Guild Wars 2

I remember during bwex so much communication with devs. Anyone here have success with getting suggestions noticed by devs or know what kind of format they prefer? I’d love to provide constructive feedback but it’s disheartening to put time and effort into posts not sure if it even gets to the right people.

Well that’s wrong. CDI is an example as was bwe. Please try constructive comments

I appreciate your well written response, and was not completely aware of everything you mentioned. I have taken it into consideration, but start I just want to say I am not really interested in what Anet has done wrong.

yes I see that Anet from a lot of players persepectives has been ‘the devil’ and agree about what you said about the massive feedback threads during BWE times. I only remember seeing that on ele threads tbh, reaper and rev had stand alone feedbacks with a form to fill out. I believe it was asked to put [feedback bwe2] or something in your title. and a lot of the adjustments made during HoT was addressed by feedback. The dev’s themselves even posted it on the official forums.

But if you need proof CDI is a sup topic. stands for collaborative development something. It had/has high-vis with devs, you can stroll through those threads and see, but you can’t post since none of the threads are active at the time and I believe only dev’s can make threads.

I guess I should edit my original post and explain I am looking for any launch type forms for recommended suggestions or success stories from others. I am starting to think posting this in the ele thread was silly. It is more of a general thing(altho I only plan to make suggestions for ele).

Anyway tldr – there is a lot of proof as of late dev’s do listen. I don’t care for majority of past experience or even current things Anet does wrong.

Thanks,
~Roman

Hey Gaile,

Many players, elementalists along them, are worried about the directions of the game balance, especially in Structuted PvP. It seems like the game developpers are satisfied with giving only one build options (meta viable) per class for now. I’d like to give my personnal concern about that perceived direction in the balance philosophy.

A proper example concerning elementalists would be the current Auramancer Dagger/Focus that currently defines a whole class. We saw and we’re sure to see more of that build in the ESL proleagues, yet, a vast majority of elementalist players are not content with the extreme support gameplay it offers. And as far as balance go, this build is going to be seen as an indicator that the “class is just fine”, when other weapon set (Staff; D/D; Scepter; Warhorn) are put aside, and for months.

As a SPvP player, my top priority when I see new content added to the game, my top priority is balance updates. I believe that I am far from the only player feeling that way. Gaile, are the developpers of the game aware about what their players look the most into a new game update?

I personaly did game balance for another game and diversity is a key for me and many games. When doing this i did read every post in the forums each day! Its a dedication. A dev has to listen, filter and put all together. Of couse its impossibe to please everyone and giving players what they cry for is often a bad idea. But there are always good ideas hidden in the posts and there are a few players that realy understand what to do, at least in some areas. So a dev uses his superior overview and the input in the forum to build a stable system that also pleases most. He learns from the comunity but makes his own decisions.
What i feel is that there is not enough manpower dedicated to this. And for a large and great game like GW2 this would be a pity and not understandable for most of us.
Especially because there would be players like me being pleased to contribute in game balance.

The pvp playerbase is far smaller then the PVE playerbase, while i do agree with everything you guys are saying, it would be better if we would get tweaks for our Ele’s sooner rather then later.
I also understand its something a company has set as goals and that time is needed to sift through the data and data requires time to form. But its underwhelming when only 2-3/9 classes are viable in pvp. Does that not facilitate a need for some changes?

I mean its like your only catering to 30% of your pvp player base.. and rest of us can just either quit, provide food and be a stepping stone for the FOTM classes or simply learn the FOTM class, i like Ele and i do try to contribute in pvp but every time i enter the game i feel like im a burden to my team…

There was a number of posts in this thread with players expressing their feelings about Anet not actually listening and not actually making changes based on the community’s feedback. They all were posted before Gaile’s and they now seem to be gone and only Gaile’s post remains.

Maybe, both Roman God of War and I are delusional, since he seems to be replying to ghosts or figments of his imagination with his posts and I seem to remember things being there that actually aren’t.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Hi Roman,

I can see that you are asking this question with sincerity and good intent, and I’m happy to share a few thoughts on suggestions and how they work on the forums.

The team is not often able to respond to individual player and forum member suggestions, but as you’ve seen yourself, many ideas, concerns, and suggestions from players are addressed within or adopted into the game. This does not happen only during a Beta — it happens on a regular basis. Many of the changes that the devs make to skills, for example, come through feedback from our player base, and we’re very happy to have it. I saw a lot of changes in the January quarterly update that had its source in forum input; I see more of those sorts of positive changes, updates, and improvements coming in the next update, too.

Suggestions are definitely read and reviewed. That happens on a daily basis, although naturally not every dev can be on the forum every day. Too, it’s not really possible to go back into each thread to post an acknowledgement, nor to retrieve a thread months later to note, “See that change you mentioned? It’s now in the game!” But I have seen many forum members “connect the dots” between game changes and forum posts because as a whole, forum members know our game very, very well, and they are familiar with the ideas that the community shares with us.

So please — go ahead and share your ideas! They might be about gameplay, the world, maps, missions, objectives, professions, even things of a more “light” nature, such as ideas for the Gem Store. They may be about the next expansion pack, about the core game, about HoT, or anything in between. You absolutely should feel free to share them any time.

One suggestion: Before posting it’s best to look for an existing thread so that you can expand upon posted ideas, or add your input for changes. This keeps things efficient, and allows the devs the most meaningful time on the forums.

Thanks for asking about this!

Did they read my CDI thread(s)?

Gaile Gray.6029:

Alekt — To answer your questions: In my opinion, different devs look for different things. I do agree with what I believe you’re stating, that balance improvements are an essential element of the update process. I can’t say they are the most important element, particularly since a game bug could benefit every single player in the game. But yes, balance is very important, I agree with you. I’m glad you posted your insights.

Wolfric — You would be surprised how much our developers are able to accomplish in a single day. They read, analyze, review, and discuss many threads. At the core you can be sure that we are well aware that good ideas come from players. In fact, we say that often — with 100% conviction — and I said that in this very thread!

Wing — We have a huge game with a lot of elements: PvP, PvE, WvW, Raids, Dungeons, Fractals… you know what I mean. From what I’ve observed, there is no lack of attention given to the professions, although I do understand that someone might feel an urgency in relation to their profession of preference and I take on board that with Season 2 underway, that sense of urgency may increase. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

MadRabbit — The OP posted to ask a reasonable question and unfortunately was met with aggression, allegation, insult, argument, and a series of untruths from a single forum member. I stand behind the moderators’ decision to remove those comments in order to keep the thread on topic and to give a real response, not a flame.

In the future, if you could please refer questions about moderation to Forums@Arena.Net it would allow forum members (which includes the devs who are reading players’ questions and input) to better focus on the topic at hand. Thanks for understanding.

Fair enough. So in the questions of revealing truth, why don’t you provide some concrete examples that demonstrate instances where Arenanet has used player feedback in it’s decisions?

Your posts on this subject are nothing more than your personal assurance that you all are really listening, but lack any kind of substance to back it up.

Why do forum posters need to connect the dots to figure out what changes are influence by feedback? Why don’t you just flat out come out and say it? Why not say “Hey, we listened all this feedback and made this decision, because of it” or “Hey, we listened to all this feedback, but we went a different direction, because we feel X is better”?

Your patch notes just list out changes with no explanation as to why. “Bristleback has had it’s damage reduced.” Why did you do this? What was the reasoning? How does this make the game better?

Communication is apparently a one way act from your company. You claim you point out threads to developers and developers read them and then you make decisions, but you provide no assurances or feedback except very rare circumstances. There is no confirmation at all really that the player base is listened to, except for those rare moments where we apparently connect the dots and read your minds.

Topics repeat over and over again. Threads with long chains of posts with constructive feedback receive no feedback even with a single comment of “Hey, we are listening and we are considering this.”

During beta, the elementalist community provided a lot of constructive feedback on threads. I know; I was part of it. None of them received any kind of response from Karl or Arenanet, then the changes that were made seemed to go in the complete opposite direction of that feedback.

In that situation, how do you not expect player’s to form the opinion that they are just being ignored? Your own negligent communication creates it.

Then when such players post their perspectives to a new player asking how to lead such constructive feedback, it’s censored as flame and untruth. You might consider it to be offtopic, but I think letting someone know that they feel the company in question doesn’t care is important information to know in deciding whether or not you want to invest your time into leaving that feedback.

Give me like 3-4 examples. Connect the dots. List changes and source it to player feedback. It seems to be your job to direct developers to feedback, so there should be no one better qualified to do this. You should have first hand knowledge of what feedback was responsible for what changes.

If you do this, I give you my personal assurance I won’t ever criticize Arenanet again for not listening. I’ll still criticize you for your lack of bidirectional communication, but at least, we’ll have established the unidirectional communication actually exists.

I am convinced that the degree of toxicity and bitterness that has become rampant on the forums is largely due to the silence from your company and the feeling of not being listened to is making everyone is who trying to help make this a better game feel resentful.

Gaile, while I totally undertand the fact that devs cant post in every thread or even read them all I think that A-Net can really improve in the communication with the player base with just little things. For example:

- It would be nice if the forum/page was treated as the official and main way to communicate info: it really feels strange when you must search for bits of info abut the game in reddit, you tube, twitter, articles on other web pagest etc… instead of the main official page.

- Explaining balance changes would help A LOT to calm down people. Because even if you dont like why the dev did something to your class at least you can understand it and even give better feedback about it. Most competitive games are doing this allready: dota, lol, hearthstone, starcraft…. it doesnt matter the genre and it doesnt takes devs that HUGE amount of time.

- I really loved when some dev posted what where the main goals and improvement for the next few months-year. Yes I know that there are still things from the expansion missing, but I doubt that its the only thing you guys are doing. (or at least I hope that xD)

Gaile Gray.6029:

Naurgalen.2374:

- Explaining balance changes would help A LOT to calm down people. Because even if you dont like why the dev did something to your class at least you can understand it and even give better feedback about it. Most competitive games are doing this allready: dota, lol, hearthstone, starcraft…. it doesnt matter the genre and it doesnt takes devs that HUGE amount of time.

I will pass this along. We had a lot of balance threads a few months ago. Maybe it’s something that can happen again, if time allows. I can see the benefit of it, and I hope that the forum community will enjoy them and the opportunity to provide constructive feedback if such posts are offered.

That would be great. Wonderful. Amazing.

Also, even just improving the update notes a little should help. For example, the update notes of a certain other highly successful online pvp game include a paragraph of the reasoning behind each balance change. Just including that would be fantastic. Additionally, each update notes is prefaced with an overview of overall goals.

Gaile Gray.6029:

One suggestion: Before posting it’s best to look for an existing thread so that you can expand upon posted ideas, or add your input for changes.

Gaile have you ever tried to do a research in this forum?

Oh yeah, that’s another very good point.
Tell your website guy to replace the search bar with a link to google. Or at the very least remove it. As it is, it serves ONLY to mislead people.

Naurgalen.2374:

- Explaining balance changes would help A LOT to calm down people. Because even if you dont like why the dev did something to your class at least you can understand it and even give better feedback about it. Most competitive games are doing this allready: dota, lol, hearthstone, starcraft…. it doesnt matter the genre and it doesnt takes devs that HUGE amount of time.

I will pass this along. We had a lot of balance threads a few months ago. Maybe it’s something that can happen again, if time allows. I can see the benefit of it, and I hope that the forum community will enjoy them and the opportunity to provide constructive feedback if such posts are offered.

Gaile, I think this is a great idea. I would like to know why Devs decided to buff/nerf current things, i think it would ease many players’ anger, and especially mine.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I think I understand this concern: You don’t want to miss info, you want to know what we’ve shared. This is something our Communications Team — which includes people who focus on forums, social media, and public relations — can discuss. There’s synergy now; for example, I might make a forum post that another team member shares on social media (with a link to the thread). But I take on board your opinion that our players may have to visit multiple sites to get info. Sometimes this is good — an exclusive press interview with new details of the game is always cool! — but we can discuss ways in which to share info about external items so that even more people benefit from them.

Yes, the synergy part is what I was thinking!: you dont need to rewrite the interview, just point to it. Or if the infos are really short but you know players would want to know them (some twitter things, some post on other forums) maybe putting it in a monthly roundup could work.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I will pass this along. We had a lot of balance threads a few months ago. Maybe it’s something that can happen again, if time allows. I can see the benefit of it, and I hope that the forum community will enjoy them and the opportunity to provide constructive feedback if such posts are offered.

Ty! I think its a win-win for all. And remember that maybe as other have said just little explanations could work. (but if they want to write more in depth im all eyes!)

Gaile Gray.6029:

I think the first Quarterly Update was marvelous, and I’m looking forward to our next one. In the meantime, we do share info on a regular basis on our website, and we’ll keep doing that in the future.

While I was thinking in something like the old, longer plans that tell a little about PvE, PvP and WvW + some highligts, I agree that those shorter are really nice and maybe better. (we see less from the longer picture but we get “confirmed” things)

Thanks for your responses Gaile!

I love to see how devs feel about “jack of all trades” balancing for ele vs other classes becoming more jack of all trades with there elite spec. I mean how do you ask something like that to the devs? It just seems like a real balancing issue.

From my perspective:
there are four templates per f1 skills:
heavy dmg and burn,
superior support and heal
heavy dmg and control abilities
superior dmg over time and defensive abilities
and they are permanetly linked to elements in order: fire, water, air, earth.
I would not agree firstly with those templates:
it should be:
heavy aoe dmg
heavy single target dmg
heavy support and control
heavy defensive
and it should be player to decide which element link to it.
Personaly I would go water for heavy aoe dmg and fire for suport and control:)
If you use that templates even if all eles will have the same mechanics, they will be all different cuz of that opportunity to set which template to which element.

There are things that can’t be exlusive to one template. Those need to be in all of them:
- dmg
- invunerability
- migitation of projetiles.

Examples:
Staff, I have long evade on fire 3, instead I would split it into 0,2s inuverability on each element/f1’sskill
Staff, I have long projetile reflect on earth 3, instead I would split it into 1s projetile reflect on each element/f1’sskill
etc etc.
Nextly I dmg enemy attuned to fire or I don’t dmg them in other f1’s skills at all.

Overloads should have been a F5 skill with an independent cooldown from the attunement swap. Then it could have been made stronger with a longer cooldown. There is just no way to balance it when the cooldown is linked to the attunement swap.

One of the main reason I stop playing elementalist and eventually the game was because Tempest was (1) the only viable build (build variety was gone) and (2) it interfered with the combat rotation I had spent years to perfect and crippled the elementalist gameplay.

Warhorn should have given the elementalist extended range with a scepter, to make the scepter viable a long range single-target weapon in WvW. And also Warhorn development should have taken into account player feedback, because it turned out to be a really clunky and ineffective weapon to use for an expansion that wasn’t cheap at all.

The trait lines needed to be split in offensive-defensive-support branches instead of being all mostly support and defensive.

Then when Anet nerfed cantrip might for daggers they removed the viability of the fire line for staff users reducing again build variety to the bare minimum.

And I’m not talking here about the stability changes that had disastrous consequences on WvW. I often lost my 8 stacks of Stability from Armor of earth in under 1 seconds after that changes! Why would you do something like this just for PvP when it ruins other game modes?

But then we can go back in time and think about when it was possible to move around Eternal Battleground with Ride the Lightning without having to wait near 1 minute every time we used it, or how we could keep on casting healing, utility and elite skills while in mist form. When that last one was removed it took a year for Anet to realize the elementalist needed more survivability. However a number change will never be as interesting as being able to cast a skill while in mist form.

So overall it’s a series of very-small bad decisions taken without consideration for certain game modes or user feedback that brought us where we are today: where almost every topic in the Ele forum is addressing problems and issues with gameplay, skill-balance, useless skills, weapons or traits and the lack of build variety.

I don’t know how things got there, because 2 years ago Anet was really on the right track.
Perhaps it was the Chinese release and free2play business model that derailed the game from it’s initially intended goals.

I would gladly come back if all these little changes were reverted.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Hi Roman,

I can see that you are asking this question with sincerity and good intent, and I’m happy to share a few thoughts on suggestions and how they work on the forums.

Thank you for the response! I have learned recently that putting [suggestion] is a huge help for devs when scanning and I def will try to back peddle through a couple of pages to see if anything I want to talk about is already a current thread, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that >.<

I def did not expect a dev response on this, so thank you again. Only because you are part of the communications I’d like to make one quick small suggestion that I thought of a long time ago. I’m sorry your bombarded with every suggestion since people saw you replied >.<

Content creators have a thing called Patreon, its a way to support the content creators with little to no reward for donators. Would arena-net ever consider something similar, for people interested in having some more weight to their suggestion as the one and only bonus? Beta for HoT was a great time for me, I loved reading dev changes, reading and critiquing other players suggestions, posting suggestions, and then player testing the changes themselves in during a beta weekend event! I honestly wouldnt mind paying you guys to essentially “prove” that my only interest is the betterment of community and game. I can def see ALOT of cons with this, but always meant to throw it in there at some point.

Oh and the AMA was amazing, good luck with the changes in the office!

ps – heard you were in LA recently sorry i missed it! was busy in gw1 haha

Xillllix.3485:

Overloads should have been a F5 skill with an independent cooldown from the attunement swap. Then it could have been made stronger with a longer cooldown. There is just no way to balance it when the cooldown is linked to the attunement swap.

One of the main reason I stop playing elementalist and eventually the game was because Tempest was (1) the only viable build (build variety was gone) and (2) it interfered with the combat rotation I had spent years to perfect and crippled the elementalist gameplay.

Warhorn should have given the elementalist extended range with a scepter, to make the scepter viable a long range single-target weapon in WvW. And also Warhorn development should have taken into account player feedback, because it turned out to be a really clunky and ineffective weapon to use for an expansion that wasn’t cheap at all.

The trait lines needed to be split in offensive-defensive-support branches instead of being all mostly support and defensive.

Then when Anet nerfed cantrip might for daggers they removed the viability of the fire line for staff users reducing again build variety to the bare minimum.

And I’m not talking here about the stability changes that had disastrous consequences on WvW. I often lost my 8 stacks of Stability from Armor of earth in under 1 seconds after that changes! Why would you do something like this just for PvP when it ruins other game modes?

But then we can go back in time and think about when it was possible to move around Eternal Battleground with Ride the Lightning without having to wait near 1 minute every time we used it, or how we could keep on casting healing, utility and elite skills while in mist form. When that last one was removed it took a year for Anet to realize the elementalist needed more survivability. However a number change will never be as interesting as being able to cast a skill while in mist form.

So overall it’s a series of very-small bad decisions taken without consideration for certain game modes or user feedback that brought us where we are today: where almost every topic in the Ele forum is addressing problems and issues with gameplay, skill-balance, useless skills, weapons or traits and the lack of build variety.

I don’t know how things got there, because 2 years ago Anet was really on the right track.
Perhaps it was the Chinese release and free2play business model that derailed the game from it’s initially intended goals.

I would gladly come back if all these little changes were reverted.

FYI – Gaile isn’t a profession developer. Don’t mean to target you directly but ALOT of responses on this thread HAVE suggestions in them. My topic doesn’t have the [suggestion] tag nor does the content of the topic seem like something a profession developer would click on. Something more along the lines of anyone on the social front for anet.

Not sure what posting suggestion after suggestion on this thread does but confuse anyone going through the comments :/

MadRabbit.3179:

Alekt — To

I am convinced that the degree of toxicity and bitterness that has become rampant on the forums is largely due to the silence from your company and the feeling of not being listened to is making everyone is who trying to help make this a better game feel resentful.

There is NEVER an excuse for toxicity. If you don’t feel the developers are doing things you agree with

A) Be constructive publicly
or
B) Stop buying their products, in an economy like ours dollars spent is how you vote.

If anet stops producing the same profits they will know what they are doing is wrong.

ESPECIALLY when replies socially is most likely something they can not charge hours too. I think it is self-centered to be so rude to someone when they have to work likely more then 8 hours a day on development, and rob them of family/personal time to read our feedback. If I were them I would ignore a toxic community in a heartbeat, but anet employees seem to be up to taking our abuse for some silly reason.

Dev communication only really happens when they have a new box to hype up and sell. You see them appear for beta event weekends sporadically, and once those changes go through and boxes are sold, they go back into the nether, rarely to be heard of again.

And it’s not because they’re busy, otherwise we’d see class balance changes more often than every 6+ months and on a scale larger than mostly tooltip polish and some measly numerical tweak to some awful trait that won’t still be used.

It’s been 3+ years and they still haven’t even balanced autoattack DPS across classes for PvE or made many of the useless weapons viable.

Clearly class balance or content that is not conducive to massive gold/RNG grinds to drive up gem to gold exchange is not high on their priority list.

Zenith.7301:

And it’s not because they’re busy, otherwise we’d see class balance changes more often than every 6+ months and on a scale larger than mostly tooltip polish and some measly numerical tweak to some awful trait that won’t still be used.

We do not really have enough information to assume that. I would like to think that a significant amount of time is spent working on the next living story and/or expansion. This is work that will not be visible until it’s beta or RTM. Even then, a significant amount of coding work will still be invisible.

This is not unlike the inner components of your cell phone – no one pays attention to what goes into the cell radio or GPS receiver so long as calls and Google Maps work.

Roman God of War.6953:

FYI – Gaile isn’t a profession developer. Don’t mean to target you directly but ALOT of responses on this thread HAVE suggestions in them. My topic doesn’t have the [suggestion] tag nor does the content of the topic seem like something a profession developer would click on. Something more along the lines of anyone on the social front for anet.

Not sure what posting suggestion after suggestion on this thread does but confuse anyone going through the comments :/

People are posting suggestions in this thread because they feel like this is the last straw they could possibly grasp as this is the one and only thread with a dev response within almost 15 kittening pages of threads full of suggestions and feedback (that all were conveniently ignored). Looks like you haven’t been around here for too long, so maybe get accomodated to this place before starting to critique its native inhabitants.

Roman God of War.6953:

I think it is self-centered to be so rude to someone when they have to work likely more then 8 hours a day on development, and rob them of family/personal time to read our feedback. If I were them I would ignore a toxic community in a heartbeat, but anet employees seem to be up to taking our abuse for some silly reason.

Getting on the forums to gather feedback and interact with their PAYING CUSTOMERS is the very least these guys can do, it’s their kittening job. People getting annoyed for being ignored or getting bullkitten responses like Gaile’s in this very thread (1st quartely update was “marvelous”? rofl shut the f up already) for YEARS is just natural I’d say. Maybe you’ll realise this one day when in 2 years you’re looking back at this thread realizing it did exactly nothing despite Gaile’s shiny responses.

ATMAvatar.5749:

Zenith.7301:

And it’s not because they’re busy, otherwise we’d see class balance changes more often than every 6+ months and on a scale larger than mostly tooltip polish and some measly numerical tweak to some awful trait that won’t still be used.

We do not really have enough information to assume that. I would like to think that a significant amount of time is spent working on the next living story and/or expansion. This is work that will not be visible until it’s beta or RTM. Even then, a significant amount of coding work will still be invisible.

This is not unlike the inner components of your cell phone – no one pays attention to what goes into the cell radio or GPS receiver so long as calls and Google Maps work.

3 years to develop an expansion pack which consists of 3 maps with just dynamic events. No new dungeons, no new fractals, a tiny fraction of the armor/weaponsets we received from vanilla and most of it gated behind huge RNG or gold grinds.

1 short raid wing that was wholly cleared in less than a week of its release.

Living Story updates that amount to a 2-3 hour affair every 4-5+ months?

How can you even justify the glacial pace of everything they do? When they release new armor/costumes pretty much every month on the cash store.

This game has devolved into a Farmville experience.

makku.2508:

Roman God of War.6953:

FYI – Gaile isn’t a profession developer. Don’t mean to target you directly but ALOT of responses on this thread HAVE suggestions in them. My topic doesn’t have the [suggestion] tag nor does the content of the topic seem like something a profession developer would click on. Something more along the lines of anyone on the social front for anet.

Not sure what posting suggestion after suggestion on this thread does but confuse anyone going through the comments :/

People are posting suggestions in this thread because they feel like this is the last straw they could possibly grasp as this is the one and only thread with a dev response within almost 15 kittening pages of threads full of suggestions and feedback (that all were conveniently ignored). Looks like you haven’t been around here for too long, so maybe get accomodated to this place before starting to critique its native inhabitants.

Roman God of War.6953:

I think it is self-centered to be so rude to someone when they have to work likely more then 8 hours a day on development, and rob them of family/personal time to read our feedback. If I were them I would ignore a toxic community in a heartbeat, but anet employees seem to be up to taking our abuse for some silly reason.

Getting on the forums to gather feedback and interact with their PAYING CUSTOMERS is the very least these guys can do, it’s their kittening job. People getting annoyed for being ignored or getting bullkitten responses like Gaile’s in this very thread (1st quartely update was “marvelous”? rofl shut the f up already) for YEARS is just natural I’d say. Maybe you’ll realise this one day when in 2 years you’re looking back at this thread realizing it did exactly nothing despite Gaile’s shiny responses.

I have been an arena net customer for 10 years my friend. Been here since the launch of gw1. Two years from now will be my 12th year, just to keep things in perspective.

I know WHY they are posting, I am saying it is in the wrong place.

Everyone seems to forget there business model is B2P. You would spend this same amount of money on Witcher, Fall Out, Pokemon, Legend of Zelda, Assasins Creed….

You have 0 say in the development in those titles. You have 0 interaction with those developers ever.

IMO any communication is amazing and something to keep in perspective. I personally have over 2000 hours in gw2. That is SO many for only spending 100 bucks(thats base and expansion put together).

Roman God of War.6953:

Everyone seems to forget there business model is B2P. You would spend this same amount of money on Witcher, Fall Out, Pokemon, Legend of Zelda, Assasins Creed….

You have 0 say in the development in those titles. You have 0 interaction with those developers ever.

What???

Look I stopped playing GW2 and only still follow this forums due to the WvW being the only thing that might salvage this. But I had to drop here and say about Witcher.

You have absolutely 0 knowledge of CD Projekt Red based on what you wrote there. CD Projekt Red is one of the few developers that is actually good and has good communication.

ANET would have to go through a complete restructure to be able to compare to them. CD Projekt Red during Witcher 1, Witcher 2 and Witcher 3 gathered (and still gathers) a ton of player feedback, plus releases a ton of content – the majority of it for free – based on player feedback, including patches, DLCs and Enhanced Edition mode.

Seriously, go learn who you are comparing with before dropping names around.

And lastly, on the topic, the “communication improvement” of ANET these last few days (as well as the recent “March Sale”) is a PR desperate gamble to try and recover from the loss of players and – as I bet NCSoft numbers will show once the 2016Q1 are released – loss of profits.

Roman God of War.6953:

I have been an arena net customer for 10 years my friend. Been here since the launch of gw1. Two years from now will be my 12th year, just to keep things in perspective.

Not sure what being an ArenaNet customer for 10 years has to do with GW2 and especially these forums (btw, since I actually did play GW1 from launch on I’m pretty sure it was released in April 2005, so that would make it 11 years, just sayin’), I just found that post of yours dating to July or August 2014 in which you state ‘i am new to GW2 also’, which makes it look like you arrived kinda late to the party.

Roman God of War.6953:

I know WHY they are posting, I am saying it is in the wrong place.

How can it be the wrong place when there is no right place? Any place is as bad as the next.

Roman God of War.6953:

Everyone seems to forget there business model is B2P.

Nope. It’s actually F2P (free to play) with microtransactions and a P2W (pay to win) option.

Roman God of War.6953:

You would spend this same amount of money on Witcher, Fall Out, Pokemon, Legend of Zelda, Assasins Creed….

You have 0 say in the development in those titles. You have 0 interaction with those developers ever.

It might not be the best of ideas to compare it to games from completely different genres (especially not when it completely backfires, see the Witcher thing above, but w/e). GW2 is an MMO with a huge emphasize on competitive PvP (as established by ArenaNet themselves). So compare it to LoL, Dota2, etc. I don’t think I need to say anything about how ArenaNet compares to the developers of these titles in terms of interaction & communication with their player base…

Roman God of War.6953:

IMO any communication is amazing and something to keep in perspective.

Yea well, if you like being treated like kitten that’s fine for me. But don’t demand from others to like being treated like kitten as well.

Roman God of War.6953:

I personally have over 2000 hours in gw2. That is SO many for only spending 100 bucks(thats base and expansion put together).

So dumping a lot of hours for a few bucks into something makes it ok when everything goes down the drain later on? I can’t quite agree on that.

Wow. Ok.

I’m really happy I read this thread. Thank you Gaile, I now have a better idea of what’s going on, both with how devs do things, to how the communication team works, and I sincerely hope some of the concerns mentioned are acted on, in particular the explanation of changes (buffs/nerfs) to classes and other parts of the game. Would be awesome if that were added to the Game Release Notes so they are easily accessed at any time. The [Suggestion] tag is also a good idea, and I will try to use it.

Is there a centralized place that has all the tips/tricks for how to best use the forums as a communications tool with the devs and whoever else?

I am also gonna go read that thread on searching the forums, as that has been a pain to do. Thanks again!

makku.2508:

Roman God of War.6953:

I have been an arena net customer for 10 years my friend. Been here since the launch of gw1. Two years from now will be my 12th year, just to keep things in perspective.

Not sure what being an ArenaNet customer for 10 years has to do with GW2 and especially these forums (btw, since I actually did play GW1 from launch on I’m pretty sure it was released in April 2005, so that would make it 11 years, just sayin’), I just found that post of yours dating to July or August 2014 in which you state ‘i am new to GW2 also’, which makes it look like you arrived kinda late to the party.

Roman God of War.6953:

I know WHY they are posting, I am saying it is in the wrong place.

How can it be the wrong place when there is no right place? Any place is as bad as the next.

Roman God of War.6953:

Everyone seems to forget there business model is B2P.

Nope. It’s actually F2P (free to play) with microtransactions and a P2W (pay to win) option.

Roman God of War.6953:

You would spend this same amount of money on Witcher, Fall Out, Pokemon, Legend of Zelda, Assasins Creed….

You have 0 say in the development in those titles. You have 0 interaction with those developers ever.

It might not be the best of ideas to compare it to games from completely different genres (especially not when it completely backfires, see the Witcher thing above, but w/e). GW2 is an MMO with a huge emphasize on competitive PvP (as established by ArenaNet themselves). So compare it to LoL, Dota2, etc. I don’t think I need to say anything about how ArenaNet compares to the developers of these titles in terms of interaction & communication with their player base…

Roman God of War.6953:

IMO any communication is amazing and something to keep in perspective.

Yea well, if you like being treated like kitten that’s fine for me. But don’t demand from others to like being treated like kitten as well.

Roman God of War.6953:

I personally have over 2000 hours in gw2. That is SO many for only spending 100 bucks(thats base and expansion put together).

So dumping a lot of hours for a few bucks into something makes it ok when everything goes down the drain later on? I can’t quite agree on that.

April is next month. So yes I have like 10.xxx years…someone complained about being here for 2-3 with playing this game. Anet still developed gw1 so I still have been familiar of anet regardless of when I bought gw2.

I said it’s the wrong place because you don’t post off topic comments in a forum thread. I’m not gonna go to ride aparts forum and start talking the about the ls1 block and swapping it into a hot rod.

Anet has never treated me like kitten. I just don’t act snobby and keep real life in perspective. #firstworldprobemsmyvideogamedevzignoreme

$100 isn’t even a week of time for a software developer. We get so much for so little.

And what are you a politician? Instead of saying anything constructive or truly on topic your just nitpicking at the OPs words. Everything I said was to inject either a different perspective or a suggestion for moving development suggestions out of this thread.

Yes you called me out on the witcher, I’ve only seen n played witcher 3 but guess what, if the game sucked I still don’t expect to hop online email a dev and hand them disc asking for a new patch for what I want. The context of my example was just namebrand one shot play buy games.

Hopefully this wasn’t too poorly organized. Did this on my phone bored at work

If shouts are 2x instant and 2x 1/4, signets should by all instant, or at least earth instant and fire/water 1/4. If shouts gives auras, signets should at least give 1s of invulnerability.

Far more builds will be available if we will have water field as utility. Instant. Glyph of ele power or rework glyph of renewal or arcane blast rework into arcane water.

Arcane Surge should add condi dmg or condi duration and arcane skills attuned to earth should immobilize+cripple or immoblize+2stacks of bleeding. Rest remain unchanged.

Bliding Ashes should provide its own source of burning foes.

Piercing Shards should provide its own source of voulnerability.

Serrated Stone should provide its own source of bleeding.

Traits that gives you bonus stats based on other stat should have any additional effect to be more appealing: power overwhelimg, ferious winds and strenght of stone.

Ele should gain two new elite skills: one for underwater and second something like glint wings that launch foes, but instead its could be pheonix, pheonix of fire/lightning/aquatic/dust (depends on attunement) for additional effect. Well telegraphed and would feel like elite.

Edit:/ I came up with yet another new version of lingering elements version 3.0 : you choose one weapon skill as f5 so it can be use regardless of attunement. Due too that in many cases probably I would choose the hardest hitting aa’s to cover my weak dmg from other elements.

MadRabbit.3179:

Fair enough. So in the questions of revealing truth, why don’t you provide some concrete examples that demonstrate instances where Arenanet has used player feedback in it’s decisions?

(snip)

Give me like 3-4 examples. Connect the dots. List changes and source it to player feedback. It seems to be your job to direct developers to feedback, so there should be no one better qualified to do this. You should have first hand knowledge of what feedback was responsible for what changes.

If you do this, I give you my personal assurance I won’t ever criticize Arenanet again for not listening. I’ll still criticize you for your lack of bidirectional communication, but at least, we’ll have established the unidirectional communication actually exists.

I am convinced that the degree of toxicity and bitterness that has become rampant on the forums is largely due to the silence from your company and the feeling of not being listened to is making everyone is who trying to help make this a better game feel resentful.

Very well written, and sadly not even a brief response to your post. I’m just going to go ahead and assume that means ANet isn’t listening very well.

Very well written, and sadly not even a brief response to your post. I’m just going to go ahead and assume that means ANet isn’t listening very well.[/quote]

Well to be fair he answered most of his questions in his responses to other people. The only thing that wasn’t replied to were the specific examples of implemented player feedback. Did he seriously expect someone who just said two post ago the staff memebers don’t have time to reply to all posts to search the forum for specific suggestion threads that were used in the patches?

That being said, pls stop nerfing my mesmer

I can tell you guys, the devs do look at our suggestions. The healing on aura trait was introduced as a result of our suggestions (was originally like wanting stab on aura).

The biggest thing is they are worried how small changes can shift the meta in the long run.

This is just a balance suggestion from me gaile. I think getting rid of celestial was a good idea, but it set us back to a bunker/condi meta. If you want a better balanced game you should reevaluate how much condi damage can be put out. Condi builds are far superior to power builds. What I would do is look into having certain skills dish out less stacks for shorter amounts of time, but decrease the cooldowns of said skills.

Also, damage from chill on reapers is a bit high to me, especially for the duration and consistency they can apply it.

Also please remove moa from pvp.

I think if you guys toned down the chill for necros and forced mesmers to choose between torment or confusion that would be a good place to start.