Guild Wars 2

Templar.4512:

Hey, Chris.

Although I disagree with the company policy and don’t like many things about the game, I wanted to just thank you for taking your time to communicate with the playerbase. Your rank is up high in the dev team, and you’ll be a very valuable link between the community and the rest of Anet.

As a developer, I know how hard it is to keep up, but I’m younger and not as experienced as you are. Also, as a dev, I know how hard it can be to just…socialize, and you’re doing a great job.

Thanks, Chris, you’re actually a nice guy!

Thank you Templar for your kind words and your feedback. I appreciate it.

Chris

fourhim.3584:

This accusation gets tossed around a lot – that certain people who post such high praise for Anet’s decisions might be rewarded in some way. I haven’t reached a decision on this yet, so I thought the best approach is just to come right out and ask.

Will someone at ANet please tell the rest of us if you reward certain people for their forum comments? If you could just issue a flat out denial then that might diminish the number of accusations, especially right now.

We do not pay players to post on the forums nor do we make use of shill or sock puppet accounts. Honestly, I’m surprised if anybody takes these accusations seriously.

I see a variety of comments on feeling more attachment to a specific guild and a lot of talk of the # of guilds people are a part of and the fear that is causing a lack of attachment. This lack of attachment keeps players players from being compelled to belong to any of their guilds instead of being compelled to belong to all of them (which was the original intention of this design of guilds as more social groups rather than as exclusive cliques).

I’d love to see some discussion on how we could create greater attachment to a single guild without taking away the current value of membership in multiple guilds.

I think that involves some discussion of the following.

1) What is currently a part of being in a guild that can’t be taken away, and why would it be bad to take it away?
2) Is there anything that is currently part of being in a guild that could be taken away and given to a more focused guild association? What could we do to mitigate some of the negativity of taking away current functionality? For example replace it on all guilds or enhance it for the one guild that it is tied to?
3) What kind of features are there that don’t even exist yet that would really only make sense with a more fixed association with a single guild?

A lot of good design discussions come from answering these questions anyway which I would summarize as what can/can’t we take away? What can/can’t we change? What can/can’t we add? I ask them in that order because it’s generally the order that they are easiest to implement in.

Jon

As far as expected patches/updates, we (the tech team) get the information pretty close to the same time it is released to players. This is mainly due to the process at which they test/release the updates. Because of this, it is highly unlikely that I will have any solid information on upcoming patch performance until myself and the Mac player base are actually able to install and use the client. When I test the game on my Mac, I do so on the live client so that I can potentially run into the same issues that any of y’all may run into. I hope that helps to explain why I was unable to update this thread until now. With that said, I am still going over the recent posts and will update them as I can.

Go to the “Materials” section of your bank, the miniatures have their own section after all the crafting materials. To add the mini to your wardrobe for use by all characters on the account, withdraw it, then right-click the mini in your inventory and select “Add to Wardrobe.” This will consume the mini and add it to your wardrobe.

(You will probably need to do this for each character.)

SkiTz.4590:

You want to retain players? that’s not going to help. No one is going to keep playing this game because of the early levels…every MMORPG maker knows that endgame is how you retain players, not the early stages that get completed in less than a week…. so for the 10000th time, please work on a CONTENT PATCH FOR VETERANS. thats how you get new players to commit to this game and stay commited…. not by this pointless NPE.

I want to clarify one point I’ve been seeing expressed. This is one type of retention. There’s another type of retention where new players try the game and churn out before they even get to the point where they’re seeing the potential the game has to offer. Yes, a certain amount of people will just do that; they’ll log in to see what it’s about, have their curiosity satisfied, and move on. But we were seeing a lot of places where people who would otherwise have become active users were churning out prematurely because of the issues that we’re addressing with the NPE.

As Colin stated above, we can’t talk in detail about the ongoing development to drive retention for our veteran players, but I just wanted to make the point that the NPE was deliberately designed to address the early game retention issues, and ensure that Guild Wars 2 can benefit from a strong and steady influx of new players into the game.

SkiTz.4590:

Colin, just clear up one thing – There is 0% chance EU/NA GW2 gets a VIP system?

We’re absolutely not bringing the China VIP system to NA/EU, correct.

SkiTz.4590:

ColinJohanson.2394:

snip

Exactly how much of this was influenced from KongZhong? Because by the looks of it, the direction you are taking this game is being HEAVILY influenced by metrics from CHINA GW2….

Testing was done predominantly in the west focused on players who played guild wars 2 today, people who played gw2 at launch and left, people who heavily play other MMORPG’s, and people who heavily play RPG’s. We did all of this testing ourselves in the west, I’ll just kill right now that this is a system developed for China. It’s a system developed for the global game, period, because retaining new users at early levels wasn’t just a china problem we needed to solve, it’s a problem in the west too.

Our friends over in China did their own tests as well and saw nearly identical results to us in retention differences when testing our old systems to the new. And as I said, if we find on live all our testing was wrong, we’re not going to let it sit there, our goal is to teach and excite better at low levels to keep more players, not the other way around!

I’d also be very careful attempting to apply stereotypes to western or eastern gamers and attempting to lump them all into one pile. Just like we have a very diverse community of western gamers who play and enjoy games in different ways you’ll find in the east the same is also true.

As for content for level 80 people, I agree, we need more awesome stuff there too. However if you don’t keep people at early levels, you don’t have level 80 players to ship content to, and our development team was asked to fix the very clear issue of early player retention. Anyway as for level 80 this is a post about new player experience specifically, not level 80 stuff. There is a great CDI going on right now about guilds in (and more coming soon) where you can help give feedback on what you’d like to see the level 80 guild experience be in particular!

Hey folks,

Wanted to pop by and give another update on where we stand, as well as to help provide some information on some of the more common misconceptions we’ve seen floating around as well:

- There are bugs! We’ve seen the content direction system (the little arrow) pointing people at super high level maps when it shouldn’t, some systems/features not unlocking as intended for all characters on your account once your first learns them, some systems level gated that aren’t intended to be, balance issues where certain levels appear to be very out of whack, etc. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, our team is working to figure out what happened here and fix these as quickly as possible.

- There is misinformation: Numerous systems that show up in the level up guide that teaches you about things in the game when you gain levels are not locked out, the system simply tells you they exist in the game to help give you a better list of things you can do. Just because it’s included in the level up guide, doesn’t mean it’s actually locked out. You can dodge from level one, jumping puzzle from level one, etc. There also appear to be a lot of folks chiming in who haven’t actually played with any of the system, and are making claims that aren’t remotely true.

- There are some things happening at the wrong levels. Things like utility skills and elites are intended to come at approx. the same time they used to in actual game time, we sped up leveling for levels 1-15 and had them slide back in levels a bit to offset that pacing, they are not currently where we want them to be in the level up system. This was an oversight, and will absolutely be fixed.

- Not all of these changes were made as ways to teach the game, some of them are to provide a better sense of pacing, reward and progression. Early on we want to give a sense that you’re rapidly gaining new abilities, rewards, and learning new things as you level up. We added the level up reward messages, and the actual rewards themselves, and took abilities you’d usually use around that point in total game hours and presented them as unlocks (or things we teach that are already unlocked) to help give a better sense of pacing and progression.

With the addition of the new rewards, messaging, and level up screen to make leveling more exciting: we also wanted to make sure you had that feeling of excitement more often early on in the game, and presented new learning on a more regular cadence. So we greatly sped up leveling from levels 1-15. Many of the things unlocked at later levels are earned at about the same time period you used to start using them in the old system in actual real game time, we just staggered them out across the levels since we sped up leveling to make the game feel more rewarding early on.

- In general, this system is intended to be not only better for new players, but our hope is by the time it’s all in place you’ll find via the better rewards from levels 1-80 via the level up guide, the better rewards from personal story, the faster leveling from 1-15, and the ability to toggle the content direction system to help you with map complete will make this a better for experienced players as well.

- Over a years worth of testing with new players found we were absolutely able to keep them both more engaged, and more likely to return to keep playing Gw2 as a result of the intended system. That is at the end of the day, a win for all of us since all of you need more people to play with! However: if we find in the live environment that isn’t true and we’re not retaining new users better, we’ll absolutely both share that information with you, and continue to iterate to make it better. We keep very real time metrics of player retention for new users, and we’ll know very quickly how effective the work we’ve done is. I want to make it clear: what we used to have absolutely wasn’t good enough for our standards of retaining new users. Before we do some of the other things we want to do with Gw2, we had to fix this, period.

- Finally, I want to add that a few things (hello traits!) are things that can be improved for players who make multiple alts, we’re aware of this, and though company policy prevents us from discussing what’s in development: I can say we know Gw2 can be an even better game for people who love making alts in the long run, more info: when it’s ready™.

All of the drops were moved to the end-of-story rewards, so we could provide more predictable/consistent rewards. (This also prevents some story steps from being more profitable simply because they have more enemies to fight.)

Konig Des Todes.2086:

If I had to guess, the tipping point for her would have been the Scarlet’s End instance, where she basically goes berserk and starts summoning illusions like crazy. More of a self-made psychological block than any external influence – she did seem unsure of herself prior to Scarlet’s End, and seeing what she did then likely made her realize “wow, I’m better than I thought! I should stop looking so down on myself”. Motivation and self-esteem tend to be heavy motivators on things that are based on willpower – like magic seems to be.

A very astute observation.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Who is Mister E?

We simply don’t know, but we have been told that we will find out who E is by the end of Season 2.

This can neither be confirmed nor denied. It may or may not still be the case. One thing is certain. At some point in the future, you will learn E’s true identity.

Gismor.8407:

EK is looking to adopt Jessica Boettiger to make up for ram finishing her off a cliff

Dat ram… I can’t even be mad about it.

Ooh, this is cool. I’m going to enjoy seeing you mark these off as the story unfolds.

Rym.1469:

McCoy’s Angles.

LOLOLOL! Veto.

Hello, Valderon. I closed the thread, believing that your questions had been addressed. That’s an efficiency step to reduce time spent rereading threads time and time again once the resolution seems posted. Once the answer is given, it’s closed.

I apologize that in this case you had continued questions, so I’ll leave this open in case you have more to ask.

Thanks to Jeffrey for providing the valuable information he’s been able to give on this oft-asked question.

Neko.9021:

Gaile Gray.6029:

We just identified an issue and a few players did not receive the correct refund. We’re so sorry! We’ll get that corrected as soon as possible. (Please allow until tomorrow, just in case it’s something that requires extra time.)

Thanks for asking about this, and again, we’re sorry for the mix-up.

This seems to happen a lot (it took a longer amount of time to get my WvW rewards from Season 2, for instance, and now I haven’t gotten the refund for this). I’m curious, is it just very difficult to send out things such as rewards or refunds on a massive scale?

In a word, yes. Because of the way we do it, essentially “manually” it is complicated, and that has a way of influencing the number of issues that may arise. In the long term we hope to have a different means of such distributions, but in the short term, the team does the best it can to get everything properly aligned, and to quickly react to and correct any shortfalls or errors.

Having said that, I have a strong suspicion you will not wait more than another day for everything to be corrected in terms of the Commander tag refunds. I am not promising that, but I’m merely making a personal prediction that they will be done quickly. I hope that’s of some help to you.

Boottspurr.9184:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Boottspurr.9184:

Yup, my bad. Gonna delete mine now.

But totally need to remember to come to the Guild Content CDI to suggest Guild Raids again…

We will be discussing ideas around Guild Raids.

Chris

Have I told you lately that I love you?

Hehe <3 to you to!

Chris

Boottspurr.9184:

Yup, my bad. Gonna delete mine now.

But totally need to remember to come to the Guild Content CDI to suggest Guild Raids again…

We will be discussing ideas around Guild Raids.

Chris

FYI.

Message Body length must at least be 15.

Aha, thanks! Yes, that kind of info is very important. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Each storyline is one chapter long. So at the end of the chapter, it will look at your character to determine the next storyline, unless you accept another character’s progress/decisions again.

Alright guys a fix went out for the crash that was occurring due to Standard Models.

The good news: Our data is showing that there are significantly less crashes occurring due to this feature.

The bad news: There are still a few crashes occurring related to Standard Models.

The other good news: We are actively trying to fix this.

If you have any information on this crash please say something, and please submit your crash reports!

Guys, this is a bug and we’re working on fixing it right now. I want to take a second to remind you of two things that we’ve mentioned before: First, if you see something that you think isn’t working properly, please use /bug in game so the right people can be notified immediately. (Talking it over on the forum is fine too–sharing the details with us and other players can be enormously helpful)

Second, datamined content is unfinished and subject to an enormous amount of change, so it’s always a bad idea to make assumptions about a situation based on it.

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

Wanze.8410

What makes you think those changes have an economic reason?

I think they don’t have an economic reason, that’s sort of why I’m asking.

They certainly have no good economic reason for players to do them. The cost of crafting for Alpha Crafter for example, and the reward? Those are the most expensive 5 ectos, ever.

I would say that Economics was not the driving force behind many of these changes, but I still think they’re good changes.

You will return to the “normal” storyline for your character on completion of the current storyline (not story step), assuming you don’t do the final step with a character from another order and accept their progress/decisions. This is so two players can go through the story together if they wish—it warns you that accepting progress at the end of the story step will accept ALL choices made by the other character.

Elrey.5472:

What Chris said is that selling dungeons isn’t supported and if you get kicked while trying to sell it’s your own fault. However, if someone joins the group and kicks you out of a dungeon for any reason, that should be reported just in case that same player is doing the same to a lot of people, in which cause it should be banned due to community toxicity and griefing(is that a word in english?) players.

I believe that’s what he meant.

This is a good way to interpret what I said.

Edit: ^lol interoperate, thanks auto correct

We just identified an issue and a few players did not receive the correct refund. We’re so sorry! We’ll get that corrected as soon as possible. (Please allow until tomorrow, just in case it’s something that requires extra time.)

Thanks for asking about this, and again, we’re sorry for the mix-up.

I’ll go ahead and clarify since there has apparently been different information coming from different sources in the past. Customer Service is not able to support party politics unless they involve cases of targeted harassment in-game. This is because of the number of different reasons that certain party politics happen. Since CS only has access to actions that occur in-game, we are unable to verify specifics for incidents in a large number of incidents. Specifics are the most important part of these situations.

However, we do view player reports via CS tickets, and if a player can be verified as a habitual abuser of the LFG system or parties in general, we can take action against them.

Oh noooo. Well, that info is helpful, so thank you for sharing.

We’re still on the case!

Hi JSSPH, I wanted to let you know and others affected we are tyring to repro this crash in house. Awesome, thank you for the link as well.

Relshdan.6854:

beyond this subject, and maybe GvG, is there really any chance anything discussed has a hope on a prayer of being implemented?

guild halls….lol.

i’ll definitely stay tuned to this CDI, at least. good stuff so far.

Yes

Not enough characters blah…

Chris

This issue is being looked into actively. No ETA yet.

This issue is being looked into actively. No ETA yet.

Hi, my name is Gavian and I am the head of production for ArenaNet and I am also a Mac user. I am enjoying the discussion of various development methedologies, and that is something I could talk about endlessly, but I wanted to drop in and let you know what we are doing on the Mac.

Our current focus, like what we are doing right now, is reproducing Mac specific bugs and issues we see reported on the forums and working towards fixes. I will say that it is heartening to see everyone here helping each other out and it helps us out as well.

As has been pointed out, we do have a Mac specific client, it just happens to be using Cider.

We will try and post more to keep you in the loop about issues we had addressed that are Mac specific.

As a side note, for development methedology we use a number of different approaches, depends what the team make up is and what we are trying to accomplish.

Thanks!

Hey everyone,

While this is currently working as intended, it’s definitely something that we’ll be working on and tweaking in the future. We want you to be able to enjoy your minis so hang in there!

Sinister — clearly you knew you were using offensive language in your forum post, and of course a moderator removed it. If your lack of restraint is mirrored by a similar lack of restraint in the game — and unfortunately it’s clear your game account history is spotted, at best — then you really need to get on board our rules, because otherwise the account will be blocked again and again and/or terminated. And neither you nor we want that to happen, but it’s really your choice, and I hope you will… choose wisely.

rapthorne.7345:

My Rytlock, from my digital deluxe pack, seems to have vanished from thin air can’t find it at all in the mini’s wardrobe section

Have you checked the Minis section in my original post for instructions on how to obtain your minis? If you have and you do not see a mini that you believe you should own, please file a ticket at our support site: https://help.guildwars2.com/anonymous_requests/new . Select In-Game Issue for this particular type of inquiry.

Tanek.5983:

So, I have a guildie who was on what used to be a Ch7 story part and now it is in 8. does that mean he misses out on what used to be in between?

No, though your question confuses me. No story steps moved from Chapter 7 to Chapter 8—just the opposite.

Dungeon selling is not something that will be officially supported. Listing a group on the LFG tool is opening it up to a public realm and you do so at your own risk.

Customer Service will not be able to support any interactions that involves group formation politics.

We just did a live build. Could you please check and see if the issue is corrected for you?

Any info you can provide, whether the same error message/assertion/log or a different one, would be very useful! (By that I mean, could you please provide it in a new post, so we can track this?)

Hopefully, a whole lot of you are A-OK now! And thanks for your continued patience!

ReV.6097:

Not many bugs that I’ve experienced, although why did they take out the Trading post agent in the human 1-15 map near the start?

I don’t know many people who are happy at all with this patch. It sucks to know I bough a few thousand Gems today, but even with 21 characters, after checking out this patch, the new leveling process really is a pain to even bother with.
I’d make a new thread, but I’m not sure how many Devs check the forums..
It’s appreciated with the work put in, but the way it has been done, is terrible to players who have leveled up over the last few years, to be given this, it’s a joke and tottally off-putting.

What will new players think when they watch the original video promoting how GW2 was meant to be, and then come to this where you get told where to go and what lvl you have to be to even be allowed start your personal story… That just removes the challenge and the fun and the free-will.

[My minis won’t always show because I get the most daftest message “Due to popularity, we cannot display miniatures”. :/
Is that a BUG?]
On the up side, I love what you did to the trading post system.

This is feedback regarding the contents of the Feature Build. Please start or join in a thread related to your feedback on the forums. Devs check the forums daily.

TwoPiArrrr, it sounds like you’re having an issue with speaker configuration. There’s a helpful post here on the Logitech forums that should resolve your issue with the panning.

http://forums.logitech.com/t5/Headphones-Headsets-Microphones/Fixing-G35-s-audio-only-in-right-ear/td-p/853162

Hey, everyone. We’ve discovered a number of issues related to the new player experience, both bugs and things that are not working as intended, for players who have multiple characters. we are working on fixes for both.

For all those saying thanks for the CDI: Right back at you. Thanks for contributing.

Chris

Hey all! I want to let you know, that was one of the things we’ve been working on today and it was part of the hotfix that just went out! “Custom emotes no longer add the sender’s name.”

I just want to quickly add, there are some errors on this chart of how stuff is unlocking, as well as 1st character vs. account unlocks when some of these systems were carried between regions. We’re trying to identify what happened and repair those things assigned the wrong account/character fields, as well as levels.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed various client crashes.
• Fixed an issue in which players would disconnect when quitting a storyline via the Story Journal.
• Fixed a bug that prevented interact UI from showing while moving the camera.
• Thief:
  • Steal: Fixed an issue in which thieves were unable to hit with this ability while using a movement skill.
• Fixed PvP healing at low levels. It’s now interruptible again.
• Fixed an issue in which players were unable to purchase trait guides in the PvP lobby.
• Custom emotes no longer add the sender’s name.

Glory.1493:

whats intended ??hide mini no matter what?

While this is currently working as intended, it’s definitely something that we’ll be working on and tweaking in the future. We want you to be able to enjoy your minis so hang in there!

Illysharia.7286:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ohoni.6057:

While I think a great many players also agree, the CDI for guilds was talked about before the patch.

Yeah, but I didn’t care about it then either. CDIs are great, but there is nothing they could do involving guilds that would make the game any better, and the only thing they could do is make things worse (by adding new features that you need to be part of a large guild to benefit from), so I’ve never cared about a guild-based CDI. Before this week, I would have wanted a CDI on the destructive changes to the Traits system introduced in the last feature patch.

This new patch is a major issue though, and they need to have a major sit-down explaining why we shouldn’t hate the things we believe we hate about it. Why should we like the new level-gating system? Why should anyone? Why should we appreciate having to go several layers deep to see what we just sold rather than having it as a top-level option? These are all far more important topics of discussion than anything involving guilds.

To you maybe but the world doesn’t revolve around either you or I. I promised the CDI and we are doing it. There is plenty of awesome stuff that can come from it so it is a pleasure to be able to read what members of the CDI have to say.

if you don’t see the value in it then don’t partake.

Cheers

Chris

It’s sort of like planning a family meeting a week in advance to talk about how the kids could help out mom more around the house. You promise your wife it will get better, and set a date and time. Then, when the promised time comes up, the house catches on fire. Rather than addressing the fire, you stubbornly sit your family down in the burning living room to make good on your promise.

That is the degree of sense you are making. It is such a magnitudinous sign relating to the disconnect between what is going on, and what ANET wants to do.

No. It is nothing like that at all.

Chris