by 8%, and the marketing budget was slashed 42% (due to no major events).

For the sake of discussion, say Dev budget was allocated an extra $200,000 a year. With the way I’ve heard the industry works, that’s enough to cover around 7 or 8 part-time Devs to assist core programming teams, or 4 to 5 full timers to create a whole new unit. I’m lowballing the salaries because top end salaries are for senior employees.

I love all game types of GW2. I want to see Anet succeed for another 20, 30, 40+ years. It would be a dream to see Anet fill stadiums with 50k fans and 10 million viewers for E-Sports finals. The reallocation of resources is just one idea that I wanted to toss around.

So if you know how it works then how are you coming up with these numbers? The business areas are Bellevue Washington (where part time dock workers make $21 a hour) and in California.

Im sorry how would you hire 7-8 employees when part time tech people are looking for the next job? Could leave at any moment? And how are you asking for them to make 25,000 a year which in a state where min wage is almost $10 a hour and in the Air Port area min wage is $15 a hour, when a base line full time job is around 21,000?

Yes i understand you want to see 200,000 of business go else where but its not realistic in any real way of improving the state of the game in any area.

Except that Esports can and has harmed GW2.

Since it is available to everyone then everyone tries it, but only those with the elite specs have a decent chance of advancing and being useful. So people get steam rolled which causes them to think negatively of the game as a whole as due to the attention Esports has WVW and PVE are left to stagnate.

We can see the results of this in WVW as worlds have now been merged because not enough people play, but this causes more problems because some worlds are more active than others and now have even more members, causing worlds like mine to go from having a tough time to being impossible to win. So then people leave again after they already did.

Now look at PVE, HoT was not a success, it divided the community and caused people to leave and stop spending as much. They leave it for what 9 months? during that time people leave all during which Esports is constantly being put up and tweaked. New content drop (LS 3) people flock to it, but it lasts a week at most (Took me and my partner 3 hours to do 75-80% off all that new content) so after which they leave to play other games and only hop back on to do the next weeks worth of LS.

And all this is going on whilst the PVP is frequently being given attention, which as other pages show still isn’t helping because each League is worse than the next.

My world, quite populated:
during League 1: Majority of people in legendary
During League 2: Majority stuck in Ruby
During League 3: Barely any Legendary players in sight
During League 4: Barely anyone above Ruby or even with a tag to show they have played a single Ranked game this League

They need to work on fixing what is broken before running more competitions and splitting their team in the middle to make a new expansion.

It will just cause another mediocre expansion whilst the game we are stuck with at the moment is gaining more holes.

Drakz.7051:

snip

We’re talking about Pro League, it’s little to do with casual league or your perception that PvE and WvW aren’t successful either, for their own reasons.

Drawing people into the casual league system is not the only point of having Pro League, and if those people do end up disliking the casual league system, it’s not the fault of eSports for enticing them to try.

FiveGauge.1357:

Drakz.7051:

snip

We’re talking about Pro League, it’s little to do with casual league or your perception that PvE and WvW aren’t successful either, for their own reasons.

Drawing people into the casual league system is not the only point of having Pro League, and if those people do end up disliking the casual league system, it’s not the fault of eSports for enticing them to try.

I’m not knocking Pro League because I do enjoy watching the matches, but has it been successful at pulling people in?

I started watching the weekly pro games the first week of season one, but at that point I had already decided that I wanted to PvP and had gone from a F2P account to a full one.

Two things struck me the first games I tried to watch:

1. Being new I hadn’t the faintest idea what skills/effects/etc… were being used. The entirety of the games were one gigantic blitz of seizure-inducing light and effects.

2. The in game observation was jerky and the way it tries to zoom across the battlefield when you click on a player left a lot to be desired.

Again, I had already gone to full account so I wasn’t the targeted potential group they’re trying to advertise to, but I think from the two items above would turn off the average viewer coming in to see if they would want to play the game and as they say: you only get one chance to make a first impression.

There is no transition from “casual league” to pro league. The system does not funnel like it did in gw1 with gvg or team arenas. There is this large disconnect between what happens in pro leagues where players practice together multiple situations, specific class comps, and voice comms, and players being thrown together in matches of ranked arenas.

Any other competitive sport, game, etc that is successful, has some sort of pre-designed funnel system that allows players to move up and ascend to higher levels of play. Whether it be, high school sports, college levels, and professional, or MMR systems of counter strike or gw1 gvg ranking.

Right now, pro-league is more like a proof of concept of what gw2 could be. It’s entertaining to watch and fun to twitch chat.

Starbreaker.6507:

FiveGauge.1357:

Drakz.7051:

snip

We’re talking about Pro League, it’s little to do with casual league or your perception that PvE and WvW aren’t successful either, for their own reasons.

Drawing people into the casual league system is not the only point of having Pro League, and if those people do end up disliking the casual league system, it’s not the fault of eSports for enticing them to try.

I’m not knocking Pro League because I do enjoy watching the matches, but has it been successful at pulling people in?

I started watching the weekly pro games the first week of season one, but at that point I had already decided that I wanted to PvP and had gone from a F2P account to a full one.

Two things struck me the first games I tried to watch:

1. Being new I hadn’t the faintest idea what skills/effects/etc… were being used. The entirety of the games were one gigantic blitz of seizure-inducing light and effects.

2. The in game observation was jerky and the way it tries to zoom across the battlefield when you click on a player left a lot to be desired.

Again, I had already gone to full account so I wasn’t the targeted potential group they’re trying to advertise to, but I think from the two items above would turn off the average viewer coming in to see if they would want to play the game and as they say: you only get one chance to make a first impression.

That was just HOT and everything bad balance thing that came with it. GW2 before HOT was very fun to watch. Heck you could go back to WTS1 and see Blu losing his stuff when i believe phanta gets a decap on rom in a 1 vs 1 where rom capped a point basically winning the 1 vs 1 then giving it right back up.

I was in the AG tournaments in the AG 30’s and we didnt get to compete sometimes because all the spots filled up before we broke up.’

I mean you could look up the TOL 2 & 3 and see literally hundreds of teams entering into these open tournaments.( won 2 free finishers yeah!!!!)

That changed when HOT hit, so your not the only one who was like what is all this crap?

IMO 2 things really hurt the PvP scene. Anet willing to deal with the d/d ele at its apex (knowing they were gonna kill the build, they probably were just trying to hold out) and plain and simply HOT spec lines. They were slowly killing build diversity but we still had some and then BAM HOT hits and every team is running 2 mesmers, 2 revs, and a ele. Even the ESL had to make rules like 1 class per team simply because of the balance.

GW2 had a shot of being something special heading into it but have dropped the baton, tripped over a hurdle and fallen off the track and everyone is still trying to just finish the race.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I fully understand how business work. My degree is in Marketing. In the internal war that is corporate business, units fight for a piece of the budget that’s allocated to them. When I was with iHeartMedia (huge radio corporation in the US) years ago, we brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per quarter. Did we employees see any of that? No. I make triple my old salary working for the government.

Having a marketing background, there are times when you need to think outside of the box. GW2 brings in a good amount of revenue for NCSoft over the years, but that doesn’t translate to unlimited budgets. In the last quarterly report, GW2 sales beat only Wildstar. Company wide, labor costs were reduced by 8%, and the marketing budget was slashed 42% (due to no major events).

For the sake of discussion, say Dev budget was allocated an extra $200,000 a year. With the way I’ve heard the industry works, that’s enough to cover around 7 or 8 part-time Devs to assist core programming teams, or 4 to 5 full timers to create a whole new unit. I’m lowballing the salaries because top end salaries are for senior employees.

I love all game types of GW2. I want to see Anet succeed for another 20, 30, 40+ years. It would be a dream to see Anet fill stadiums with 50k fans and 10 million viewers for E-Sports finals. The reallocation of resources is just one idea that I wanted to toss around.

Unless you are hiring programmers on a third world country, you aren’t going to get 4-5 entry level people let alone full time dev team members with experience for anywhere near that one you factor in benefits and all the overhead.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

For the sake of discussion, say Dev budget was allocated an extra $200,000 a year. With the way I’ve heard the industry works, that’s enough to cover around 7 or 8 part-time Devs to assist core programming teams, or 4 to 5 full timers to create a whole new unit. I’m lowballing the salaries because top end salaries are for senior employees.

Lowballing salaries, getting a brand new, no experience designer from a local game design vocational school, no 4-year degree no relo is going to run you around 60-70k. If you want a programmer you’re looking at total costs of 120k minimum, if you’re lucky and get someone who really wants to be at A.Net. Want someone with any actual experience that could touch core code? You’re doing well to stay under 200k; 180k is more realistic.

None of this even considers the hiring rampage AGS is on and how that has pushed the price of any actual talent up a good 20% at a bare minimum.

It also assumes that the HR costs A.Net incurred last quarter dropped because of downsizing – A.Net is hiring very aggressively, and the reduction in staffing expenditures reflects high price, talented people being poached by AGS and A.Net’s inability to replace them. Look at their hiring page – they are looking to expand, not shrink right now. There’s just a serious shortage of major design and implementation talent in Seattle right now between AGS and some other big studios relocating here.

Finally…if you think things like legendary weapons were cut because they took too long to design and concept, I have a bridge to sell you. Look at the way they talk about their delays, why features are cut – the bulk of the work on a new legendary collection is hooking up and debugging the 100+ steps in the precursor journey – which is not something a design intern is going to be much help on. A.Net is beyond wealthy when it comes to design and artistic talent. Their choke point is almost certainly on the implementation side – people who can hook it all up and make it place nice with the 10-year-old spaghetti code base they have to work with. Getting someone to help there is not cheap, and honestly if they can even find that person at a rate that doesn’t break the bank they hire them on the spot.

The mistake that you make is that the Pro League live events are largely sponsored by other companies, who will stop sponsoring if there is a lack of live events. PvP is probably the most anticipated part among streamers and viewers, and as a company I would enhance PvP leagues and events to make a better name for yourself in a gaming world full of rivals.

Ensign.2189:

snip

You make a lot of good points. The direction I was headed with my lowballing was based on the fact that Anet already has a lot of senior talent on their roster. You bring in more talent to support the star Devs already there, and you’re able to get more done. Yes hiring the best and brightest is what all companies want. But if you’re looking to keep labor costs low, you can pull off some shortcuts. Options include temporary contract Devs, or long term part-timers. Large corporations used to take advantage of labor laws where you keep employees under 19 hours a week, and you don’t have to provide benefits. I personally hate that this happens, but again, this is just ideas.

HeadCrowned.6834:

The mistake that you make is that the Pro League live events are largely sponsored by other companies, who will stop sponsoring if there is a lack of live events. PvP is probably the most anticipated part among streamers and viewers, and as a company I would enhance PvP leagues and events to make a better name for yourself in a gaming world full of rivals.

Yes, I would want Anet to enhance GW2 Pro Leagues to the levels of LoL. But before they can, they need to fix PvP. Right now, there are too many complaints coming from the PvP community. Balance. Matchmaking. Pip progression. No option for separate Solo Queue / Team Queue play. In my personal opinion, GW1 had a much better PvP setup. God I miss those Necro spikes, or the clutch Monk infuse.