Guild Wars 2

TsukasaHiiragi.9730:

@Greg Obvious troll is obvious

Obvious troll is saying that there are some clear signs that someone is having a (and I use exaggeration here for humorous rather than offensive purposes) crazy hobo rant instead of putting forward a well considered point.

• “This demands attention”
• “very much intended warning to Anet/Nexon/NCSoft”
• “cannot, repeat cannot”
• wide generalisation of opinion/experience of “all the players”
• suggestion of conspiracy leading to some future unwanted outcome

I’d ding you on the complete lack of appropriate punctuation too – I think they teach you how to leave all your apostrophes off in Crazy Hobo 101 – but that’s probably unnecessarily mean if English isn’t your first language, so let’s let that slide.

Next time maybe try to title your thread “Suggested fix for RNG progression problem” or “An alternate system for Ascended acquisition” or something a little more positive generally.

Hellkaiser.6025:

GregT.4702:

I started reading the original post and about a paragraph in I couldn’t see anything except the OP living in this run down apartment covered with blurry black-and-white pictures of politicians, the pope, and Barney the Dinosaur, linked together with thumbtacks and red string. Everywhere there are post-its with cryptic notes like “RNG > Progression”, “WoW = illusion??” and “How Many Vials Have You Found!”. There are a million air fresheners hanging from the ceiling on strings and the power company disconnected the electricity like a year ago.

Totally uncalled for, and a clear appeal to ridicule in terms of fallacy.

Oh, man, the OP didn’t need my help to look ridiculous. It’s right there in the thread title. But I’m making the point that if you have a serious argument to present it’s probably best to present it in a serious fashion, not just scribble exclamation marks on the back of a napkin and then mail it to the Prime Minister in an envelope with some of your toenail clippings.

Hellkaiser.6025:

GregT.4702:

I spent about $10 AUD back in October and used it to buy the mats I was missing to craft a full set of exotic Rampager’s Leather. I’ve enjoyed that set of armour for two months now, and given my lack of interest in Fractals I’m likely to continue enjoying it until they add Ascendeds as world drops or craftables, at the earliest.

For half the price of a gourmet pizza, I honestly have not the slightest regrets.

That’s an apples and oranges statement.

This plain grey rock I’m offering to sell you could potentially last 100 years! and is in fact usable as many things including a paper weight! clearly it’s worth a thousand dollars right?

What I’m saying is that I have ALREADY got my money’s worth out of the gear I bought. I got it, frankly, on the very night that I crafted the gear, and tried out some dyes on it, and linked it to my guild, and then did a dungeon in it. That was five hours of fun, which is about what I expect from $10 of DLC. Everything since then has been gravy.

Your argument that there’s no point in buying gear with money because it will be made obsolete assumes two really sad things:
(1) that people would buy gear as an investment, rather than for its immediate worth, and
(2) that the value of having the gear is for the content it unlocks, rather than that the gear is content in and of itself.

You’re entitled to hold those beliefs; I’m just saying it’s a sad and lonely way to game and if that’s your honest opinion you’re unlikely to get much happiness from gaming in either the short or long term. You’re likewise entitled to believe that exotic gear is not worth the price I paid for it; that’s great, you get to sell it to people like me and make a profit. You should celebrate that.

Raine.1394:

This is true. If you use gems to buy gear, as I did, you must be prepared to continue shelling out dollars to buy gear as vertical progression progresses. There is no in-game economy by which you can support yourself as in other MMO’s, sadly, so it’s buy gems or simply don’t keep up with the gear progression.

I agree. If only there was some way in the game to procure exotics without buying gems. That would be a fine thing. But unfortunately they just appear magically on the TP without human intervention, leaving us all to scramble to spend upwards of $2 to buy them or face being less competitive in ways which only we will really notice.

Curse you Anet. You are taking food out of the mouths of hypothetical children that I made up in order to make this complaint more dramatic.

EDIT: So here is a thing, the forum automatically doesn’t display any paragraph that starts with the format “(blank) you Anet”, where (blank) is a censored word. Lol

I started reading the original post and about a paragraph in I couldn’t see anything except the OP living in this run down apartment covered with blurry black-and-white pictures of politicians, the pope, and Barney the Dinosaur, linked together with thumbtacks and red string. Everywhere there are post-its with cryptic notes like “RNG > Progression”, “WoW = illusion??” and “How Many Vials Have You Found!”. There are a million air fresheners hanging from the ceiling on strings and the power company disconnected the electricity like a year ago.

I spent about $10 AUD back in October and used it to buy the mats I was missing to craft a full set of exotic Rampager’s Leather. I’ve enjoyed that set of armour for two months now, and given my lack of interest in Fractals I’m likely to continue enjoying it until they add Ascendeds as world drops or craftables, at the earliest.

For half the price of a gourmet pizza, I honestly have not the slightest regrets.

Here it is. On the development of the LFG tool, as of ~5 Dec 2012:

Robert Hrouda.1327:

the problem with rough estimates is that if I gave a date, that’s /the/ date everyone will expect it. Then, if it’s not ready, people get upset with us. It’s just best to say “we’re on it!” and try to get it out as quick as we can, with as much awesome functionality as we can

but.. to evoke Colin Johandsome: “When it’s ready.”

Full thread:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Any-word-on-a-Dungeon-Group-Finder-system/first#post912338

Boristos.4638:

So Anet have confirmed that they are working on a LFG tool?

I’ll go see if I can find the exact quote (watch this space) but my understanding is yes, they’re working on it, but there’s no ETA and it’s not a top priority so don’t hold your breath.

Safari.3021:

Ualtar.5047:

British people do American badly. :P

Hugh laurie (House), Andrew Lincoln (Walking dead), Christian Bale (Batman/American Pyscho), Andrew Garfield (Spiderman) and Henry Caville (Superman).

o’rly.

By way of counterpoint, I offer you every American character ever depicted on Doctor Who or Torchwood, except those played by actual Americans.

Boristos.4638:

I understand where you are coming from but I’ll probably just run into the same problem of not being able to find a group when I hit level 40. I feel really unmotivated to play now.

Yeah I tried that LFG tool in the contact, I didn’t get any responses.

I’m not going to lie, the process for transitioning into dungeons is woeful. There’s a sharp difficulty spike from the overworld into dungeons and when you get there you’re expected to know how to work in a group, manage aggro, and a bunch of other stuff that there’s no real reason to learn in the overworld.

They’re pretty fun, though, once you know what you’re doing. It can just be a rough process getting there. The best experience is to do them with friends, or, failing that, guildies.

In terms of third party stuff, I hear people have had some success with gw2lfg.com, which the GW2 devs have straight up recommended as a solution until they get it working in game. I can’t vouch for its quality – I’ve never had any success finding a group with it – but other people swear by it.

Boristos – if this is your first character, hitting level 30 for the first time, I strongly recommend waiting before doing AC. You are just going to die a lot, and get frustrated, and have a bad day.

Most experienced players agree AC is easy – but it’s not when you’re doing it for the first time. It’s much harder than comparable early dungeons in any other MMO I’ve played – it is, like all the GW2 dungeons, tuned to an endgame level of difficulty and skill.

I’d recommend starting off with Caudecus Manor (CM) at level 40, which is easier and more straightforward, and I’d recommend if at all possible doing it with friends or members of your guild, who are inclined to be patient while you die again and again (and again, from different angles).

People don’t want to do AC with you at 30 because you are, frankly, likely to just make the dungeon take longer and be less fun for them. Helping people out is all well and good, and I encourage it, but when it’s the difference between doing the dungeon in 25 minutes and doing it in 50, and the difference between zero repairs and up to 20 silver in repairs, you can see why they wouldn’t feel that generous.

EDIT: Also, there is a really crappy LFG tool in the game, it’s in your Contacts menu. It’s just that it’s not very useful and no-one uses it.

Fantastic initiative. Cheers to Ethereal Dawn and your brave fractalologists. Donation made.

That Sylvari cheerfulness just really annoys me. It’s like they don’t even know or care about Ascended gear. They make out as though they are enjoying life instead of just grinding life to get a new and higher tier of life later. What’s up with that?

AuldWolf.7598:

Wow GregT, that was some trolling effort. Your fallacies are repugnant.

“You’re not doing what you say you’re doing. You’re doing what I say you’re doing, because of entirely specious reasons.”

Ever thought of going into politics?

I did. Didn’t get a lot of votes, but we’re getting censorship changes here in Australia partially as a result.

But what I’m saying is, my experience with internet gaming forums consists of basically the entire time that they’ve existed as part of the web, and a portion of the newsgroup/BBS era before that. And I can tell you that ragequit posters are not something a gaming company needs to worry about.

Going to a forum to explain why you’re quitting says at least one two things: (1) that you care about the direction the developer is going enough to try and influence them with a passionate speech and/or (2) that you require the attention of strangers within your peer group to feel validated, and will resort to a public tantrum to obtain that approval. (It also means (3) you likely don’t have a blog, and therefore don’t have any kind of audience who respects your opinions and will change their purchasing as a result.)

That is to say that either you’re a loyal customer who’s likely to return to this or a future product, or that you’re toxic to the community and the sooner you quit the better.

The customers that Anet should be worried about aren’t those who post vocally on the forums, it’s the ones that just shrug and stop playing without ever looking back.

Guild hopping is fine. There just needs to be more point to being in a guild.

We need guild log-on/log-off notifications. We need achievement broadcasting to guilds. We need ability to set notes on the guild roster. We need ability to display alts other than the last-used on the guild roster.

These are all really, really easy things to do (or they should be, unless the game’s been coded in some really bizarre way). They’re trivial. They should have been there at launch. They should have been there in the first patch. It’s baffling that a game called Guild Wars doesn’t have basic guild functionality that, for instance, WoW had at launch.

I got that medium armour hat-with-a-feather-in-it at level 35 in Ascalonian Catacombs and I haven’t looked back; I’ve transmuted it so many times it must be starting to have holes.

Currently I have the stats of level 80 crafted exotics, the skin of tier 2 female norn cultural armour… and my jaunty feather hat.

If you’re on the forums right now, you haven’t quit the game over Ascended Gear.

And you’re very likely not going to. You’re either going to:

( a ) quit the game because actually you’ve finished all the content you want to and you’re bored with it;
( b ) quit the game because as a hardcore player you have a high game rotation and honestly you were going to move on to another game soon no matter what GW2 did;
( c ) not quit the game, and keep complaining for another three years; or
( d ) not quit the game, and enjoy it.

I play Engineer. I find Supply Crate is fine as an elite skill; cooldown is appropriate so that it’s always there when I need it, but so that I won’t bust it out unless I -do- need it. Effect is graphically impressive, conceptually impressive, and very useful mechanics-wise. I love it.

I haven’t got much use out of Mortar or Elixir X yet; I’d appreciate someone selling me on their merits.

But in principle I don’t think there’s anything in principle wrong with the current elites, other than that there’s not enough of them to choose from.

Snores.7806:

I’m am worried about the direction of GW2.

…patches and updates that do little to nothing for the long term development of the game and it’s community….
… constant content push […] for new content instead of a focus on game stability and playability. The steady nerfs to the economy, drop rates and general wealth generation. The lack of genuine communication and any real QA from the development team.

Dude, I don’t know what you’re seeing or what your experience is, but I can tell you in 30 years of gaming:

• I’ve rarely seen a game release solid new content this reliably or this often;
• I’ve never seen a game team of this size answer questions so frankly and fully in so many different places; and
• with the notable exception of EVE Online, I’ve never seen a game take such a serious and professional approach to managing its economy.

I’m ignoring, obviously, Lost Shores, which had just a ton of problems which the dev team have never fully addressed. And the game’s not perfect, obviously, because otherwise everyone everywhere would play it and I’d never need any other game ever again. But beyond that – man, if you find a game that does all these things BETTER, be sure to tell me what it is, and what I need to smoke in order to play it.

Tolmos.8395:

What kills me… is that I believe 100% that this is how MMOs these days determine what is “fun” or not, because it explains perfectly why MMOs are becoming such crap. :-\

You missed or misunderstood a step.

I was proposing a way to determine if a player is motivated to do content by the reward.

You seem to have assumed that if they are, in fact, grinding for the reward, that the developer would think that was good and be satisfied.

I was implying that if they are repeating content for the reward rather than the fun, then the content was insufficiently fun and the design process had gone wrong, and the developer would retune the content to, if nothing else, be more friendly to (non-reward-motivated) casuals.

Sorry for the confusion. The basic point stands, that metrics can tell you more about what your players are doing and why than anecdotal evidence can.

I’m not worried about claims of pseudo-intellectualism. I haven’t studied game design professionally, but I have written about the study of game design professionally, and if what I’m putting forth is psuedo-intellectualism then I would be both entertained and educated by the real thing. :-)

Besides, Carltonbanks, you don’t have to understand it all; that’s why you’re the one playing the game, not the one making it.

nachtnebel.9168:

As I mentioned before, unproven or just wrong assumption like those are the reason why games keep getting worse nowadays. Companies think players like neat graphics more than challenging gameplay mechanics or that people actually enjoy grinding.

If you want to use a method like that you would, at the very least, have to change your parameters. Only those people who have everything they can get out of FotM and still continue running it, do it cause they like it. Based on that assumption, the data recorded during the last weeks would be completely pointless since there are not much players that really have anything FotM has to offer yet.

No, you’re misunderstanding me. I’m not saying we’re looking for players who get a high RNG and never run FOTM again. I’m saying we’re looking for players who take a high RNG as their trigger to take a break and log off, before coming on and doing more of it the next day. They’re players who are continuing to grind because they want rewards. We already know from other studies (BF Skinner and others) that in activities with mixed fixed/variable reward systems (such as FoTM, where you get a big reward of some kind every fractal, with some bigger than others) people are MOST likely to discontinue the activity when the time until the perceived next reward is longest. In FoTM, that’s going to be at the end of a fractal after a perceived “good” drop. Players who break here are more likely to be motivated by the reward schedule than the process of getting to the reward. It’s basic behavioural psychology.

Likewise I’m not saying that “high mouselook in rest periods” is people liking pretty graphics. (And remember this is a hypothetical anyway.) I was suggesting that it either (a) it may correlate to people being more engaged with their surrounding and companions and therefore having more fun, or that (b) it may be an involuntary reaction correlating to fun, the same way that people enjoying a conversation will semi-involuntarily lean in, make more eye contact, and nod or shake their head in response to the speaker’s attitude.

It may not correlate. But over the vast number of statistics measurable, SOMETHING will correlate to “fun” gameplay, and it’s reasonably trivial for someone in Anet’s position to determine what that is and track it. There is a lot of behavioural psychology out there, much of it specifically aimed at video games and play states in general, and humans are, in the end, predictable creatures with observable tics that betray our emotional states.

If you’re actually interested in this, PM me and I’ll direct you to some of the people doing work on stuff like this.

Speaking of statistics, they’re against you on “games keep getting worse nowadays”. On average, today games have more consumers, who are more satisfied, than at any time in history. Which is just one more reason why you’re not a representative sample. :-)

Tolmos.8395:

Again, that is by far the most inaccurate way to determine enjoyment of content. Pretending to have some nonexistant knowledge of stats and probability beyond that of mortal men won’t change this.

The only situation in which I have knowledge beyond that of mortal men is if mortal men have no knowledge of statistics. I’d like to say you’re making a good case for that but I’d just be following the errors throughout this thread about sample sizes and representative samples.

I’ll give you two really good metrics RIGHT NOW to gauge how much of the community is actually enjoying the fractals:

(a) Check the average “fractals completed” numbers across all players who completed the fractals component of their monthly achievement for November. If you get a lot of numbers in the 7 to 10 range it’s likely a lot of players weren’t motivated to come back after completing their monthly. That’s only a one way correlation, obviously – if the numbers ARE higher they obviously may just be hunting the rewards, not having fun.
(b) Check the average hours spent dungeon/fractal instancing across players who did more than 15 dungeon runs over October against the same stat over November. If it’s gone up, they’re either enjoying fractals more or more strongly motivated by them (or some combination of the above). You then check the loot from their last fractal before log-off – if it’s at the top end of the RNG it’s likely they’re loot motivated. On the other hand if they’re coming back for more after high RNGs they’re probably enjoying the experience (whether or not they’re actually griping). Yes, this has a high anomaly rate across individual players but is reasonably reliable over hundreds of thousands of them.

You could do a whole ton more except for the stupid November monthlies being dungeons and fractals, which will distort your stats. As soon as they run a month without fractals in the monthlies we’ll be able to get some much better hypothetical metrics about fractal use.

It’s also likely that there are other kinds of metric that correlate to fun activity. You might find, for example, that players use emotes more on average when they’re having fun, or guild chat more, or mouse-look around the environment more during rest periods or something like that. None of those are immediately intuitively right, though, so you’d need a bit of research to sync them up. It’s research that’s reasonably easily obtainable though and I’d be surprised if Anet doesn’t already have some informing their analysis of the metrics.

More importantly, it’s the BEST way of determining enjoyment of content. What you’re advocating by contrast is taking anecdotal evidence from players. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes it’s not. I’m sure we all have experience with those players who buy the game, play it 10 hours a day for 5 years, spend a fortune at every seasonal event, and gripe and whine about how the game is ruined the whole way through. If that’s a discontented player, I’m sure Anet would like to have more just like him! And likewise the casual player who claims to love everything about the game and then just stops playing it after a month because he’s done.

Anecdotal evidence has its place, but it’s not a very big place.

JarekCyphus.7068:

f a fish equates to the disposition of one’s opinion? I just don’t see your logic there.

He was trolling; it was an obtuse kind of humour making use of sarcasm to expose the ridiculousness of the OP’s argument.

Unfortunately all the posts immediately following it that pointed that out were infracted but the original post was left alone.

shrug

nachtnebel.9168:

If the market research sector really thinks of that kind of data as a gold mine then I know why games keep getting worse. Log files of what people have done doesn’t tell you anything about what they want to do. Running 20 fractals per day doesn’t necessary mean that that player likes the dungeon, he could just want the 20 slot bags or is maybe hoping for a good ring to drop.

In-game activities don’t tell you anything unless you can link them to a players motivation, which you can’t get from just evaluating log files, you have to actually talk to him.

If you were only sampling one player this might be an issue. But you’re sampling ~1 million players, so it’s not. If you find that players stop running a dungeon as soon as they get a 20 slot bag, then it’s a safe assumption they’re running the dungeon to GET the 20 slot bag. If, in addition to that, you find that players who already HAVE 20 slot bags don’t run the dungeon at all, then probably the dungeon is not inherently fun and it’s all about the bag.

You can also compare it to the play patterns of casuals. Casuals aren’t going to run all the dungeons, and they certainly aren’t going to grind them. Looking at which dungeons casuals DO play, and in particular the ones they repeat, gives you a pretty good idea of which ones are fun, especially if they’re different ones to those being hit by reward-motivated players.

This is all year 8 statistics stuff, guys. It’s not rocket science. A statistic by itself can be misunderstood; the more intersecting statistics you have, though, the more likely you are to have a true picture of the situation. Anet has a LOT of intersecting statistics.

juventas.2975:

The respawn rate and enemy density in this game are way too high! Can you scale it down when there’s like two people in the map? It’s so frustrating to finally defeat all the enemies around a skill point node and the moment you beat them, all of the enemies respawn again and kill you.

Not all skill points are soloable. (If nothing else, I’m pretty sure Temple of Balthazar at Cursed Shore requires you to complete the group event at that area to make getting it possible.) There’s usually at least one on each map where you really should have at least some help from one or more other players.

That said, the vast majority ARE soloable. If respawn is kicking your butt, you may just need to do it better. Try using different skills, a different weapon, or approaching it in another way (maybe the mobs can be distracted onto a summoned creature while you get the point?).

There really are very, very, few places in the game where respawn rates are an issue, though, and if you’re finding that respawn is a frequent problem in same-level zones then you probably are misunderstanding something about your chosen profession or the game mechanics. Tell us a little more about what you’re doing and maybe we can help.

I’m reading “January and February are pretty much a full expansion worth of content” in the same sense that I read “the November update was pretty well received”. :-)

Which is to say that I’m expecting January and February to be interesting, and I’m looking forward to them, but they’re only going to be “a full expansion worth of content” if you’re used to very, very small expansions. Certainly not an expansion in the Blizzard or Guild Wars 1 sense.

If Keg Brawl, Costume Brawl and the Halloween PvPs are an example, activities are not Anet’s strong suit and I’d rather they didn’t waste time on them.

That’s not a knock on Anet; you can see the same thing in a lot of games. If you have a main game, and then a subset of the game that uses fundamentally different rules, the subset it pretty likely to suck because you’re now making two games and only one is going to be a priority for development and QA. (Yes, there are plenty of examples in the world of minigames done well, but they’re examples of beating the curve rather than proof of the concept.)

I understand that activities let you appeal to a wider range of player types, but you’re still better off trying to get their attention with something that plays to your strengths rather than effectively developing Bejeweled or something in parallel with your core game.

Tolmos.8395:

In the end, the only way that metric could show player dislike over something would be if they stopped playing. And deciding that something is fun and accepted simply because the playerbase didn’t quit overnight hardly seems like an efficient way to do things.

You, my friend, do not understand metrics. :-)

Assuming Anet gathers anywhere near as much information as, say, Valve (and they should) then they gather statistics on things like “last activity before log-off”, “first activity after log-in”, “activities repeated immediately upon completion”, “amount of chat interaction during activity”, “variety of skill use during activity”, “mouse-look variety during activity”.

They can use this, across a vast number of players, to determine which activities are probably triggering people to log-off (or take a break), which activities are prompting people to log in, which activites are producing repetitive (grindy) gameplay and which ones are promoting experimentation and exploration. They can tell which activities you talk about to your friends (although it might be harder to tell whether you’re griping or being enthused). And they can profile you to determine your player type and then see which activities are only being engaged in by high-end players and aren’t attracting casuals, and vice versa.

If you think metrics can’t be used to get a pretty good map of where the “fun” is in the game, you need to do more reading on statistics, analytics, and game design.

Tolmos.8395:

It doesn’t matter whether you think it is true or not. Since apparently the “silent majority” doesn’t care to get their votes in, you have one of three choices:

(etc)

Anet should do (and I hope does) what any other company does.
(a) Listen to and be aware of what’s happening on the forums (anecdotal evidence);
(b) Use their analytics, customer polls, and other professional market data (statistical evidence); and
© Remember that they’re the ones who are paid to use their own experience and talent to make the game, that methods (a) and (b) are supposed to inform their decisions, not override them, and then make bold, imaginative new content and stand by their creation.

The problem with this thread has been everyone confusing anecdotal evidence with statstical evidence. There is a place for both kinds of evidence in decision making, but you can’t will one into being the other no matter how hard you want it.

alcopaul.2156:

GregT.4702:

alcopaul.2156:

do you have to eat all the fishes in the sea to know what fish tastes like?

you just need to eat one to 2 fishes.

I was going to blast this and then I realised you were being sarcastic.
Good show. Well trolled.

The quote implies that i can take 1 player from say 1.6 million players who don’t go to forums and enjoy the game, get his opinion and that one’s players opinion is enough to represent those 1.6 million people’s opinions.

Yes, I know. Which is patently ridiculous.
It would make elections a lot cheaper to run if it were true, though. :-(

BabelFish.7234:

What were to happen if a player (like myself) was to invest a large sum or real life money into the gem store, convert it to gold and buy every last rare type of commodity (such as ecto).

Then what would happen if I destroyed every last one of those ectos?
What would the effect be on the TP?

The sum of money you are talking about is unfeasibly large.
You would not reach the stage where you could buy all the ectos because you would first impact the market for gems, reducing the price of gems to somewhere around 1 copper per gem. You would end up basically just buying free gems for whoever wants them. And, let’s be clear, it is a ton of real world money – tens of thousands of dollars at least – before you even get to that point.

Let’s say you somehow end up with a ton of gold out of your gem-buying scheme. You now need to buy all the ectos. And this is, again, stupidly unfeasible. They start out at, what, 27 silver an ecto, but by the time you’ve bought maybe a couple of hundred of these you’ve bought all the cheap ones and you’re now paying upwards of a gold an ecto.

You won’t get to buy all the ectos because the price will keep going up, and people putting new ones on the market will reflect this. You’ll be shelling out multiple gold per ecto; everyone who’s able to farm ectos will get rich for a couple of hours or so.

You’ll end up with a giant stack of ectos that you can’t sell because no one will pay the price you’ve just driven it up to, and then in probably only a couple of hours (or less) the price will revert back to normal and you’ll just have made a huge loss on your ectos.

Maybe, maybe during that period the price on other crafting components will fluctuate, because (a) people will divert to farming ectos instead of their usual patterns, or (b) people will be less inclined to craft endgame stuff while ectos are so expensive. But it’s unlikely you’ll be able to distort the market long enough for people to even notice.

But once again, the amount of real-world money required to even start to distort that is ridiculously huge. And if you want to try it, I’m sure Anet would be happy to let you try. :-)

Lordrosicky.5813:

I hate it when people say forum users are the minority of the community.

We aren’t. Anyone who knows about maths and sampling knows that forum goers provide a snapshot of the community and what we say reflects generally the feelings of the whole player base.

I know forum users = self selected sample so we arent totally reliable for feedback but that doesnt mean the people here and on other forums culminate to be a minority. It doesnt.

(1) Forum users are literally a minority of the community. Sampling doesn’t change that. I’d estimate that the number of people who regularly post to the forums is less than 5% of the player base, maybe as low as 0.3%. Intermittent posters will be under 10%, maybe as low as 1%. Players who read the forums even intermittently will be under 25%, maybe as low as 3%. Anet have stats on the number of user accounts, and user accounts with more than two posts; they can presumably confirm this.

(2) Forum users are not a representative sample of the community by any means, in that they are ridiculously strongly self-selected along precisely the lines that invalidate their opinion. They are by definition the players most invested in the game; they are by definition players dissatisfied with some aspect of the game (or else they’d just play it); they are players who crave the attention of others, who have a lot of free time, who are accustomed to engaging socially on forums, and who are willing to expose their opinions to the general public. That is to say, they may be as little as 0.3% of the community but they’ll almost certainly capture at least 60% of those with a strong problem with the game.

So what I’m saying is, these are safe and logical deductions from forum content:
(a) If any users anywhere have a problem with the game, it is probably represented on the forums.
(b) If a problem is not strongly represented on the forums, it is probably not bothering anyone.
© If the forums as a whole are more or less content, the game is probably in good shape.

The following are not safe deductions:
(a) If a problem is on the forums, that many players outside the forums care about it or are even aware of it.
(b) That if the forums by and large have an opinion, that this is representative of the opinions of players outside the forums.

I have to say that if they’re just going to be PvP-esque stuff similar to Keg Brawl I’d prefer them not to bother. I already barely touch the main PvP content, and that’s all way better implemented than Keg Brawl.

But they could certainly explore some other types of gameplay. Collaborative music making sounds awesome, Polymock could be kinda fun if it works off our existing mini collections rather than requiring us to collect something new. Other types of non PvP group play could really be exciting.

I doubt Bar Brawl’s still in the works, though. It sounds like they took the basic mechanics of the concept and turned it into Costume Brawl, which was a better idea anyway as it adds functionality to existing content, and you can play it anywhere.

I’ve opened about 50 black lion chests (mostly over Halloween) and I got one copy of the Endless Mystery Tonic that turns you into furniture.

Bear in mind that there are (several?) different versions of the EMT – one turns you into random furniture, one turns you into random mobs. There may be others.

Naoko.7096:

Gw1 was a corpg with instanced-maps. It’s not meant to be a mmorpg. Gw2 is a mmorpg with open environment. That’s why it has to accustom with the human nature in reality too. Mmorpg = a world that’s reflected from reality.

There’s hierarchy of needs, elitisms, dedication-get-rewards, skillful-get-rewards, sense of belonging to be with a group, seeking to feel special, seeking to be worth in something, to protect something, to feel motivated with something, feeding people’s needs of progression, seek something new everyday, taste something new everyday, to have leisure and most importantly, people in reality can only create light only when there’s darkness. That’s why in reality, people appreciate things more that comes with own effort.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

The closer the mmorpg is closer to human nature, the more successful it’ll be.
The reason: It’s inevitable that human nature will be shown in a virtual world that’s a reflects realism and people.

This is a frightening misunderstanding of game design, of the experience of human play, of psychology, and particularly of the work of Abraham Maslow.

Maslow’s model of human motivation (which in any case is now largely discredited) is intended to apply to the whole of human life, not to be micro-replicated into individual activities. It’s true to say that people are unlikely to play games (or feel comfortable playing games) when they feel their physical safety is not under control. But it’s not true to say that the game space should replicate and satisfy all of a human’s needs; the logical extension would be to say that people can’t enjoy a dungeon until they have a healthy guild and regular cybersex, because their emotional needs have to be met before they can self-actualize. That’s patent rubbish, and you look ridiculous for having suggested it. It would be analagous to the suggestion that for people to enjoy a hamburger it must offer them sexual intimacy, security of housing, and the potential for self actualization.

Specifically Maslow has nothing to say about whether humans enjoy challenge, or being rewarded for challenge. What he’s saying is that people are unikely to be motivated to seek out higher order challenges such as building their self-esteem or engaging in personal self-growth while their lower-order needs such as safety and social acceptance are failing to be met.

Appeals to authority work better when you understand what you’re talking about rather than just mis-linking a wiki page.

Mirta.5029:

It’s the same as saying “I don’t see the Mass Effect in Mass Effect 2”

[nerd]The “mass effect” is the ability to create fields which raise or lower mass through the use of element zero. It’s used in the game’s FTL technology, biotic powers, and most of its guns. In short, there’s plenty of Mass Effect in Mass Effect 2. [/end nerd]

Hawken son of Z.1367:

guildwars1 was not a failure.. so why did you change the NUMBER 1 REASON that it was different and was for several years the #2 MMO. (vertical progression). tbh.. all of your devs answers in the reddit interview make me cringe.. and im not alone. all of my friends that play this game feel the exact same way. we purchased guildwars2, BECAUSE WE LOVED GUILDWARS1!

there is a question to this threat – why did the devs feel GW1 was a failure?

They didn’t. It’s so much of a not-failure that it’s still online now, and you can play it.

Why on Earth would they make the same game twice?

Also, am I the only one who remembers the endless “raise the level cap” threads on the GW1 forums? The non-stop whining for it to be more like WoW, which eventually led to Eye of the North?

Doesn’t matter what the game’s like, there will always be someone who didn’t get the memo and wants something else.

zeromius.1604:

It’s possible it has nothing to do with Guild Wars 2 itself. Planetside 2 just came out recently and you have SWTOR going free to play. You’ve also got Black Ops 2 and Halo 4 that most likely will draw attention away from Guild Wars 2. I bet even WoW is losing playing time and possibly subscribers at this moment.

Judging by the sales figures on Mists of Pandaria I’d say WoW is absolutely haemorrhaging players. They lost a quarter of their subscriber base between Cataclysm and Mists, and latest figures suggest they’ve only gained a 10% bump back up on the back of Mists. They’re definitely on the downhill slide.

That said, they’re starting from a ridiculously huge player base, though. They could lose 95% of their player base and still be profitable (although probably not employ quite so many people). And the decline’s going to be asymptotic – that last couple of million subscribers are going to be there for more than a decade to come, much like the long tail on Everquest, only bigger.

Death Reincarnated.3570:

You can’t really close the gap. Accomplishments are based on the time/effort put into them. There is no viable way to lower the time/effort for a certain group of people and not have the other NOT be affected as well.

Well, playing devil’s advocate, you can use diminishing returns. So that each successive hour of play per day (or per week) after the first yields progression at a slower rate. Someone who plays four hours a day will still be ahead of someone who plays one hour a day, but not four times as far ahead – maybe twice as far.

And GW2 already does that to some degree through daily achievements and diminishing rewards on dungeons. It could do it more but you eventually get to a point where you’re discouraging people from playing your game, which is counterproductive.

You can do other stuff like giving people cash for each day they don’t log in – way less than if they played, but still more than nothing. It’d need to be per account, not per character, obviously. You can develop mobile apps so that players who don’t spend a lot of time in front of their computer per se can still meaningfully interact with the game on buses etc (effectively converting some of their existnig super-casual gaming time into GW2 time). You can recognise that casuals are more likely to want to play socially and make it easier to find friends for content, get into the content, and get out without downtime. You can apply a Magic Find boost that accumulates duration very slowly when you are logged off and drains very quickly while you are logged in.

There’s a lot you can do. I just think that the perception of the problem is maybe a bit over-sensitive, and it’s one that MMOs have been surviving just fine without having solved.

Any chance we could have Dev Tracker filter out comments about account issues and bans? Gaile does a wonderful job responding to these but there’s millions of them and they’re of absolutely no interest to anyone other than the player with the problem. It makes it really difficult to find the substantive posts.

Just set it to not include posts made in the Account Issues forum, if that’s technically feasible.

Erasculio.2914:

Take a look here.

For those saying, “LOL, not everyone who plays GW2 uses Xfire”, please read here.

Lol, statistics fail. Players who use Xfire are not remotely a representative sample; they’re heavy gamers, likely with a long game queue, exposed to a lot of media about upcoming games. They’re early adopters and early leavers; they play a lot of hours a week; they are likely to move games to follow their friends; they are likely to build social groups based on competition rather than on socialisation.

In short, you’re saying, “Oh noes, compared to launch day, there are significantly less early adopters online.” Which is… well, what did you expect was going to happen? For people who play 20+ games a year to suddenly get down on one knee and make a monogamous commitment to Guild Wars 2?

It’s a great game, but… seriously.

Level for PUGging EX dungeons is realistically 80 if you’ve never done them before.
Please don’t try and do an EX path with a PUG for the first time before level 80, you’re just costing your teammates time and repairs. Go with your guild, or wait till you’re 80.

Which is to say it’s absolutely possible to do them for the first time at all kind of levels, but I just don’t know why any random person would want to pull your weight for you while you learn.

Apathy.6430:

I for one enjoyed the crazy life bar juggling dance healing of Guild Wars. Healing in other MMOs was admittedly far less interesting, but healing in Guild Wars was just phenomenal gameplay.

I’m still missing it. I still haven’t come to realize that this system is “just better”. I mean, yeah you can kind of build most classes for some kind of support…my Guardian has some mean reflection walls and protection, and my necro has sustainable chilled…but it just doesn’t scratch the itch.

As a former GW1 monk (and a former WoW shaman and priest, and former DCUO controller), I like healing – but I’ve found I like it even more when I get to actually take part in the content and see what’s going on on my screen outside of those pernickety health bars. No regrets.

I’ve been playing MMOs for, what, ten years now? And I’ve been reading casual/hardcore threads for ten years.

Look, there’s no point in pleasing casual players because they’re not committed to the game, might leave at any momnet, and in any case they just want to get all the epic rewards without actually having to acquire skills or finish content.

And, honestly, hardcore players are just terrible, terrible people, and they’re lucky that they’re barely tolerated to play this game instead of being put in jail, where they can whine about how lenient parole systems are ruining the challenge of the custodial experience.

It may be that Arenanet are secretly breeding magical loot pixies that will shower tolerance dust over both casual and hardcore alike and bring about a new golden age where everyone is happy. That is possible.

But more likely you should just accept that this is a basically insoluble problem of MMO design, that casuals keep playing MMOs despite whining about not being catered to, that hardcores keep playing MMOs despite whining about not being catered to, and that the world goes on turning and we’re all having fun regardless.

Flyfunner.2093:

Yea i’m dropping my warrior though, trying to put everything on ele, only need 20g more for the last piece of cultural armor for him too. If i bought an exotics w/ karma from one of the orr places, can I salvage it for ectos?

Can’t salvage stuff from karma vendors, I’m reasonably sure.

They really tried hard to stop you converting your karma into coins in any but the most indirect ways.

At the very least you can make sure that all your karma-vendor cooking ingredients are maxed out at 250.

Have been gaming since 1984 on an Apple IIe. Have owned a Sega Master System, Mega Drive, PS2, Gamecube, XBox 360 and Wii, along with a plethora of handhelds. Have had a gaming PC for that majority of that time. Favourite genres have typically been RPGs, although I’ve recently been lured into the world of competitive RTS and MOBA gaming. Played GW1 casually for about 18 months, WoW for about two years including time as a prominent guild leader, City of Heroes and SWTOR for a couple of months each, and DCUO in an endgame guild for six months or so.

Have written about and reviewed games both as a hobby and professionally.

Have played most successful boardgames at one time or another; have played Warhammer, War Machine and Chronopia; have played a variety of CCGs, including Magic and A Game Of Thrones at a tournament level.

I write and run convention-style one-shot system-lite RPGs for Australian conventions and have on occasion been paid to run these.

I am in most respects a hardcore gamer, although I rarely put in the commitment to a single game that that demographic typically enjoys.

I love Guild Wars 2. It’s great. The art is the best I’ve seen in an MMO, and the game design philosophy is the most intriguing and intelligent. Their willingness to take risks and depart from previous models of MMOs is great, and I love their communication about how they come to their design decisions.

Frankly, for all that I love it, it’s just less addictive that something like WoW. I like playing, but I don’t NEED to play it. That’s vastly, vastly healthier (yay!) but to be perfectly honest it means I likely won’t stick with it as long as I did with WoW. shrug I need to find time to play other games somewhere. It’s normal and natural to be “done” with a game and move on. To expect otherwise is probably pretty unhealthy and co-dependent.

And as of right now, I’m still loving it.

It’s negative because the main reason for someone to come to the forums is because they are confused or upset about something.

People having fun rarely feel the need to come to the forums. They just play the game.

It’s redundant to ask, “Why is the complaints box full of complaints?” It only take a moment’s thought to see why there aren’t several hundred thousand posts saying, “Everything is fine, good job.”

Just want to say thank you for the tone and frankness of the communication on the AMA. One of the impressions that made me interested in GW2 was that the Anet team were intelligent people committed to grappling with the problems of MMO design in intelligent and interesting ways. I’d like the frankness of their communication about what they were doing with the game and, more importantly, how they were coming to their decisions. It seemed like they wouldn’t always get it right, but that they’d do things based on a reasonable chain of logic, and they’d alter course (again based on good reasons) if things didn’t work out.

The pretty terrible Lost Shores – and, more to the point, the awful communication blackout once it started going wrong – had shaken my faith.

I’m feeling more confident again now, and am looking forward to the future of the game! Thanks, all!

I have not had any trouble finding people to do anything, even during the “off” hours.

Seems fine to me.

If Anet start to notice any player dropoff they can just release it on Steam and the numbers will go right back up there.

As someone who loves both GW1 and GW2, I have to say that Guild Wars 2 took nothing I loved about GW1. They’re totally different games and I can’t really see how they have any demographic overlap in terms of MMO players.

That’s great for me and it’s what I expected. Now I have two games, instead of just an update of my first game. I went back and played some GW1 today, had a blast.

But the first game is absolutely a slower, more deliberative game in PvE with a much higher skill requirement for even basic play; and a faster, more dynamic, more skill-based PvP game. The design philosophies seem radically different; they’re both great philosophies, but they produced very different games.

I don’t recommend people who love GW2 go play GW1, or vice versa – they’re just not going to find a lot that they recognise, gameplay-wise.