Guild Wars 2

Greetings all!

For the first round of the Players Collaborative Development Initiative, let’s discuss PR for World vs World and WvW forums . Post here your ideas how should PR work and what you expect from them.
Rules
1: This initiative is all about discussion.
2: Anet will not be disclosing information pertaining to what is currently in development.
3: Anger and emotion will have less impact than intelligent discussion.
4: Aggression and disrespect to a fellow community member or developer will not be tolerated, and in the extreme could lead to the shutting down of the initiative.
5: The teams primary focus is work toward the development of GW2 and therefore posting of discussion and commentary may not be as frequent as you like. Please do understand that the initiative is about PR and responses from ANET team. They might not even respond.
6: This topic may be closed very soon based on decision of Anet mods.

I will start first.

Facts:
- in last year there was little to almost none communication from Anet
- in last year very little changes to WvW were made, even those known from beta, aka Commander tags, achivements, bugs,exploits
- even that there was some response, most of them was saying: dont not ask we wont tell anything
- no roadmap

impact of these facts:
- players get negative attitude
- players get angry
- posting of negative and angry topics on forum
- players leaving the game

changes:
1) roadmap – I am not talkign about every single detail, but if there are wvw devs and are working on something I doubt its not discussed internally and approved internally long time before. For example WXP account bound. This change was discussed last year and was supposed to go online with EOTM. This did not happened and we seen only one post at the end of 2013 saying Account bound WXP is postponed.
4 months later, without any other response, Account bound WXP went online. These 4 months players asked whats wrong, why its not online, if it is even planned to release Accound bound WXP.
Roadmap would help us to understand whats going on and what to expect.
For example:
team is working on Commander icons, ETA summer 2014, lets make a roadmap with Fall 2014- Commander system changes, this will mean they will have time to test it and to actually make it.
another example might be map change, or anything team is working on

2) communication – this is important and communication to players is the basics devs need to learn. With Roadmap, devs can actually write news into it, and ask players on forum. Players that will see a goalline will be much polite and respectfull. Even that there may sometimes be flame wars between 2 player groups, those wont affect communication devs<->players

3) updates – with Roadmap and Communication, its important to plan possible updates. From Commander system, achivements, map change or even creating new maps, players want to know everything. Every tiny little bit of information will be long discussed from players. For example, PvE updates are every 2 weeks now. And we havent seen WvW update for a long time now. With Roadmap and Communication it will be much easier to spoil something.
Example: golem mastery, this is probably the last mastery missiong. If your team works on it and would be in roadmap for Fall 2014, with internally expect release date August 2014, you can post screenshot from test server where you can see icon of Golem mastery in WxP window, without seeing any actuall info about it. Just picture where is Golem mastery implemented and we can see 5 columns for poitns. With any info.
Players will discuss possible needed points to spend or effect for days, weeks if you will reveal first effect 2-3 weeks after.

4) Changing rules about matchup topics. While matchup topic was highly toxic, it was full of friendly rivalry too. With deleting them, you almost destroyed this friendly rivalry while toxic trolls just moved to other topic. Reopening and giving some trusted players mod power for this sub-forum may be second best thing you can do to community. Right after some updates.

These are just my few lines of text of possible ideas.

How can Anet help improve their PR?

1) Communication - The reason things have gotten so bad is due to a lack of communication between certain parties. The only red post we’ve seen in over a month is one telling us to stop.

2) Truth - Stop dangling carrots, stop telling us you can talk about it. We’re 2 years in and we’ve not seen much happen in WvW. If you want people to stay in this game you are going to have to do more than “We cant say anything”. To us this now means “Nothing is going on”
Give us a list of what the WvW devs are working on, if they are actually working on WvW. Give us a timeframe. If a month or two down the line you decide you cant implement one thing, or it’s taking longer, then make a thread in the forums to let us know.

Right now telling us nothing is the same as telling us nothing is being developed for WvW. We just want to know what is going on.

Our fear is that, as we are all assuming, nothing really is going on for WvW, and that is why you refuse to tell us anything; as telling us nothing is going on will of course make people leave this game sooner.

So it’s either give us a roadmap, even a draft one, or we’ll assume WvW has no roadmap, no plans for the future.

i think your thread title needs work

this isnt “collaborative”

unless you mean between players and players