Guild Wars 2

I just went through all professions’ forums to see what is the community support / attention we’ve been getting from ANet.

Basically I accessed the first 5 pages of each forum which means 150 posts per forum and the number of posts with at least one Community Support answer are:

Elementalist: 5 (the winner)
Engineer: 1
Guardian: 0
Necro: 2
Mesmer: 1
Ranger: 3
Thief: 2
Warrior: 1

So, for every 1200 post ANet answers 15 of them or 1.25%, however if we go a little bit deeper, 9 of these answers are locking the post, therefore only 6 constructive answers have been given to the community (or 0.6%).

How ANet thinks they can balance the professions if the community is not heard?

How ANet thinks PvPers will stick to the game if game balancing is not taken seriously?

How Anet dares to implement big patches without testing it in a public test server?

GW2 is 3-4 months old, at this pace the one year celebration will be a 3 servers party.

In fairness the sPvP forum receives a lot of feedback and discussion with the devs, as does WvW. Unfortunatly a significant portion of those posts are discussing how to deal with portal ¬_¬

It’s impossible for them to check & respond to every single thread.

The ratio of constructive responses to posts is misleading because I’d take a wager that at least half of the threads started on these forums have nothing to do with bugs or gameplay issues, but are simply complaints and criticisms of otherwise properly working mechanics. (the ‘RNG sucks’, ‘we need new weapon sets’, or ‘new faceroll build’ type of threads)

To make matters worse, the bug reports forum is absolutely inundated with frivolous complaints, many of which simply do not warrant a response. Bringing to their attention gamebreaking gameplay issues is severely hindered because often these threads are surrounded by trivial problems like "my asura’s ears don’t look right this patch’ and ‘my bird pets now have 2 sets of wings, looks weird’.

You want to figure out what percentage of posts are actually valid questions, and then do the response ratio. I don’t particularly care for the thought of them wasting resources responding to every ridiculous rant on the forums. Or responding to questions that have already been answered elsewhere and can be easily found with a search.

And let me first explain that yes, I think listening to your players and what they want is important, to a certain degree. But ESPECIALLY in the area of class balance, the forums are the LAST place I want a developer. Class balance needs to be looked at from the top down, and a lot of times what the player wants is nowhere near what the player needs.

So let me get this straight. You want them to work on fixing the game less and respond to redundant posts more?

Reading and posting on forums seriously reduces time spent on work. I used to write code for Cisco. I loved getting feedback from customers, but not directly. I found that any time I would interact directly, I’d loose entire days of productivity. It was far better to let the testers get data from the customer advocates, test stuff to weed out the nonsense, and then present the coders with actual problems that need to be solved.

I’m actually fairly impressed with the level of attention and feedback we are getting. The devs are replying and yet aren’t letting themselves become embroiled in forum issues. That’s hard to do. Engineer of any stripe all love an argument.

I’m unhappy with a lot of the recent changes, though. It feels like they’re following me from class to class and nerfing me as I play. Was going to play thief a bit, had just spent 10g on exotic weapons, then <whap> the weapon set I bought got nerfed into oblivion. OK, back to mesmer. <whap> GS destroyed.

I love my mesmer and will probably always keep trying to play it as my main, but it’s getting hard. I should probably head over to Warrior. It’s fairly balanced (ie. OP in the current unbalanced class situation) and thus could survive the hard nerf hits that seem to follow me around from class to class.

I think what they have done is completely wrong during the last patches.. sure they cant spend a say to search through everything, but hell forum moderators are they. There has to be some form of communication from the community to the dev and testers…

mesmers for example as stated above have had there most valuable weapon thrown to the dumps, their illusions discarded only left for 1 viable play build across the entire game? for what reason? yes they have the damage and the tricks but they need that to survive cause of their incredible squishyness…

How about saying, “Okay, most or all our clients are infuriated. How about we revert the update for now and see what they have to say?” this does not mean they have to listen to every stupid idea that comes out? Suggestion to make a testing realm so that they wont have these problems online?

I think they Anet is putting a lot of effort in, dont get me wrong. The problem is they are focusing on the wrong content…fix the current issues and most of the server will be over joyed! Make sure you dont nerf one or two classes messed up and leave others OP as they stand.

All of this is just off putting.

Kitteh out..

Okuza.5210:

It feels like they’re following me from class to class and nerfing me as I play.

I really had started to think this was the case myself. . . I actually started playing both a warrior and thief just to see if they would nerf them, but I kept falling asleep at the keyboard while playing them. I mean really they were that easy for me to play, maybe because they mostly feel like every other warrior/thief I’ve ever played in any other game. That includes rogues and such as well. . . If only I could have stuck with it, maybe they would have been nerfed.

That being said I’ve seen more developer activity as of late then I had in quite awhile, so the hope now exists that they are in fact working on issues that have been around for some time now. Pulling resources from other areas of the game for work on these issues would greatly speed up the process, and something they might in fact do, but patience is wearing thin for many players (or is completely gone at this point).

I find myself struggling to maintain high morale and even slipping into the mindset of others from time to time, regardless of the fact that I try not to assume that the developers do not care. Really they have made great strides as of recent to relay their intentions as best they can, these stats just prove that players care quite a bit about this game, and that the developers are nearly drowning in requests to have certain issues fixed.