Guild Wars 2

Let me start with this quote:

DevonCarver.5370:

When I’ve been working on WvW for 11 months, then we’ll talk.

So, 11 months have passed, let’s talk then?
1. What is currently being worked on for WvW?
2. Why are things, that have been in the top of the player requests for over an year not only not implemented, but even not talked about from your side?
3. We haven’t heard from you since you posted in the “new maps” thread several months ago… and that was after around 6 months of you not posting. Do you think if you communicated better you’d avoid some of the huge negativity and toxicity on the WvW forums? Any plans to do something besides hiring more mods and creating additional CoC rules?

Feel free to add more questions guys.

Honestly this is a great question to ask. It has 11 months as you said and Anet has gone silent with wvw, which is literally the biggest community they have (the TA vs NS gvg had more viewers then the TOL which even gave precursors lol). I am honestly just so confused on why they are throwing away a huge source of the community and income. WvW could have been a long term investment with a HUGE payoff if they improved it and made gvg a official game mode with tournaments.

Maybe he meant 11 years not months.

Vermillion.4061:

Maybe he meant 11 years not months.

or 11 decades

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

the TA vs NS gvg had more viewers then the TOL which even gave precursors lol

Holy crap, how many viewers?

3:
The amount of negativity and toxicity was massive as soon as he posted the first time.
It is not something that suddenly game with his lack of posting. But rather the reason for his lack of posting (most likely).

The thing is that if they ever tell us about something they are planning, people take it is a solid promise that will never change and will be implemented the very next week. And as such they have stopped telling us about it, to annoy the massive amounts of spam when things change or are not released at once.

We HAVE gotten quite a bit of stuff in WvW, since release. But we have to keep in mind that developing stuffs in WvW most likely is much harder and take more time than PvE, especially since it is very likely that the WvW team is much smaller than the PvE-team(s) due to more people playing PvE.

Several times they talked about those things like they are ready. How can you explain other way that they said that account bound WXP will be ready with EOTM.
EOTM was out and one reply from dev after 2 weeks of asking was: its not ready, no eta
So yes people were angry because they said something with several months ahead and then stopped talking.
You know how EOTM beta was? its was great success inviting those guilds there. Why they did not continued with other wvw stuff?
They could change buffs for defense and asked players what they feel. And man, then they would not need to post every silly thing because players would be talking about this change.
After months, they could push upgraded wall HP or T3 of gate upgrade. And then ask community what they think about it. Players would be occupied with this change for next month discussing if it is right or wrong. Anet could have just assign one dev to this, which would read forums, and sometimes lower HP sometimes raise HP of those gates.
Or maybe he can work with siege weapon damage.

There are several ways how to make community happy. I just wroted the easiest way. But Anet lack even with this. Thats why its toxic all the time. You think players would be angry about account bound WXP like they were if those test servers would be still up, and players would be able to test it? Even with bugs? At least hundreds of players would report those bugs.

^ Maybe the issue is that during testing people loved EOTM but more or less as soon as it was released people were whining like mad about how much it sucked and how it wasn’t WvW and so on?
Maybe that made them decide against player-testing due to the fact that it apparently didn’t give a correct image about what people actually wanted.

lordkrall.7241:

^ Maybe the issue is that during testing people loved EOTM but more or less as soon as it was released people were whining like mad about how much it sucked and how it wasn’t WvW and so on?
Maybe that made them decide against player-testing due to the fact that it apparently didn’t give a correct image about what people actually wanted.

Not really, most people love EOTM design and they are just disappointed because it doesn’t count for normal WvW PPT, therefore having no objective to pursue the “Karma train” became the objective.

Xillllix.3485:

Not really, most people love EOTM design and they are just disappointed because it doesn’t count for normal WvW PPT, therefore having no objective to pursue the “Karma train” became the objective.

Are they?

I seem to recall that people specifically didn’t WANT it to count for real match-ups simply because it mashed all servers together into one and the fact that even before that it would give massive advantages to those that already had more players than their opponents.

From what I remember, EOTM was intend to be testing ground for wvw maps.
While EOTM is running for a while now, the change we got into wvw was bloodlust. Thing that even is not in EOTM.
It became karma train because there is so many mobs and points to flip. And because there is no reason why to win in EOTM. Those supplies are good, but overall dont matter for WvW. This is why wvw guilds dont run into EOTM because its pointless to their server.

lordkrall.7241:

3:
The amount of negativity and toxicity was massive as soon as he posted the first time.
It is not something that suddenly game with his lack of posting. But rather the reason for his lack of posting (most likely).

Not true. In the first month Devon took over from Habib, the general mood was pretty positive. He listened to player feedback about seige-timers and EU reset, and implemented fixes within a couple of weeks. I was feeling pretty positive about everything back then, and so were many others. If you don’t believe me, go and re-read the threads from that time.

But then it all turned sour in the autumn, with Bloodlust and Leagues. So don’t pretend it was all the fault of mean nasty players from the start.

lordkrall.7241:

^ Maybe the issue is that during testing people loved EOTM but more or less as soon as it was released people were whining like mad about how much it sucked and how it wasn’t WvW and so on?
Maybe that made them decide against player-testing due to the fact that it apparently didn’t give a correct image about what people actually wanted.

Maybe the issue is that testers were told not to fight each other. Only PvE testing allowed. And the result is a PvE-focused map. Who could’ve seen that coming?

Ragnar.4257:

Maybe the issue is that testers were told not to fight each other. Only PvE testing allowed. And the result is a PvE-focused map. Who could’ve seen that coming?

There’s only a kernel of truth there. There was a testing schedule and some of the tests were for exploring the map and attempting to break it so players were asked not to fight each other. Other tests were full-on PvP.

Question:
If we can’t post in threads that are 30 days old since last post, why haven’t you locked all of them yet?

lordkrall.7241:

I seem to recall that people specifically didn’t WANT it to count for real match-ups

Please link this request, I seem to recall that people asked for a WvW map, not a queue map. So where are these people who knew it was coming as submitted this? Or are you talking about the small group of incompetent “WvW” players, who didnt represent the community at all, who were invited to testing?

What they need is a community relations person to post not devs. If you go back and look at the dev responses they’re rather snarky.

I think they’re trying to be funny but it just comes across as condescending. And that further sours the attitude of the players.

Pro tip to devs or any other Anet person who posts: Don’t use this

As somebody who is generally supportive of the ArenaNet developers, perhaps to a fault (as I’m often called a “white knight”), and somebody who has mostly stopped reading/responding to these boards because of the toxicity, I have this to say…

Devs are busy. They do read (let’s say “skim” because that’s probably more accurate?) these threads. Understood. Taking the time to develop a well-crafted response is probably not something they can all do.

But please, please: it would go leaps and bounds for them to just put a quick, “Interesting ideas here, keep going” every so often. It would take 30 seconds but would lead to so much more red-tag visibility here.

A little bit of positive encouragement goes a long way. Any manager knows it. Heck, any guild leader knows it. It might be worth trying here to see if things improve.

The only thing I want to read (and naturally see implemented) is the following:

“We have implemented in this update numerous WvW features, which make the numbers advantage a thing of history. We also added fair and awesome rewards for players who defend and roam. The maps have been overhauled, all glitches and exploits have been removed and we have added new terrain and tactical situations where even the lesser used professions for WvW zerging will be vital for your side to succeed.”

Is that too much to ask?

Mark Katzbach.9084:

I am going to jump in here answer these as honestly as I am able.

1. We can’t talk about that right now. Once the in-development features reach a state where we, as a company, are comfortable talking about them, we will.
2. Some player requests are under development. What those are and when they will be completed, I can’t say at this time for reasons mentioned above.

First, let me start with saying “Thanks” for the reply.

But: these 2 reasons are exactly why most of the WvW players feel so… “hopeless” I guess is the word most fitting here. Just a simple and short “we are working on this and this because such priorities, priorities might change, this dropped because of that, but we are considering it for some day” once/month will go a long way. Instead we get… 1 tooltip update/2 weeks and we pretty much feel as if nothing substantial is ever being done.

It’s really hard to believe this PR.
Working hard – that’s alright, completely understandable.
But where are the results? They’ve been “working hard” to fix the score system for about two years now. Clearly there’s something really wrong over here.

This would fall under the category of ‘believe it when we see it’, as we have yet to even see changes to the likes of the yakslapper title after two years and these were being ‘worked on’ then.

Sorry to say Mark’s comment tells us nothing, promises nothing and gives away nothing as to what if anything might be getting done to wvw, and as nothing is what has happened so far the record isn’t looking too good that anything will happen this year either.

Sorry Mark, but I think you understand yourself where the frustration comes from if all WvW gets is a “we’re working on something we cant talk about”. Because the past 2 years we got the same answers and most of the time the actual “something” turned out to be not what the players have asked for.

Either you say “we’re working on commander squads/guild commander tags but we are in a very early stadium of development” and show some progress within the next month (for example screenshots or ready up streams) or people wont believe you.
Good luck though.

Victory.2879:

Mark’s comment tells us nothing, promises nothing and gives away nothing

That’s about as diplomatic a response as is possible when the mob is fickle.

Mark Katzbach.9084:

Devon is very busy with his job duties and only has limited time to devote to reading the forums. If he spent the time demanded of him responding to threads on the forums, his work would suffer. My job duties have me reading and reporting on the forums regularly to ensure that Devon and the rest of the team are aware of active concerns within the WvW community. I do this for other parts of the forum as well. As has been mentioned a multitude of times previously, our developers read the forums as much as they are able, but time prevents them from responding to everything they read.

Some of the other forums have significantly more dev red posts than this one. Those devs have just as much work to do, no?

Lord Kuru.3685:

Some of the other forums have significantly more dev red posts than this one. Those devs have just as much work to do, no?

How many of those posts have been made by devs though?
You also have to keep in mind that the different teams most likely have completely different numbers of devs, and as such a bigger team should have more time to talk on the forums compared to a smaller one.

lordkrall.7241:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Some of the other forums have significantly more dev red posts than this one. Those devs have just as much work to do, no?

How many of those posts have been made by devs though?
You also have to keep in mind that the different teams most likely have completely different numbers of devs, and as such a bigger team should have more time to talk on the forums compared to a smaller one.

It might help to read the post: “significantly more dev red posts” before responding.

Bigger teams exist because they have more work to do than smaller ones. Or perhaps you’re saying Anet is inefficient in their allocation of dev resources?

Lord Kuru.3685:

It might help to read the post: “significantly more dev red posts” before responding.

Bigger teams exist because they have more work to do than smaller ones. Or perhaps you’re saying Anet is inefficient in their allocation of dev resources?

I did read it. But how many of those posts were made by DEVS. Redpost != Dev-post after all.

Yes, bigger teams exists due to that.
But with bigger teams (that works together) it is also much more likely that someone will have some spare time, as opposed to smaller teams where people are most likely working much closer together and on more things (per person) at once.

Thanks for the response Mark, I feel better knowing that things are at least being worked on.

Mark Katzbach.9084:

Pavel.8531:

Let me start with this quote:

DevonCarver.5370:

When I’ve been working on WvW for 11 months, then we’ll talk.

So, 11 months have passed, let’s talk then?
1. What is currently being worked on for WvW?
2. Why are things, that have been in the top of the player requests for over an year not only not implemented, but even not talked about from your side?
3. We haven’t heard from you since you posted in the “new maps” thread several months ago… and that was after around 6 months of you not posting. Do you think if you communicated better you’d avoid some of the huge negativity and toxicity on the WvW forums? Any plans to do something besides hiring more mods and creating additional CoC rules?

Feel free to add more questions guys.

I am going to jump in here answer these as honestly as I am able.

1. We can’t talk about that right now. Once the in-development features reach a state where we, as a company, are comfortable talking about them, we will.
2. Some player requests are under development. What those are and when they will be completed, I can’t say at this time for reasons mentioned above.
3. Devon is very busy with his job duties and only has limited time to devote to reading the forums. If he spent the time demanded of him responding to threads on the forums, his work would suffer. My job duties have me reading and reporting on the forums regularly to ensure that Devon and the rest of the team are aware of active concerns within the WvW community. I do this for other parts of the forum as well. As has been mentioned a multitude of times previously, our developers read the forums as much as they are able, but time prevents them from responding to everything they read.

And I’ll be honest too, your teams communication with the WvW community on these forums is absolutely horrendous compared to the other parts of the game. The only times that we ever see devs anymore is when it’s them coming in to defend actions they’ve done. It’s so bad that not even your PR team can even give a heads up when you delay/decide to not to do a WvW CDI that was supposed to come out a week after the end of WvW season 2.

Sheesh. WvW is the best part of GW2. Can’t wait for a refresh. I a not a developer, nor have I played one on TV, nor did I sleep at a Holiday Inn, but I can imagine that changes in this part of the game is complex.

Let’s be patient…I imagine we’ll see some upgrades and changes soon.

Unfortunately to me this just reads as "We’re not actually working on anything, but I am not allowed to say that or I’ll lose my job".

Developers are posting just fine in other sections. The things the ’WvW team’ is supposedly ’working so hard’ on to the point where they cannot even spare a few minutes within the past YEAR to give any type of life signs what so ever... These things are incredibly hard to believe, and it is much easier to believe a WvW shutdown is coming.

lordkrall.7241:

We HAVE gotten quite a bit of stuff in WvW, since release. But we have to keep in mind that developing stuffs in WvW most likely is much harder and take more time than PvE, especially since it is very likely that the WvW team is much smaller than the PvE-team(s) due to more people playing PvE.

It’s been over 12 months since that post on their WvW plans and correct me if I’m wrong, none of those changes have been implemented yet. I’m kind of assuming that we’re gonna see something before Season 3 starts…it’s even been around a year since they added any WXP traits.

lordkrall.7241:

Yes, bigger teams exists due to that.
But with bigger teams (that works together) it is also much more likely that someone will have some spare time, as opposed to smaller teams where people are most likely working much closer together and on more things (per person) at once.

If this is true,this means that WvW team is 1 person or less.

Oh and btw lordkrall,how do you manage to be in every post in every subforum,this is unbelievable ,how do you find time to play WvW,do you have time to play the game at all,after 116 pages?
Amazing!!!

/bow

7.29.14

World vs. World
Updated the names on past WvW tournament world-placement achievements.
The Toxic Unveiling Volley skill no longer shows up on an Arrow Cart’s skill bar until the skill has been unlocked.
Guild Arrow Cart skill-damage tooltips now properly reflect their superior-level damage.

ITS WHAT WE’VE ALL BE WAITING FOR THE WVW FEATURE PATCH!

To be fair did they even say that they were bringing any new content to WvW? Hyperbole much?

Thanks for the Red tag comment. I agree with the poster who pointed out anything is better than nothing, comment wise.

Assassin X.8573:

7.29.14

World vs. World
Updated the names on past WvW tournament world-placement achievements.
The Toxic Unveiling Volley skill no longer shows up on an Arrow Cart’s skill bar until the skill has been unlocked.
Guild Arrow Cart skill-damage tooltips now properly reflect their superior-level damage.

---

ITS WHAT WE’VE ALL BE WAITING FOR THE WVW FEATURE PATCH!

Let me summarise for you the patch notes, since the big april 15th patch:

May 20 Content Release Notes
World vs. World
•Fixed a bug in which Ballista Mastery V wasn’t working while operating a superior ballista.
•Updated the text for WvW-related daily achievements.

June 3 Content Release Notes
World vs. World
General
•The Battle Historian now has WvW tournament rewards. These rewards will be temporarily disabled while we resolve an issue with Tournament Ticket distribution.
•Due to fierce financial competition, one of the armor and weapons merchants in each staging area has declared bankruptcy and moved on. Their goods have been claimed by the remaining merchants.
•The player-count requirement for breakout events has been lowered from 10 to 5.

Edge of the Mists – who cares.

June 17 Content Release Notes
World vs. World
•All players who qualified for rewards from the Spring 2014 Tournament have been given 100 additional WvW Tournament Claim Tickets.
•World vs. World Spring 2014 Tournament placement achievements and associated tournament chests have been redistributed.
•The Battle Historian’s Tournament Rewards tab has been re-enabled.

July 1 Content Release Notes
WvW section missing.

July 15 Content Release Notes
World vs. World
•Fixed an issue preventing the WvW armorsmith vendors from selling to level 60-69 characters.
•Fixed an issue in which Build Master II caused the incorrect amount of supply to be spent when building burning oil, cannons, and mortars.

To be honest, I’d switch all of these for a bug fix on the “stuck while building siege, switch weapons, or type an emote” thing.

What I think I’ve just heard again is apparently the result of an inwardly focused culture that seems to value internal processes above customers (concerns/experience.)

I hope I heard that wrong.

I’m at a total loss to understand this, both as a retired software developer and as a customer.

Not sure how to think about this: on the one hand, some players will appreciate the response; I personally would have felt better not having seen it (reinforces unwanted concept).

@Mark,

What you need to understand is that people are frustrated. When is the last time we saw a WvW update? Correct me if I am wrong, but there hasn’t been anything new all year. The only thing I’ve seen is a new PvE map named EotM. That doesn’t count.

That said, I’d rather see nothing than bad decisions. Please do not mess up the current WvW maps with junk from EotM.

Style thats now entirely true. You can say that making WXP account bound was an update, yes you can ask why did Anet made is soulbound and players shout about it from begining. But true is they made it this year account bound.
Also that bigger update this year was not even in patch notes. Thats how funny situation we ar ein.

THE BIGGEST WVW UPDATE WAS NOT IN PATCH NOTES,it was silent update. Can you imagine this?
Oh i forgot, I am talking about grey names of dead players.

So yes they did something this year, but for almost 8 months this may seem just a bit low on updates. Look on pve updates and then back to 2 updates for wvw in 8 months.

Mark Katzbach.9084:

Pavel.8531:

Let me start with this quote:

DevonCarver.5370:

When I’ve been working on WvW for 11 months, then we’ll talk.

So, 11 months have passed, let’s talk then?
1. What is currently being worked on for WvW?
2. Why are things, that have been in the top of the player requests for over an year not only not implemented, but even not talked about from your side?
3. We haven’t heard from you since you posted in the “new maps” thread several months ago… and that was after around 6 months of you not posting. Do you think if you communicated better you’d avoid some of the huge negativity and toxicity on the WvW forums? Any plans to do something besides hiring more mods and creating additional CoC rules?

Feel free to add more questions guys.

I am going to jump in here answer these as honestly as I am able.

1. We can’t talk about that right now. Once the in-development features reach a state where we, as a company, are comfortable talking about them, we will.
2. Some player requests are under development. What those are and when they will be completed, I can’t say at this time for reasons mentioned above.
3. Devon is very busy with his job duties and only has limited time to devote to reading the forums. If he spent the time demanded of him responding to threads on the forums, his work would suffer. My job duties have me reading and reporting on the forums regularly to ensure that Devon and the rest of the team are aware of active concerns within the WvW community. I do this for other parts of the forum as well. As has been mentioned a multitude of times previously, our developers read the forums as much as they are able, but time prevents them from responding to everything they read.

1. This is the exact mentality that has lead people to think ArenaNet doesn’t listen or care. You guys might want to rethink your information strategies as it’s having a large negative impact on the community. Sure talking about features you might not do or even scrap can be bad, but if you keep the community updated about them it won’t be nearly as toxic as your current strategy of letting the community wallow in despair and hate. Of course the only reason I can think of for continuing down this path is that the updates for WvW are so lackluster that informing the community that is all that’s in the works for them would kill what’s left of the community.

2. While I don’t doubt that you’re using some player requests, that was also true a year ago and we’ve yet to see or even hear anything. See point #1, you cannot just keep saying we can’t talk about it.

3. Then you need to report back to the WvW team that their silence and lack of a simple MONTHLY or even QUARTERLY information update on what’s happening is helping to kill wvw. We don’t need devon to make posts here, he is just a figurehead, what we need is an ArenaNet representative to keep us informed and hopeful. It doesn’t take buy 10mins to throw together some basic information on what’s being worked on, what got scrapped, and what they would love to do but aren’t working on yet. Yes, some people will be upset if something gets scrapped, but do you think the negativity then is anything like what it is currently?

Honestly you guys are doing way more harm than good. Let’s try a different tact and put it into business terms. You guys need to think of players like investors, if every 3 months at the investor meeting you say nothing the players aren’t going to invest. Not only that they are going to dump your company and invest somewhere else where they get the information they want.

Thank you Mark Katzbach for answering the questions.

I will wait for the next update to see what has changed for WvW.

at first i thought the whole secrecy thing was great. but now it seems like more of an excuse. the community demands transparency. we dont care about the fine details, just give us a" we are working on a topic." there doesnt really neeed to be more than that!

we are working on comm tags
we are working on bug x
we are working on bug q

not we are working on stuff. stuff doesnt cut it.

timmyf.1490:

But please, please: it would go leaps and bounds for them to just put a quick, “Interesting ideas here, keep going” every so often. It would take 30 seconds but would lead to so much more red-tag visibility here.

I have never understood this, why is it that the fact of a simple “yeah go on” suddenly makes things better in WvW? Everytime a dev posts on a topic everyone’s mentality suddenly changes to “omg thanks so much for posting we were dying here”.

I’m not directing this at you timmy, but at most of the WvW related threads that I have been looking at recently, some PvP too. I really don’t understand the “magic” this dev replies do since I honestly can’t feel it…

Because in the end people will continue to demand the developers for more replies and more elaborate ones, oh well don’t mind me too much…

Dog pile on the Anet guy! Actually I just wanted to correct a word for you:

Mark Katzbach.9084:

As has been mentioned a multitude of times previously, our developers read the forums as much as they are able, but time prevents them from responding to everything they read.

As has been mentioned a multitude of times previously, our developers read the forums as much as they are able, but time prevents them from responding to everything anything they read.

I am just in total shock at a red dev post in the WvW section of the forums…it will take me a week to recover…

Honestly thought WvW had been totally and utterly forgot about.

Chaba.5410:

Victory.2879:

Mark’s comment tells us nothing, promises nothing and gives away nothing

That’s about as diplomatic a response as is possible when the mob is fickle.

How did players who love the game become a “mob” to you OR to anyone?

Fickle? No, the players have been consistent, not fickle.

Are there some who grief rather than posit ideas and forward community – yep, and funny that I’ve been accused of that when I am full of ideas -I don’t “just complain” ;
I like many others, report problems, suggest ideas and discuss what we believe is the state of the real end game for Guild Wars 2.

If we didn’t care about the game, we wouldn’t come into the very dangerous waters of a company forum where we are locked out, told to wait (interminably) be satisfied with bugs, missing items and WvW that is broken more than most know since you can still glitch into Citadel and every other map spawn as I have witnessed and have many a screen shot of.

The “answers” we need won’t come from a post, they will come, as others have stated, from an update that actually addresses the problems, not wants, of a community who have been waiting since WvW was instituted.

We aren’t asking for much – just for the “bones” – the “framework” of WvW to be fixed, fleshed out and given the attention by the powers that be, even a fraction, of what is being spent on the “rest of the game”, and so far, we’ve been told, again, to sit down be satisfied with what we have.

It’s not working well.

Servers are in the wrong tier.

Want proof? Look at how many times TC has won after season ended in WvW… They can’t win. They won’t win unless BG and JQ just give up a week – and I doubt they will.

Glitches galore affect scores, making it not a “player” game but a “glitch” game.

Running down the single player with 25-50 players… Still don’t know how that’s war and not just running someone over. Then griefing that player with siege and more…

Missing items after patches – this one belongs on all forums but since I was in WvW when they went missing (rare dyes I bought and discovered are missing) it could very well be WvW code – I wasn’t doing much else before last week rarely stepped foot out of WvW much.

So, we know that programming a game takes time, that’s a no brainer, but we can tell that WvW is on a back burner compared to “the rest of the game” and has been since day 1.

Chaba, I need to find a moosie hat for you

atheria.2837:

WvW that is broken more than most know since you can still glitch into Citadel and every other map spawn as I have witnessed and have many a screen shot of.

They actually fixed that

They fixed a map bug which gave the enemy no strategic advantage at all whilst other things which greatly give them an advantage have not.