Guild Wars 2

Tyaen.5148:

Would you agree to pay a Mobile provider if their ToS said they could censor your calls? No. Said company would never have a chance to go out of business as they wouldn’t have a business in the first place.

Great analogy.

Would you agree to pay a Mobile provider if their ToS said they could record your calls, your exact location, other metadata, then turn it over to your government for permanent storage in a secret desert base? No. Said company would never have a chance to go out of business as they wouldn’t have a business in the first place. Oh wait…

To paraphrase Mark Twain, “Censorship is telling an adult that they can’t have a steak because a baby would have trouble chewing it.”

JobCreator.1956:

Johje Holan.4607:

Nothing to do with freedom of speech or censorship. Anet is a private company, they don’t have to let you say anthing on their forums.

I hope my cell phone carrier never hears about this because by your standard, as a private company, they won’t have to let me say anything on my phone. If you split too many hairs too many times you’ll eventually be bald.

Nope those companies use public spectrum provided by the gov

Johje Holan.4607:

Nothing to do with freedom of speech or censorship. Anet is a private company, they don’t have to let you say anthing on their forums.

Having the ability to do something, and it being a good idea, are entirely two different things. While you are slurping back your purple kool-aid, some of us are concerned about the long term effect this will have on the game.

Jaxs.5830:

Johje Holan.4607:

Nothing to do with freedom of speech or censorship. Anet is a private company, they don’t have to let you say anthing on their forums.

Having the ability to do something, and it being a good idea, are entirely two different things. While you are slurping back your purple kool-aid, some of us are concerned about the long term effect this will have on the game.

Bingo. Never drink the Kool-Aid.

Only matter of time when they extend the censorship to other forums to tone down the negative feedback also. Happens in every mmo forum if there’s enough negative feedback since it’s cheaper to quiet down the forums than to fix the game.

I love how anet artificially creates this forum problem… meantime no improvement to wvw for 8-9 weeks now.. gg anet

Its ridiculous, if anything they should remove this WvW Discussion forum, because they never reply to any questions or discussions we have.

It was a business decision. It simply took too much time/money/human resources to patrol the matchups thread.

They either had to change their code of conduct to lower standards (and risk lawsuits), or continue to “lose money,” or end the matchup forum.

How about this solution: the matchup thread remains, but every post costs $.50 to cover the extra moderators’ salaries?

Aeonblade.8709:

Jaxs.5830:

Johje Holan.4607:

Nothing to do with freedom of speech or censorship. Anet is a private company, they don’t have to let you say anthing on their forums.

Having the ability to do something, and it being a good idea, are entirely two different things. While you are slurping back your purple kool-aid, some of us are concerned about the long term effect this will have on the game.

Bingo. Never drink the Kool-Aid.

I never said it was a good idea. And I’m not defending Anet’s decision.

I was talking about people going on about the concepts of freedom of speech and censorship. And they were misapplying the notions of what those concepts represent.

And the phone company is not a good analogy.

I never took anyone seriously in the threads. I always found it a good place for entertainment. I don’t think the issue was necessarily the negative posts, I think the issue was the overly aggressive moderators. Some of my most innocent and dopey jokes were removed and infracted. Let your community have some trash talk and aggressive banter, it’s just going to end up in some other subforum if this one is removed….. The problem won’t be solved.

WhiteAndMilky.2514:

I never took anyone seriously in the threads. I always found it a good place for entertainment. I don’t think the issue was necessarily the negative posts, I think the issue was the overly aggressive moderators. Some of my most innocent and dopey jokes were removed and infracted. Let your community have some trash talk and aggressive banter, it’s just going to end up in some other subforum if this one is removed….. The problem won’t be solved.

Exactly.
It will either lead to aggravation of the community with no actual change or the removal of the community altogether.

Whats the reason to play an MMORPG without any people?

Anet doesn’t care, so why should we?

Enjoy wvw for what it is, a lawless map where you kill enemy players. It will never be something else.

i guess we’ll have to take our bickering and banter to the normal wvw forums, gg anet.

every action causes a reaction

Personally I cannot see what the issue is with the match up forum. As far as trash talking goes it is really lame. Yet to witness much trash talk during world vs world rounds between servers. Often more hostility between players on the same server from players telling everyone else how they should play the game, usually in a hostile manner.

An alternative site is http://www.postcount.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?21-Guild-Wars

This is the ex-VN site and is fully un-moderated and anything goes.

This is a bit disappointing. I can’t say I used the matchup forum a whole lot, but server community forums don’t make a lot of sense to use for the overall matchup discussion (whose community do you use, for a start; then there’s the issue of approving and monitoring a whole load of new users all the time). I also don’t use, nor do I wish to use, reddit – which is not always the kind of ‘safe and productive space’ Anet wish to build here.

Taking action against forum abusers, particularly repeat offenders, is fine, but quashing the whole forum seems counterproductive unless it’s almost literally all made up of bad apples. If it requires a bit more time investment to manage on Anet’s part, well, I’m sure there are plenty of people looking for a job who would be happy to help out!

I foresee a future course in game design focussed entirely on Anet’s mistakes. Botched community relations has got to be worth at least 3-4 lectures.

Meh. I’ll most likely get flagged for this one, but it bears saying. There’s a certain tinge, nay, full-on taint of hypocrisy in this kind of situation. Doing all players dirty since a few act a total fool? Worst thing is; it’s not just this specific situation. Look at jobs, for instance – I couldn’t begin to count how many times I’ve witnessed an entire workforce
punished for the mistakes of a relative few. And you know what? It royally peeves
every other person on the job who’s not the “Bad Apple,” or is at least far less
troublesome.
Unfortunately, this is the (screwed-up) way modern society operates. Basically, "Oh,
Persons “X” and “Y” acted the wrong way? Sorry, “Z,” but you’re screwed too!"

It´s really ridiculous. They are already deleting posts here and infracting people in this thread. Pls close the thread Arenanet and tell everybody that you do not want discussion. You can try to silence people here as you wish but you can´t control reddit or other platforms where people are allowed to talk freely. Now you can infract me, i don´t care.

the best part of all of this is are the people making posts disagreeing with this and criticizing the decision, and then acting like they’re some brave revolutionary fighting “the man” saying things like “you can infract me for my opinion i dont care!!!!”

LOL its a competitive game format, you cannot taunt your enemies ingame, and your cannot taunt them on the forums, they will just drive there entire WvW community to a new site, least that way they have an awesome reason for ignoring WvW they can just say its a dead game format, look no one posts about it,

They might aswell just come out and say it, DO NOT post on the GW2 forums, the fact the “moderators” have free reign around here says it all, just another reason to tell me friends to avoid this forum, bad show.

Next you will not be allowed to post in Tech support /bugs section, as apparently this game has no tech issues or bugs in it, true story.

Never like the concept of punishing everyone because a small percentage abuse things. You don’t remove an entire forum because some people abuse it. You perma ban the abusers, you ban them quickly, and you let the majority of the community who aren’t kittens enjoy the forum

I think this is not a very helpful decision. The match-up sub-forum had a lot of traffic from the WvW community and, for a significant amount of people, provided some of the entertainment involved with WvW. Having match-up threads where servers and guilds could converse in competitive manners brought more life to the game than you would think.

Sure people get angry, but doesn’t that come with any type of competitive gaming? This including any type of game, even offline (football, baseball, etc). It adds a hype that we can’t get in-game due to obviously not being able to talk at large with opposing servers and guilds. As the game progresses in age, you want to avoid any decisions that may dull the competitive game-play since most of us have been here for a long time and we need to stay interested.

I understand that your forum has it’s code of conduct and the match-up threads can get fiery, but your moderators do clean it up pretty efficiently. As for how you state that they spend too much time doing this, I think that just goes to show how much your player-base is involved competitively with each other. This just means that your game is alive and kicking.

Aaaand there goes the BG/JQ/SoR thread……closed after 20 posts already with not a single bad word being spoken.

If anything, i think that what WhiteAndMilky.2514 said is the truth. If the moderators wouldn’t be so overly aggressive, they would have 50% less work.

Reminds me of the time i got infracted for saying ‘Hi, nice troll attempt, i give you 6/10’
Boy, the pm i got made me look like a criminal :-p

Rhaegus.8924:

Aaaand there goes the BG/JQ/SoR thread……closed after 20 posts already with not a single bad word being spoken.

If anything, i think that what WhiteAndMilky.2514 said is the truth. If the moderators wouldn’t be so overly aggressive, they would have 50% less work.

Reminds me of the time i got infracted for saying ‘Hi, nice troll attempt, i give you 6/10’
Boy, the pm i got made me look like a criminal :-p

Some guy posted screenshots of another person exploiting.

If they had moderated it normally beforehand, people might actually know what the rules are.

Why the BG/JQ/SoR thread was just closed is beyond me. With full respect, I think your moderators are creating more of an “issue” with the threads than there really is. My post three posts above this one goes further into detail than this one, but I’d like to say again that these match-up threads should be open to competitive conversations that are not moderated in such a strict manner as other sections of the forum.

It’s obvious that your code of conduct will become strenuous for moderators in environments where there is competitive talk between opposing servers. That doesn’t mean that they need to be shut down… just simply moderated with slightly different codes of conduct.

You shoulda saw the sbi/mag threads on Thursday randomly getting closed lol

Instead of closing the mathup forums, why not have the moderators create a topic for each matchup at the start of the reset, then, at the end of each matchup close the topic and move it into archive. If there is constant abuse by certain individuals, then remove their rights of posting in the matchup forum.

Maybe upgrade the forums so everyone is placed in their specific server ( and if they transfer it transfers on the forums ) and they can only post in their match topic.

and please anet, relax and don’t close a thread because its got an ‘inflammatory tone’ aka banter. Unless you want us to be robots.

Advent.6193:

Meh. I’ll most likely get flagged for this one, but it bears saying. There’s a certain tinge, nay, full-on taint of hypocrisy in this kind of situation. Doing all players dirty since a few act a total fool? Worst thing is; it’s not just this specific situation. Look at jobs, for instance – I couldn’t begin to count how many times I’ve witnessed an entire workforce
punished for the mistakes of a relative few. And you know what? It royally peeves
every other person on the job who’s not the “Bad Apple,” or is at least far less
troublesome.
Unfortunately, this is the (screwed-up) way modern society operates. Basically, "Oh,
Persons “X” and “Y” acted the wrong way? Sorry, “Z,” but you’re screwed too!"

I think the rationalisation for group punishment has always been that the threat of punishment will lead to groups enforcing rules amongst themselves – i.e., peer pressure will encourage people not to ‘ruin’ things for each other, rather than authority figures always having to crack down. But yes, I have always hated it too, because there will always be a percentage of people who just don’t care whether or not they or anyone else loses out, they are gonna act up and that’s that, and there’s not a lot people trying to follow the rules can do about it.

I really don’t care if they close anything here. I got infractions for almost everything and only a few really made sense.
I mean this is a forum, there are discussions and people are not necessarily share their opinions and sometimes it gets a little harsh. But there never seemed to be a fair or strict line from the mods here.
That’s why I don’t read here anymore. (or at least pretty rarely)

Shut it down or get some decent moderators ..

P.S: I’m pretty sure I will get an infraction for that..

Nothing positive ever comes from censorship. The WvW community should just stop using these forums all together. Congratulations ANET on telling your customers to F OFF. Seems like a solid business model.

So much nerdrage.

I for once agree with their decision. But I guess forum warriors will be forum warriors.

On one hand, this is a bad move.

Not having deathspam, enemy chat or player names in wvw is bad enough. it destroys any sense of respect and recognition you might come to gain for yourself or your enemies all for the sake of making the game WHERE YOU KILL OTHER PLAYERS more “friendly” and safer for people who dont want to get their feelings hurt.

Its not supposed to be. We dont want it to be. Its a war.

the decision to wipe the forums emphasizes this carebear view of wvw and alienates the community.

On the other hand, it doesnt matter, wvw community is gone with ESO on the horizon. with only one patch since launch (and 1 more coming up, hold your breath!) focusing on wvw while 16+ add pve content, the community knows the deal. theyre wanted but not badly enough to warrant more than 1-2 patches of content in over a year.

Obviously a bad move, WvW Guilds and trolls will have nowhere to practice ForumWars2!
Seriously though, I’ve had loads of great duels and even picked up a few friends from other servers through the matchup threads.
In deleting the Subforum its almost like Anet doesn’t want a WvW community to exist at all, This bit makes me laugh.. “Our Moderation & Community Teams spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with numerous threads & posts that are full of: Accusations of hacking, exploiting, & griefing” – Fix your broken game and this wouldn’t happen?
Perhaps a separate Code of Conduct for the WvW subforums would have been a better move.
I predict the PvP Subforums will be gone by summer too.

Raven.9603:

On one hand, this is a bad move.

Not having deathspam, enemy chat or player names in wvw is bad enough. it destroys any sense of respect and recognition you might come to gain for yourself or your enemies all for the sake of making the game WHERE YOU KILL OTHER PLAYERS more “friendly” and safer for people who dont want to get their feelings hurt.

Its not supposed to be. We dont want it to be. Its a war.

the decision to wipe the forums emphasizes this carebear view of wvw and alienates the community.

I don’t like this decision at all… looks like they are doing everything they can to remove the soul from WvW… is that what they really want? What we need in WvW is exactly the opposite, since at launch already it was quite bad… sorry to say this but I think they are going the wrong way.

Passionate fire (maybe sometimes to passionate but oh well) in the hearts of opponents in competitive gamemodes, is what keeps them alive. It’s what brings them to climax. Removing this, will remove the Fire burning in the hearts of wvw people.

I’m trying to understand this decision. Either the Dev who made the post, did it on her own (Danicia, unlikely though), or her bosses ordered to do it. Either way, it shows a lack of understanding of the mmo universe.

When gw2 started, I gave the biggest advice one person could give anet, ‘learn from others mistakes’. I gave them the example ‘gpotato – rappelz’. That game litteraly did almost everything wrong that an mmo company could do wrong. I told them ‘if you don’t follow in their mistakes, the game will become amazing’. They made at least 10 big mistakes so far that rappelz also made. Censoring forum (even more then it already did) is one of them. Either you believe me or not, but people left in big amounts because of the forum censorship on that game.

I also see it as lack of resilience against forum complaints. The community makes the game. Rappelz still is surviving, but only because a few hardcore nerds, with lot of real life money, can’t stop to keep grinding new introduced (better) stuff. They fired at least 50% of their employee’s to still keep it alive, but it’s nothing more then that. The game is about to extinct. The only part of community left is selfish people. If Anet continues on resisting passionate gw2 players advice, they will turn themself into a rappelz, and some employee’s may have to fear for their job.

Passionate players, keep communities alive, they keep guilds alive, they keep guides alive. Gw2 is a game that’s hard for a casual to start on without any outside advice. Killing the most passionate part of community will take casuals down as wel, weither you see this or not.

Less passionate community = less income overall for Anet (guild leaders leave, guildies follow, chain reaction).
Less income = less recourse to make new content.
Less content = even bigger confirmation that more players are gone leave.

This Post from CC Danicia (combined with literally no info on new coming – big – content), shows for me, GW2 is not doing well at the moment. Maybe financially still good (game purchases were big on release and still ok now, but they will soon vanish as almost everyone has the game. China may give them more money shortly, but long term, i don’t see gw2 making a big hit forward. To bad Anet, you could have been such a great company with an amazing game.

While this thread alone, is not the only reason why im mad, it’s the final straw for me. I will focus on other games now. 4400 hours veteran got tired of Anet bad decisions.

Epsilon Atreides.3816:

Here are some interesting counter-points to the Anet post:

- The ‘inordinate’ amount of time spent on the forum by staff might have something to do with it seeming to be one of the most active sub-forums on the site, if not the most. Review the concept of proportionality.

- The accusations brought up in the forum were done so due to exploits/hacks which have been ignored for over a year, and likely reported hundreds if not thousands of times. If you ignore it, you expect what to happen?

- A lot of the animosity you observe in the forums is directly related to frustrations within the community about population imbalances you have not addressed, and yet acknowledge as a problem.

To act like you had no hand in how it devolved in your perception, and express disappointment with us……is disappointing, to say the least.

I woefully agree on this one.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

They made at least 10 big mistakes so far that rappelz also made.

I’d really be interested in seeing a comparison between other failed/failing MMOs and GW2. What do you think will be Anet’s next major misstep?

- Adding new tires of equipment (especially after promised not to).
- Making the game a stealthed grind game (achievements, dailies, laurels, time gated stuff).
- Making the cash shop a casino. Black lion chests, dye’s, etc are made to take more money from you then you intend with very low droprates of the wanted items. While this is by far not as bad as rappelz yet, they went from ‘5% as bad as rappelz to 30% over the last year, and it keeps increasing. At this rate, in 5 years it will be another rappelz. The flamekissed armor is another example. They kitten ed both owners of cultural armor off, but at same time all the flamekissed armor buyers are kitten ed their armor will become more ugly.
- Making fake promises in manifesto. (like no grind, certain bugfixes promised like party leader leaving party, disbanding a 3hour going dungeon instance, not fixed yet etc).
- Using empty content to keep the players playing, and if they destroy existing (good) content by it, it doesn’t matter to them.
- Removing (resetting) hardworked progress from players, like fractals of the mist.
- Not caring about new starting players. Everything is more expensive then ever. Gems are more expensive then ever. T6 mats are more expensive then ever. List goes on, for a newbie, while possible to play and gear up, they fall far behind, the convenience launch day players had, and it seems Anet doesn’t care to fix this or improve it at least a little bit. ‘veteran or go away’-mentality. Rappelz has that for kitten sure
- Ignoring player feedback, even when almost all players agree on something, and give tremendous well written posts on how, why and solution. Accound wxp being one of them (took them a long time to fix this).
- No actions to fight inflation. If anything it seems like they like inflation (maybe to make gems bought faster). like 300 silk scraps for 1x bolt of dasm is crazy. Remember the crazy supply of 8 copper ones? It’s almost all gone, and even I who stocked up 9k of them, didn’t even resell them because i need more then that for myself, and my own armor. Basically they will be depleted very soon, unless some heavy grinding (monster to get armors/weapons to salvage) comes in. I call that bad insight on economics, or intentionally inflating the market. Precursors are another example. Casual unfriendly, going hand in hand with inflation. Nothing done about it. Neither about lack of t6 mats. They even nerfed it crazy (orr no longer drops any t6 mats, apart from the occasional bone).
- Nerfing the wrong professions. Being biased towards a profession. Rappelz the hunter was always very weak, but got some nasty nerfs. Assassin was always OP (bit like warrior here, no downside and best dps), and they boosted them non stop. If anything ranger should get boosts, and warrior nerfs, not other way around.
- Boosting Siege damage while it’s clearly making battles more cowardly then face-to-face, giving servers like vizunah square a chance to overcome their not so good (apart from few guilds) player skills, with using siege. The server with most siege will most likely win Keep battles, giving an edge to a team for just being better at building siege. Skill should be rewarded rather then ‘who has the most powerfull siege’.
- Firing good employees. Robert Hrouda. Habid who fixed culling. A legendary mod was fired by rappelz, and it splintered the community. While Anet ain’t there yet, it seems to go on course.
- Making epic ‘feeling’ skills, totally crap. Demoting a ‘Ultimate’ feeling spell to an all day caster spell. Examples: Ride the Lightning, Meteor shower, Confusion skills, Cluster bomb, Barrage, list goes on. All this skills have been ‘over’-nerfed.

I don’t wanna be purely negative about gw2, but they are going in wrong direction. To shed some positive light:

Good actions:

Hiring Grouch, we need more true passionate gw2 gamers, to enlighten the devs what we really need.

Offering refund on several cash shop items, that they made a mistake on, or confused customers with.

CDI process. They are nice discussions, and the effort of Chris Whiteside really is good. Sadly it feels more like a marketing strategy, then an actually ‘we will definitely improve upon what players really want’-strategy. I give them the benefit of the doubt for now, but to much player input has been ignored to far. But it’s a nice initiative nonetheless.

WhiteAndMilky.2514:

I never took anyone seriously in the threads. I always found it a good place for entertainment. I don’t think the issue was necessarily the negative posts, I think the issue was the overly aggressive moderators. Some of my most innocent and dopey jokes were removed and infracted. Let your community have some trash talk and aggressive banter, it’s just going to end up in some other subforum if this one is removed….. The problem won’t be solved.

True.

If the Mod’s feel like they spend to much time moderating match-up forum, it is because they do. Step the kitten back, and let the competitive trash talking and banter live. Moderate what needs to be moderated, like racist stuff, direct personal attacks etc.
Thats what the community wants. Try listening for once.

Overreaction, that gets Anet nothing but grief.

This makes no sense. Way too aggressive and the only way they can handle the forum is to shut it down lol.

Reminds me of when I got an infraction for saying “no” in another thread haha.

Oh really people have been receiving infractions on this topic? I used to moderate another forum, not these, and this does sadden me slightly. I have a single message for you fellows sitting in work viewing our threads.

If the mods would mod their threads as a player, instead of as our parents, they would have a much easier time.

In stead of being contained in the match-up thread, trolling will spread everywhere for awhile. Until they all get banned, which I doubt anyone will care.

CHIPS.6018:

If the mods would mod their threads as a player, instead of as our parents, they would have a much easier time.

If players would follow the rules of the forum then everyone would have a much easier time.

Ayrilana.1396:

CHIPS.6018:

If the mods would mod their threads as a player, instead of as our parents, they would have a much easier time.

If players would follow the rules of the forum then everyone would have a much easier time.

You must not be reading this thread. People get infracted for following the rules.

Tricare.2946:

You must not be reading this thread. People get infracted for following the rules.

Of course they are..

Tricare.2946:

Ayrilana.1396:

CHIPS.6018:

If the mods would mod their threads as a player, instead of as our parents, they would have a much easier time.

If players would follow the rules of the forum then everyone would have a much easier time.

You must not be reading this thread. People get infracted for following the rules.

Of course. Everyone must be following the rules…

Every infraction has the reasoning and rule included with it in the notification sent to you. In every match up thread you always see people trolling and/or attacking one another.

Ayrilana.1396:

Tricare.2946:

Ayrilana.1396:

CHIPS.6018:

If the mods would mod their threads as a player, instead of as our parents, they would have a much easier time.

If players would follow the rules of the forum then everyone would have a much easier time.

You must not be reading this thread. People get infracted for following the rules.

Of course. Everyone must be following the rules…

Every infraction has the reasoning and rule included with it in the notification sent to you. In every match up thread you always see people trolling and/or attacking one another.

You can insinuate anything into breaking the rules in a report message. Examples of it can be found in this thread, I’ve given 2 myself.

I’ve had some of my posts in this very thread get deleted due to “clean-up” purposes. No rules broken, no spam, nothing. Just a post they didn’t agree with.