Guild Wars 2

This is the best course that can be taken, we have always valued our players feedback regarding all aspects of the game. There are plenty of developers, designers, artists etc reading and posting on these forums – though most will generally stick to their area of expertise, they are sat there waiting for you (all our players) to talk to them, tell them what they think is right and how they would/should change those things that niggle to be better!

That is wonderful to hear of course. But doesn’t the community team handle patch notes?

Yes exactly. Explicit patch notes and honest communication is all I was and am asking for. I think you’ll find that your player base is willing to swallow quite a bit of Vision™ if they don’t have to find out about inside the game.

Your goal on the community team: Inform players without informing them too much. Discourage exploits and cheats.
Our goal: Find out about how the game is changing so we can adjust our play appropriately.

Here is what you could have written instead of the nothing that you wrote:
“Modified some encounters in CoF to get them in line with our expectations.”

That’s the vague approach. Vagueness usually sparks some productive discussion. But vagueness can also cause distrust between you and your player base. If possible, patch notes can and should be an opportunity for you to inform and entertain your players. Something like this:
“Modified some encounters in CoF to get them in line with our expectations. Some players were completing the dungeons too quickly. Poor Magg couldn’t keep up with his short legs!”

It’s a terrible joke but then patch note jokes always are. It makes you smirk or say “heh”, and it helps you get over the fact that something enjoyable just got nerfed.

They deleted this thread.
Then deleted a thread made by another person.
Then they edited out a snarky word from the thread that was the basis for my thread.
By now myself and another forums user have two infractions.
Then they resurrect the thread.
It gets two posts.
It’s deleted again.
Then minutes later resurrected again.

This is the very definition of CYA. Now they are taking a shot at open communication which is wonderful, fantastic, thank you very much. But if one person goes to the trouble to type a non-inflammatory, thought out post, just deleting it because it talks about a sensitive topic seems like the least of possible options.

Well I appreciate that, but you have essentially called me an exploiter and I have never exploited a thing in my life. The accusation, the insinuation itself is rude. I’d love to have a discussion about dungeon times and content but that’s not the topic of the thread I made. I want to talk about how you are presenting yourself to the community, how you are communicating with us. And your attempts to be at first brash, then strict, then cover your butt… has presented you with a bit of problem with your players that you ought to address.

Two things:
1) You originally gave me an infraction for this:
Moderator Notes:
Please do not make posts that contest the actions of a moderator. If you feel any action taken by a moderator was inappropriate, send an e-mail to forum@arena.net and the issue will be looked into.
Now you are changing it to giving me an infraction because I had two words capitalized for emphasis in a multi-paragraph post?

2) You edited out the “end of story” from your original post that helped precipitate that issue. You can see it quoted in the op of this thread.

Hi. My name is Andry. I am not in any way an exploiter. I did Citadel of Flame, alot. My group worked hard and we invested a ton of time for what gear we got. We got on Mumble, we communicated, we used combos (25 stacks of might for all!), and above all even though it was a bit grindy, we enjoyed it. We played the dungeon precisely as it was presented to us. We didn’t zerg any encounters, we didn’t use geometry to bug out encounters, we didn’t use speed buffs. We did the dungeon as it was designed.

The reason why we did CoF instead of other explorables? Because of three very important factors, the “sweet spot” of dungeons:
1) It was challenging, but not too challenging.
2) The reward was worth the time.
3) It didn’t take too long. Most people do not want to spend more than 30 minutes in a single unit of content. CoF was less than this, so it fit perfect.

Now, you changed the dungeon. Fine. You think it’s your game, not ours. You have a vision and you want to persue it. Again, fine.

But you must absolutely communicate with us. You cannot hide things. You cannot be dishonest. No matter how many times you edit those patch notes or make comments on other threads, in your initial draft of the patch notes (which by the way came hours after the patch when they should be in our hands the very second the servers come down) there was no mention of the changes you made to CoF.

Why? I have no idea. Some people will suggest that you don’t want to confess changes that will be viewed as unpopular. Whether or not it’s true, it is certainly well within our right as paying customers to suggest so.

Here was your response:

There were certain things that could be done (and were being done) in both CM and CoF that were not intended to be possible (read: exploits), we fixed them. End of story!

And then you closed the thread. Do you have any idea how disrespectful his is? Do you understand that this is precisely the opposite attitude you want to take. You may take umbrage at me talking down to you in this way but I implore you…. please do not continue this kind of communication with your players.

We should have a discussion about where you want dungeons to be and there should be a negotiation about what we want dungeons to be, but we can’t have that conversation and we won’t have that conversation if you are going to accuse every player getting any kind of consistent reward from your dungeons an exploiter and then shutting the discussion down.

This is the stuff that turns into bad press real fast. And if you haven’t learned it already, MMO players are the most fickle and finicky game players. You have a small window to impress with your service. It doesn’t matter one bit how beautiful your world is, how compelling your combat is, or how immersive and fun your game experience is. If your communication with players is lacking, if your communication with players is hostile, if your players do not trust or even worse if they are afraid to play your game for fear of being labelled exploiter or cheater… nobody is going to play it. Edited by moderator. Caps.

Big changes to two of the encounters in CoF. The reward nerf isn’t the only thing they did. No mention of it. You can’t hide changes to the game. They will always be found.

Why is there no mention of what you did to the dungeons? This is a pretty big community issue. You’re communication, or rather lack thereof, is extremely worrisome. Please, PLEASE take a note from Trion. You must be honest and forthcoming about how you are changing the game.