Guild Wars 2

I was wondering how many of you, over the years, have witnessed this phenomena?

I’ve seen it happen with at least five or six games that have sputtered out and died because of this social media tool.

What happens, is that a group bands together and those who yell the loudest and longest, tend to get their way — regardless of whether it benefits the game or not. Developers of various games have reinforced this behaviour by caving to demands, often just to get players to quiet down. Over the years, players have been conditioned that if you don’t yell, you get nothing. It’s endemic in most MMO gaming forums.

So we are left with this kind of abrasive mode of communication, where the developer turtles and the playerbase gets more angry. To the point that any kind of interaction winds up being antagonistic, regardless.

What’s concerning about this, and as I’ve said, I’ve watched it happen on multiple MMO forums over the years is the fallout from what I call the “appeasement plan.”

Players yell and scream for X change. The developer assesses the largest volume of voice on a forum and makes a decision based on X demand. Over the years, players have learned that you don’t have to be in the majority, you just have to be loud — and pushy. The squeaky wheel and all that.

The worst part? After the changes are implemented, the ones who were yelling the loudest usually bail for other games once they see the plan fail. And the game ultimately suffers because the devs were trying to “listen to its playerbase.”

It’s no skin off the teeth of those who were yelling if they leave the game for somewhere else. They only care if they get their way. And if it fails, no big, there’s always another game out there.

TL;DR: I would highly recommend that while the forums are great to get feedback from the most ardent fans of the game, that Anet actually offers an in-game poll by game mail, asking each player to give input to what they’d like to see in changes. (And be prepared to alter existing plans if the data goes against current programming changes). Any time a player logs in, they are given this poll about potential changes, and can click off multiple choice radio buttons of what they prefer. This absolves the company of reacting (stomping out fires) to vocal manipulation and social engineering on forums. It also gives them an accurate head count of interest to proposed changes.

It just seems to me to be the more sensible thing to do.

Jayne.9251:

TL;DR: I would highly recommend that while the forums are great to get feedback from the most ardent fans of the game, that Anet actually offers an in-game poll by game mail, asking each player to give input to what they’d like to see in changes.

Yes. Forums suffer from self-selection bias.

I play another game where every time a patch comes out, there’s a feedback form posted on reddit (with a little message in the game to go there, there’s no mail in this game so don’t have that option) for players to leave their ideas. And this company also would periodically post the w/l percentages of certain characters (it’s a MOBA) so the player base could see the data the dev team uses. The side benefit is that people could then point to data and say “yeah, this character actually has a 50% w/l rate, guess it really isn’t as OP as I think”. It really seemed to help, I wish more companies would do things like this.

That’s a good idea. This has been mentioned on a number of occasions by myself and other like minded players like you along the way. Sadly, chances of that happening are slim to none, and we will be regulated to the forums and what scraps we get from tweets and reddit. BUT, I guess we never really know what those tricksters are up to at Anet and what’s on what table…

Anet got all the right info from feedback… All the stuff implemented could have worked..barricades, dolyak protection, auto upgrades… The only thing that went wrong was the execution.

Auto upgrades should have required supply delivery. Towers should control zerg traffic but the map is too big for that to happen, dolyak protection should matter but supply lines aren’t even necessary.

It was all the execution not the info.

Sure.

People whine about “zerker meta”— they want dungeons to have specific roles

• Ferocity gets nerfed while still effecting WvW
• Dungeons don’t get “fixed”, they just get nerfed into oblivion

People whine about “trains”— they don’t like people making more gold than them.

• Most of PvE areas get nerfed into oblvion

People whine about “nothing to do”— they want more grinds to get ahead of people that don’t

• Grindy ascended gear
• More soulbound nonsense

Point is, a lot of people have an agenda. Which is fine. We all have needs and wants, but quite a few would disingenuously claim they speak for others when they changes they want would affect many others and they don’t consider that or even care. A combination of elitists, lazy folk, and yes-folk have created a situation where some groups are just left in the dust. And considering the focus that is put based on the general Gw2 population, it’s not too hard to deduce who got left in the dust.

It is just my speculation, but seems like there are those that want to reduce Gw2 to a generic grindy MMO where people with too many time on their hands can be special snowflakes and WvW always suffers as a result.

This is the reason it originally never really bothered me that much when a lot of ANET’s changes to the game got the “not listening to your players, out of touch” whine given their track record of staying true their development plans in GW1. Sure I don’t agree with a lot of their choices and it can irk me to no end to see all that wasted potential being glossed over but if they have a well thought out long term goal of what they want the game to be then I trust the developer over us, the selfish short sighted players. Maybe it would not be a game I wanted to play in the end but that would be ok if it stuck their plan and actually worked well for most.

Only problem now is I am not so sure they still have that vision and planning going on. HoT in general doesn’t feel especially well conceived and road-mapped. Instead it feels like we are getting some messed up amalgamation of what the devs want for the game to be and what the most demanding players want with neither side happy in the end which is a shame. I agree a lot of the stuff on in the new Desert map are things people were asking for here for a long time and yet somehow came out twisted and lifeless which is really hard to blame on the devs since it is the players and how they interact to with the game environment that creates that spark of unpredictable chaotic fun that games need to thrive.

Yes they build us the sandbox but what we decide to do with it speaks volumes and yes they can try incentivize us to build sand castles instead of dig giant boring holes but they can’t force us to. Granted, ANET incentivation department seems to gone out to lunch with the Desert map but I remain hopeful something is coming with those WvW changes that will make everything more clear soon. Just a little bit worried about what. =/

+1000

I usually speak for myself, or try to most of the time.

I’d definitely support this option as another tool in weeding out the kitten from the truth.

It isn’t the forum users rather it is the effort put in by the companies to inform and manage their forums. I would agree that if a company is putting up a forum to check a box on a todo list and then they don’t look back, they shouldn’t have bothered.

There have been a lot of MMOs that have great communities form around their forums. The difference between “bad” forums and “good” forums are almost all tied to the amount of community relations put in by the company. Most Turbine games, Champions Online, CoH and several others had/have quality forums where their forum users are actively engaged by the content creators.

When topics like this pop up I can’t help but think of Floyd Petrowski from “The Guild”.

One could say that this crying is the reason they ignore wvw forums

Jayne.9251:

I was wondering how many of you, over the years, have witnessed this phenomena?

I’ve seen it happen with at least five or six games that have sputtered out and died because of this social media tool.

What happens, is that a group bands together and those who yell the loudest and longest, tend to get their way — regardless of whether it benefits the game or not. Developers of various games have reinforced this behaviour by caving to demands, often just to get players to quiet down. Over the years, players have been conditioned that if you don’t yell, you get nothing. It’s endemic in most MMO gaming forums.

So we are left with this kind of abrasive mode of communication, where the developer turtles and the playerbase gets more angry. To the point that any kind of interaction winds up being antagonistic, regardless.

What’s concerning about this, and as I’ve said, I’ve watched it happen on multiple MMO forums over the years is the fallout from what I call the “appeasement plan.”

Players yell and scream for X change. The developer assesses the largest volume of voice on a forum and makes a decision based on X demand. Over the years, players have learned that you don’t have to be in the majority, you just have to be loud — and pushy. The squeaky wheel and all that.

The worst part? After the changes are implemented, the ones who were yelling the loudest usually bail for other games once they see the plan fail. And the game ultimately suffers because the devs were trying to “listen to its playerbase.”

It’s no skin off the teeth of those who were yelling if they leave the game for somewhere else. They only care if they get their way. And if it fails, no big, there’s always another game out there.

TL;DR: I would highly recommend that while the forums are great to get feedback from the most ardent fans of the game, that Anet actually offers an in-game poll by game mail, asking each player to give input to what they’d like to see in changes. (And be prepared to alter existing plans if the data goes against current programming changes). Any time a player logs in, they are given this poll about potential changes, and can click off multiple choice radio buttons of what they prefer. This absolves the company of reacting (stomping out fires) to vocal manipulation and social engineering on forums. It also gives them an accurate head count of interest to proposed changes.

It just seems to me to be the more sensible thing to do.

Oh, this is part of a bigger trend, actually. A while back, someone did a write up on the “MMO Locust Cloud”. There’s a couple million players that jump from one game to another, any time a new one launches, and spend the first 6 months after launch demanding change as loud as they possibly can. Typically, what they’re asking for pretty much breaks down to just “make it like WoW!”. Even though WoW is usually the game they had left to come ruin whatever game’s launch. So this locust cloud goes around demanding a general WoWization of every AAA MMO that ever launches. The developers cave (usually due to pressure from pulishes trying to “chase dat Wow money”), and end up stripping away what made their game special and enjoyable, and are left with a shallow WoW clone, that sadly pales in comparison to the original, and pales in comparison to the game that was originally launched. This is also where the nerf cycles usually originate from. it basically boils down to “I got killed by an x, weaken them so I can kill them.”

What we’re seeing now is a version of that. A new expansion came out, which is like crack to the Locust Cloud, and now we’re seeing several people that are basically brand new to the game forcefully pushing for changes, that basically boil down to “make it like WoW.”

The whole cycle is thoroughly destructive. Not just for the individual games, but for the industry as a whole. It destroys variety, creativity and options, and pigeonholes both players and developers into single repeated template. And if players don’t particularly like that template, they’re left with nothing. It suffocates the entire industry, and is one of the main reasons for some of the current, horrible, trends we’re seeing in modern games. Lack of challenge, hand holding, removal of communities, removal of options, removal of RP from the RPGs, blatant funneling to the cash shops, removal of the fun factor, etc. It doesn’t lead down a good path, but… I don’t know if there’s anything that can really stop it at this point.

Im not sure how you would do that. With free accounts people could vote as much as they wanted. and if you limited to only people who spent money or had HoT your results are skewed. Also you might want to include people who have played the game, since maybe you want them to come back.

Perhaps an email sent out to all existing accounts as of XX, XXXX date?

Jayne.9251:

TL;DR: I would highly recommend that while the forums are great to get feedback from the most ardent fans of the game, that Anet actually offers an in-game poll by game mail, asking each player to give input to what they’d like to see in changes. (And be prepared to alter existing plans if the data goes against current programming changes). Any time a player logs in, they are given this poll about potential changes, and can click off multiple choice radio buttons of what they prefer. This absolves the company of reacting (stomping out fires) to vocal manipulation and social engineering on forums. It also gives them an accurate head count of interest to proposed changes.

It just seems to me to be the more sensible thing to do.

Yep I agree and this is something that was suggested when the CDi threads were being done.

Jayne.9251:

TL;DR: I would highly recommend that while the forums are great to get feedback from the most ardent fans of the game, that Anet actually offers an in-game poll by game mail, asking each player to give input to what they’d like to see in changes. (And be prepared to alter existing plans if the data goes against current programming changes). Any time a player logs in, they are given this poll about potential changes, and can click off multiple choice radio buttons of what they prefer. This absolves the company of reacting (stomping out fires) to vocal manipulation and social engineering on forums. It also gives them an accurate head count of interest to proposed changes.

It just seems to me to be the more sensible thing to do.

- They already have the data what their players are doing, how often they log in and for how long. Ultimately it doesn’t matter what a player thinks if he logs in and plays for many hours each day anyway. Also there’s a fundamental discrepancy between what good business plan looks like and what a good game look like. We have no idea what’s going on in the company, how they see the game and what kind of players they’re making this game for. All these years are evidence of something, however. If someone dislikes everything Anet does and disapproves all the changes, there’s no reason to stick around and hope for change.

Complaining changes nothing. These people were here at the launch day and they will be here complaining until the last server is shut down.

+1

Couldn’t agree more.

Even an ingame poll is dangerous, though, as many people (especially young males) do just seem to end up following the pack and will, no doubt, vote according to that.

As opposed to constructing their own true, original and unbiased thoughts.

In my opinion, it is important that games devs remain above all that and follow the basic principles of morality.

In other words, while they should listen to the community, they shouldn’t listen to anyone whose main desire is to derive pleasure, by removing things from other people.

Schadenfreude should not be involved in game design/changes and yet, it so often seems to be, now.

Oh no the community wants something… Better ignore it!

Good logic there.

Best way to get good feedback is just talking to individuals. Forums are a mixed bag, and the WvW forums are at the worse end of it. You see some good posts but it doesn’t pay to read the replies (such as this one).

You mean exactly like this thread right? I’m sorry but your claim is simply adhoc nonsense. I would like to to see your burden of proof please.

There were people that stepped out well before this…the simple mention of ArenaNet and they said, “nope”. I see this now and will never muck with Anet again.

I think the game is slowly dying. Everyone wants to believe it’s for their own predicted reason but in reality Gw2 has suffered multiple population cuts for various reasons. To be honest even today…the population has never been the same after the Megaserver conversion. To me that was the most notable drop. I don’t know where the people went they just…poofed away.

If you’d been here long enough to see, the starting areas were always teeming with new players and conversations in game were always going on. It’s pretty quiet now.

Sure you can say it’s because of the forums, but the truth is there have been multiple population drops mostly produced by ArenaNets infinite wisdom.

In my opinion…an expanding game should have so much negativity about it. Look at the forums between the years before heart of thorns was even mentioned. There were very legitimate threads going on. Now…there has been nothing but ArenaNet hate (including myself).

What I think happened was that people fell for the hype…but they forgot who they were dealing with. Things were better with Ncsoft around. A lot of people think the word change means for the better…and it does not. It means change.

All in all I don’t think ArenaNet has what it takes to compete in the future. Mostly because, “not in our skill set”, keeps popping up. Gw2 is notably lacking in many areas of the game. It’s just like any other mmo with less to it. The only thing Gw2 has going for it is combat and graphics…that’s it. Even now though look at upcoming mmo’s. Gw2 doesn’t even come close. There are other companies that are picking up the trend (trying to) unifying the singleplayer experience (not game) in an mmo fasion. That will be the new mmo standard the one everyone thought gw2 would have been but it never was.

Any company can fire up an MMO but to make an MMORPG and a proper one at that is the issue. The story telling, the art of telling a story is pretty sub par in Gw2. When a specific someone dies in HoT I wasn’t even surprised cause I really don’t feel connected to any of the characters…outside of Tybalt, (may god rest his soul)

Conversely, I saw the population of starter areas – and everything else outside LA – increase dramatically following the megaserver conversion. They were dead before, even more so than today.

I guess it depends what server you were on at the time.

What I’ve seen over the years, especially with moderated forums, is that those with an opinion not in line with what they want to broadcast get pushed out. The players who care about wanting to see a better game and express this in the forums are next.

Then it’s the rise of the white knights, who blame anything bad on those first groups who wanted things to be better but were ignored while the game company consulted with a select few (let’s call them the ’yes men, or streamers) and then come up with nothing like what was asked for. Even during testing feedback is completely ignored and content is dumped on the player base.

A second round of the above follows, and so on and so forth, until what is mainly left on the forums are either one off complaints on the way to another game or totally bland comments and fan boys, which leads into another round of bad game design decisions.

This cycle is not present on all forums- where there is constant interaction by the devs and action taken to stamp out bugs, exploits, and obvious problems, and all announcements are launched on the forums first. You know it’s gone wrong (bad communication strategy) when they start using streamers and hold them up as pillars of a community (when hardly anyone has heard of them), use other forums to make announcements and spend huge amounts of money promoting one game mode whilst almost totally ignoring the other.

Although feedback by email is great in theory, no company employs sufficient people to be able to read all that feedback. It’s much better to have test servers and see how they run under low, medium and high populations and see what the players say needs changing – then actually go away and implement it.

I think the biggest issue is that they don’t have real test servers with real players to test out changes and maps and so we end up with huge issues in wvw (such as CoR- wait for that no res and the spikes will be mighty!) and maps that aren’t fit for purpose. A few people might like them, and they might have looked good on paper, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating and the Deserted BL maps aren’t liked as pvp maps by the majority of players, who now q for EB rather than step into BL- or join a BL until the instant the q pops.

If I were the game designer, I’d design the game whatever I want it to be that I think is fun. Like minded players will enjoy it, make suggestions if needed, report bugs, give out some ideas, and that’s all. I’d do my best to improve to make everyone happy while still keeping the game’s idea and integrity. If the players don’t like the lot of it, I wonder why they play the game. If they want some sort of game mode so badly, I’d suggest they become the game designer themselves and implement it. This is not a mmo thing, it’s what a video game is, that is to gather together to play a game that you all like. Rage or toxic I wonder why they are ever a thing in a video game…. ?

poll by majority is innane. hiring devs that can see and fix the obvious game problems, and conferring with high level players in each game mode is obviously the way to go.

Interesting thread Jayne.

I don’t think it is a social phenomenon as much as it is a strategic change within the industry. For the forums it is a reflection of changes to community management, but it goes beyond that to encompass the whole game or all games that a studio produces.

It came with what you can consider the third generation of MMO, as games moved away from the subscription model and a focus on product quality to free monetization and micro-transaction models, their developers also began paying less attention to the traditional roles of their community management. The cooperative development popular among first- and second generation games, where players and developers interacted over forums, have lost ground in favour of other social media focused more on poplularity than quality of discourse (like Reddit where commentators say less but vote more).

The developers themselves favour communication metrics and interpreting their results quantitatively, for a quantity-oriented development direction and business model, and have done so since about 2008. It’s about majority, opinion or popularity, rather than quality of ideas, presentation and discussion. The goal is catering to players more than making good games.

The cooperative development of old has swung in a direction of pseudo-democratic development for short-term profit (culminating with the next generation crowdsourced games), but often on the back of building a house of cards where players eventually will have trouble trying to play the game and create content together.

If you look at some of the fore-runners, especially among the more purist sandbox game developers, like CCP games, they have already felt the backlash of such development and have at least to some degree adjusted their direction in the past year or two. So far it has been alot of talk and little action, but they have begun lightly treading from words to action so there is a directional shift even though they seem to have trouble finding their heading and staying on course.

There is a very interesting correlation between broad and deep approaches, or casual and invested players, when it comes to immersion and furthering the product by telling stories and creating content. The WvW mode in GW2 is a very typical example of it, where changes being made to cater to a perceived majority could be argued to have a negative impact on players enabling content the majority play in (eg., commanders, where commanders are often guild-born even if they lead pickups, so changes that favours pickups over guilds can be detrimental to the birth cycle of new commanders and as such impact pickups themselves and overall content creation).

It is a very keen topic for both developers, server communities, guilds and players alike.

choovanski.5462:

poll by majority is innane. hiring devs that can see and fix the obvious game problems, and conferring with high level players in each game mode is obviously the way to go.

Yet these sort of polls have worked in other games. Obviously there has to be in depth analysis of poll results, one of the issues I notice with the 2 mmos I play, GW2 and SWTOR, is that both sets of devs take key metrics and feedback but then completely misinterpret them.