Guild Wars 2

I think this post may be a valuable read: Mike O’Brien on Communication.

I take on board some well-expressed comments here. Quite honestly, I’m not sure how it would work to say “Yes, we’re aware of XYZ.” Those who say “We just want to know you’re aware” are terrific. But we all know that there are others for whom that wouldn’t be satisfactory. “We want to know you’re aware and we want to know what you’re going to do about it” can even become "We want to know you’re aware, we want to know what you’re going to do about it or [insert something here, from “I’m taking a break” to “I’ll never buy another gem,” to “I’m encouraging my entire gazillion-member guild to jump to Game Z].”

Please understand I’m not dismissing the desire for the first level of info, not at all! But can you see how the outcome can be unpredictable and how, no matter the question or request, there is no perfect answer? Further, can you see how “We’re aware of this and we plan to [whatever]” can become “Ok, you said you were aware of it three days ago, where’s the fix?”

I’m sort of writing to think, but I’d like to understand what truly reaches the point of “I’d like more info, but I’m satisfied with what you’ve been able to tell us right now.” Can you give me a few examples, where players would really like to know everything, but where there is a level of disclosure that meets the basic info request?

I think a few people may have missed this thread, and it includes insights directly from ArenaNet President (and founder) Mike O’Brien on how we communicate with players. So I’m bumping the thread to the front of the forum so that everyone can get a view of how we feel as a company about communication. Communication is important to us. I think Mike expressed the reasons behind our practices very clearly, and I invite you to give the first post a read.

Since Mike posted this, ArenaNet has made additional substantial changes, including the creation of a brand new Forum Communications Team. None of our changes — both announced and unannounced — will result in overnight changes. But some of you have noticed that more red-flagged posts are appearing.

That will increase in the future.

And really, I think that says it all. Thank you for reading this and for being part of our forum family.

The “Tournament of Glory” event in the top right can actually be clicked and takes you to the stream. I’ll do a better job of making that more clear the next time I get a batch of these implemented. All in all, I think it was a great start and a great test for the system.

The “yellow text” system alert is not something we want to use for these events, as those are broadcasted across the entire game, regardless of if you’re in a dungeon, doing living world, or whatnot. We want it to be as noninvasive as possible. Someone mentioned having an NPC in the Heart of the Mists that shouts upcoming events, and I think it’s an interesting idea. I’ll bring it up with the team.

Thanks for the feedback, I’m definitely listening.

Just because we’re upping our tournament game doesn’t mean that we’re not working on making PvP better. We want the best experience for players on both ends, and we’re actively working on improving both.

As for the eligibility stuff, I’m sorry that you had a lot of underage/ineligible players. I sent you a PM about your situation if you’d like to talk about it with me.

Dasenthal.6520:

Quick question that’s mostly related to the title:
I found my old gw2 hat (the promo town clothes from launch) is it still usable with this system? I double clicked it and have no idea where it went…

Dasenthal, Speak to a Black Lion Trader with the armor marker over his head at any major Trading Post location. Ask him about town clothes – He will convert your old town clothes to either an armor skin or a costume tonic.

Hello Again,

With the WvW tournament drawing to a close, I’d like to thank everyone who participated in the Adopt-A-Dev program both as hosts and to the devs who volunteered their free time to make new friends and play with new guilds and worlds.

We collected a lot of valuable feedback. Some of that has motivated the discussions I’ve been having with you on the forums. I’ll be having another group discussion with our dev volunteers next week. Once that is complete I’ll get some notes posted on this thread.

It’s been both insightful and a ton of fun for me. My new guild DmD is full of dedicated WvW players, interesting characters, crazy stories, exotic beverages, fun-loving nuts, a pretty amazing guild leader (or three) and a guy who talks like a duck. I couldn’t have asked for a better group to get another perspective on WvW and GW2 with. Thanks for having me guys!

John

Elsdragon.5109:

Since there’s a distinction between soul-bound items and account-bound items already in place, I doubt they would make soul-bound transferable between characters in the same account (since that’s what account-bound items are).

Correct. There are several types of items, and the configuration of each item is made as a conscious decision. So it doesn’t seem likely that that the request would be fulfilled, so that soul bound items — things that are tied to the soul of a single character — would become something that could be shared across all characters. That’s not to say it could not happen, but as a general concept, it seems highly unlikely.

wwwes.1398:

Could you discuss your thoughts on the consumable ingredient market in general and, more specifically, cooking? And I know you can’t comment on that question specifically, but is it fair to say that there IS something you’re hoping to accomplish with these new recipes and that it’s not just some arbitrary value being thrown out there?

There are several different ideas going on mixing between scarcity, sinks and faucets, usefulness and lore. We often vary the different weights of each of these to get a feeling for the effectiveness of the design changes. Food is tricky because it’s so powerful, but also so abundant. Sometimes we might want to just get people to try eating food more often, sometimes we might want a rare food, sometimes we’re thinking about 18 theoretical months from now and the resources involved instead of right at the moment. The mix of all these may make it seem like a random grab bag of decisions, but it isn’t. With each iteration we’re learning and getting better.

JBDanger.2603:

John Smith.4610:

Sariel V.7024:

Any chance for a response on my question? I think you may have missed it.

I apologize, I can’t currently speak on that.

Anet’s famous response for everything!!!

This is a 14 page thread of me answering all I can; throw me a bone sometimes.

Sariel V.7024:

Any chance for a response on my question? I think you may have missed it.

I apologize, I can’t currently speak on that.

Hey guys. Thanks for the heads up on this problem. I just wanted to let you know that we are aware of it, investigating, and have already banned a bunch of accounts (I don’t know the exact number, but I know Chris Cleary has been very busy with this lately). Please keep letting us know when you see suspicious activity!

Oh no worries, we have not forgotten you!

We’re waiting for our partners to provide us with a full list of all winners before we send out the rewards. I’m not sure if that list has been caught in limbo, but Blu can speak with our rep and we’ll get this sorted. It’s only been a few days, so we ask you to please allow a bit more time for the lists to be provided, reviewed, verified, and then fulfilled. Thanks for understanding.

I also hope that Drak can do an excel vote doc when we get to the top 3 etc.

chris

Baltzenger.2467:

krosis.7598:

Guys, you’re dragging down the thread.

I agree, please let’s keep it cool guys, we have been doing it so good.

Morning Folks,

I haven’t seen anyone dragging down the thread yet. I assume some posts were deleted?

I think passionate discourse is fine between collaborators as they find their footing. What isn’t effective is when folks have no other intent than to disrupt the discussion.This is without doubt the best CDI we have ever had.

And be assured that the dev team have been reading it with a lot of interest.

Chris

Baltzenger.2467:

@Chris:
I just finished watching your presentation on The Modern Role of a Game Designer, it is a very good presentation, and even if this is going to be a little bit offtopic, I think it can be helpful to make a reflection on it, considering how good this CDI has been going.

I’ve worked as an independent designer for about 5 years (since I was about 17), I’m always eager to learn about the industry, and specially about the logistics of development and design, so I find your presentation very illustrative, and I can relate many points made there to personal experience, (more specifically, personal mistakes), so thanks for sharing.

We have a very good momentum in this thread, the fact that even the press is interested on what’s going on here is very exciting. I think that even from my amateur point of view, I can say that the features and ideas we are discussing have enormous potential for the game, not just because of how interesting and compelling to the players is the idea of having a customizable personal space, but because of how transverse it is among different game modes. (Making this a potentially interesting topic for almost every player of the game)

It makes so much more sense, after watching your presentation, the processes that we are following.
I just wish at this point, out of curiosity, to know what do you guys think of the idea of Guild Halls, after reading what we have until know, your personal preferences, or what do you think fits or doesn’t into the current game. I don’t think that at this point the discussion can be “contaminated” at all. Well, at least, I would like to know, to further understand how our ideas are understood, or seen, from a more educated perspective.

And because, I think we should keep this momentum, not just for this CDI, but for the following ones. To me, and to some I think, it was a huge step to go from “suggest what you think would be accepted” to “suggest what you would like, no restrictions”, and something tells me that it isn’t the only huge step we’re gonna make during this process.

Hi Balt,

I will try to answer your main question today.

Chris

FYI folks i am in content reviews all morning. If i don’t get involved today I will be on this weekend.

Chris

Here is the link to the Guild Halls CDI:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Guilds-Guild-Halls/first

Chris

Thanks for all the posts in the last few days. I’m not ignoring you just too busy to post and discuss right now. Keep the ideas flowing.

Jon

Hey Guys,

So from reading through the posts by far the most common proposal is to create some sort of scoring periods. There are multiple different approaches that have been presented but it’s clear that winning scoring periods and tallying up those wins to determine who wins the match is generally accepted as a good way to improve scoring.

Several people suggested keeping the map state across scoring periods so that the investment you make in upgrades and effort you take in conquering objectives but the scores will have far less of a chance of running away when the victory points come from the scoring period not the PPT.

A few other suggestions that came up a bunch were additional scoring opportunities, special goals for servers that are behind, increasing the importance of the outnumbered buff and points per kill. Points per kill had quite a lot of discussion around it.

The video from TeamBattleAxe was also brought up by several people. If you didn’t get a chance to see it, it has some great suggestions about how to create teams that share scores across their matches.

There were a bunch of other really interesting ideas that can’t easily be summarized so if you get a chance you should peruse this thread. It’s full of good suggestions.

A couple of people have said that this discussion is falling into a pattern of general consensus. It certainly does seem like a few good ideas have emerged from this. I’ll keep my eye on the thread a little longer in case anything else comes up.

Thanks for taking the time to engage in this discussion!

John

Wanze.8410:

tolunart.2095:

Wanze.8410:

John Smith.4610:

The CE is really a reflection of gem value and isn’t as strongly tied to the economy as many think it is.

So as a gold sink/counter inflation measure its not very relevant?

I think the point is that the TP and gem store are two very different entities and don’t really influence each other very much.

I mean, there are players who farm for gold to exchange for gems, then spend them in the gem store, yes. But if the game launched without this exchange, they would not be farming for gold to spend in the TP nearly as long because it’s a lot easier to get the things you want from the TP and then drop out of the market, perhaps out of the game altogether because the only real long-term goal is Legendary crafting.

Likewise, a lot of people assume players are spending thousands of real dollars on gems to exchange for gold to buy Legendaries and such, but I don’t think this happens very often. More likely they use it to craft with alts for XP and to buy equipment when the player has money to spend but not a lot of time to grind. Those players are less likely to want a Legendary and are just interested in playing the game the way they want.

And movement of the currency values over time shows that many more players are converting gold to gems than the other way around. So the gem store is impacted by this far more than the TP. Without this exchange, there would be far less players farming in the game, but the impact would probably not be severe, since there would also be a lot less “flipping” and other activities. Prices would not change as quickly and some items would not move as quickly, but otherwise there would be little difference.

Yeah, obviously alot more gold went into the CE then came out of it since launch. My question was, if that amount is meaningful compared to the total amount of gold generated in game. If all the gold that went into the CE since launch (minus the gold that came out of it for gems) would still be in the game economy, i would expect overall prices on the tp to be inflated to what we have now.

Wouldn’t even make a dent.

I understand the frustration that may arise in some of these situations. I haven’t yet read a suggestion that I think is a great solution. That being said, I do read the suggestions and am always interested in finding outcomes that make everyone better, so keep them coming!

This is a great list, thank you for taking the time to put in this level of detail. We will get these confirmed and reported this week.

-Ed

I am glad that this appears to be heading in the direction of a resolution for all concerned. The best message that I can give you is that these issues are seldom simple, and that posting on a public forum with incomplete information isn’t productive. Nor is using verbiage that could be construed as inflammatory, such as “I’ve been defrauded” when, in the end, that is not at all what happened.

I ask that you continue to discuss with Customer Support rather than making this a forum issue, for truly no one in the forums can help you with such personal matters. Thank you for understanding.

Cool idea, can’t commit to it right now.

Gobble D Goop.4081:

there are several discussions going on, but from what i can tell, most people believe the guild hall and many of the basics should be easily accessible to guilds of all sizes. The dungeon/event/WvW stuff seems to be for the fancier furniture/pictures/tables/etc. world bosses normally aren’t too bad for getting things since you can just follow the zerg around for them. Same with WvW (unless your server is having a bad time).

at any rate, if A-Net implements what the consensus seems to be, then your guild should be fine.

‘most people believe the guild hall and many of the basics should be easily accessible to guilds of all sizes.’

Correct.

Chris

Wanze.8410:

John Smith.4610:

Wanze.8410:

How, in your opinion, would the game economy have evolved differently, if the gold/gem exchange wasnt implemented?

I think it would be pretty much the same.

Lame.

The CE is really a reflection of gem value and isn’t as strongly tied to the economy as many think it is.

Many thanks VOD

CDI Summary below:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Guild-Hall-CDI-The-complete-summary-edition/first#post4476652

Chris

Great work Vod. Linking in the CDI.

Chris

Wanze.8410:

How, in your opinion, would the game economy have evolved differently, if the gold/gem exchange wasnt implemented?

I think it would be pretty much the same.

Hi All,

just to let you know I am super busy today and may not be able to get involved. I m reading though.

Chris

We have no objections to this, as long as both accounts are used by you and you’re not, say, botting with the one. Clearly, account sharing is a really bad idea, and botting is strictly prohibited and will bring the wrath of Dhuum down upon your head. Well, figuratively speaking, anyway. I don’t sense you’re intending either of those things, though, and a lot of players have a secondary account they use legitimately in order to send benefits to their main.

Good luck to all participants today, and many thanks to ESL for running this cup for nearly a year now!

I remember casting the Test Cup way back then….brings a tear to my eye.

You’re more than welcome, and thanks for the compliments! =) We’re all glad that we were able to assist you!

Your ticket is with the correct department at this time, but they are a bit backed up at the moment, hence the delay. My apologies for that. Someone will contact you as soon as they are able.

Wanze.8410:

GM Aurora.8530:

Definitely phishy.

I can only repeat what I said in another thread: Customer Support is not sending out warnings that accounts will be suspended or terminated. If we need to block an account, we just do it without any warning.

Gailes Post in this topic suggests a change in that policy, though.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Flagged-as-a-bot/first#post4464709

This e-mail and I’m flagging this one only it not a phishing attempt. It’s a legitimate e-mail from one of our CS Agents. Please continue the discussion in the e-mail, as this is not a suitable topic for the forums (for your privacy if for no other reason).
Thanks.

Gus, who is part of our CS team here at ANet, did create a support ticket for the player (ie send an email). That player posted the email in the thread mentioned. And if you are reading the message thorough enough, then you realize that it is not quite a warning that we are going to block his account. It is more a request to stop certain actions. As you may also notice, we did not request ANY sort of personal or account information, or action from that player, except a simple email reply. Please note that we also did not send a link either. And as I said, when Gus sent this message, a ticket in our ticketing system was created for this customer.

I want to point out that this message was an unusual exception and probably will not happen again. We are not changing our policy in that regard. However, there can always be very unusual circumstances which call for a brief deviation from our policy.

To reiterate what I said earlier, we are not sending warning emails about accounts being blocked, we generally speaking just block the accounts without any notification.

Hope this helps to clear this up a bit.

I remember when I met up with Anet folks (many moons ago) playing TF2. I remember listening to Mr. Chap and Mr. Izzy talks about balance, design, and combat for GW2. I also remember Chap really taking me under his wing when I tried to get into the gaming industry. Chap has always been a great friend, role-model, and designer that I have always hoped to aspire to be. I will never be able to fill the void that Chap has left on GW2 and ArenaNet, but I promise to give it my all. Good luck to you Mr. Chap in everything you do good sir!

Or just using pagination + the Link headers we return (see https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5988 for a description)

Is your mailbox full? If you have too many messages in it, new mail will be queued up until you make room. Try clearing out your inbox by deleting as much mail as you can.

Hears to epic company of heroes battles during crunch, basketball shoot outs, hearthstone deck tips, late night philosophy, german beer, [Ni]’s attempts to climb the Gw1 ladder, and Jon destroying your fan.

Good luck chasing your dreams Chap!

Guhracie.3419:

It’s almost as if there are many different people, with many different opinions, who play this game. Imagine that!

So true, and thanks for a good laugh.

Heibi.4251:

It’s just like when you bid on something from EBay. If you get outbid, you don’t get the item. Simple as that. Try complaining at a real auction, you’ll be laughed out of the building. Either buy the item outright or live with the “technically” real world style of bidding on items in GW2.

As I was reading the thread, that’s what I was thinking, too, that although not perfect, you could draw an analogy from eBay. On eBay, there might be a set “minimum raise” of $1.00, but the actual raise can end up being just one penny, based on the other person’s top bid. Like others in this thread, I don’t think that the 1 copper raise is an issue, but I will ask the team — who clearly is more expert on this subject — if they have anything to add on the subject.

Back now. I heard from our Director of Sales, North America, and then realized I hadn’t asked your location, SpudBob! But assuming you’re in North America, Amazon has ordered gem cards and I believe they’re replenishing as quickly as they can. It’s a popular item, as you can see from azzy’s post, but I feel sure they’ll keep them on offer.

Are you guys posting in an active thread in the Tech Support forum? Or submitting a ticket? I think the team is gathering info on this, so feel free to provide the requested info if you want to do so. It could help solve any problems over which we have control. (I mean, we can’t solve issues with an ISP or an Internet backbone problem — the stuff that is outside our data center, somewhere between you and us — but with data from players, we’ve nailed other latency issues in the past.)

Thanks for giving us some good food for thought. Please continue to add your suggestions and input — we’re listening.

I really think Excel does the trick. To add the fun factor, consider using colored tabs! (Just kidding! )

Thanks for putting up those helpful links, Wanze!

I think posting in the Ranger forum would get you a bunch of helpful input!

I tend to agree with the forum members here: You’d need a lot of data to make such a conclusion with any level of accuracy.

I’ve seen interesting posts from players (on the forums or wiki) who want to try gathering that sort of info. You’re welcome to try to get the depth of details you need from a group of players (the larger the better, of course). But given the variable nature of drops, I’d recommend not drawing a conclusion from anecdotal evidence.

Edit:

Umm… this may say it better:

Marndeis.7815:

Your Sample size is insignificant. Its just bad luck.

:)

I don’t know if it’s coming, and it’s probably a really late request for this year’s Halloween event. I do see your point, though. I’d be devastated if I lost my hats! (Old GW players positively cherish their headgear after all!)

If it doesn’t come to pass for this event, why not make a suggestion post after the event, with [Suggestion] in the title? It can’t hurt to get your thoughts on the radar, eh?

First, umm… Nova, are we doing your homework for you? Ok, ok, you used “gibber-gabber” so I may have to look the other way.

Second, thanks to those of you who are joining in. I admit your jokes are funny, but really, this could be a pretty interesting exercise.

That’s game log-in situation sis frustrating, and I’m sorry that happening. Have you guys reported this to CS via a ticket? I’m going to ask them tomorrow (it’s after hours now) if they’re aware of this, but in the meantime, it looks like you could try ignoring the grayed-out look and hitting log-in because it may have remembered the p/w despite how it appears.

As for the forum log-in, I feel that pain. I actually wrote the team to tell them I felt like I was in a endless circle — even when I bloomin’ authorized! — but it appears my problem was related to being an employee who was logging in from outside our office network. In your case, it seems very odd that you get an e-mail and have to rush to approve or it expires!

Can you guys time that for us? Like how long was it before the authentication authorization expired? One minute? Three minutes? Ten or more? I think I will talk to our web team (because I think this is a web thing) if you’re finding that you have to scramble to log into the forums. We want you here, not outside knocking on the door!