Guild Wars 2

Chris – I know it’s kinda against forum rules to talk about other games, but I thought I’d bring up the (fairly) recent example of Oldschool Runescape to highlight an important point about communication. I hope you don’t mind…

Quick background: Oldschool Runescape (OSRS) has a small dev team of around 5 guys and an active player base of at least 100k (with around 10-15k online at any one time). It released in early 2013 as a set of official legacy servers running an 2007 build of the Runescape, and has had fairly significant development since then, with updates requiring a 75% majority vote from the community before they are implemented.

If you ever played Runescape back in the day, you’ll know that the community was very toxic, with ignorant and rude players who constantly demanded/complained about updates, insulted both the developers and one another and were generally very offensive. In many ways, the OSRS community is no different; players constantly argue over game updates with much the same level of vitriol as before, and from my experience it is significantly more toxic than the GW2 community.

However, the player-driven nature of the game forced the devs to interact with the community from day one: they post on the forums very frequently, asking the player feedback and engaging in real discussion. Particularly notable are the game update threads: a couple of devs will follow the thread for several hours after an update goes live and when players bring up bugs (sometimes in a very insulting manner), they patiently let people know that they’re looking into it, often give nice and simple explanations of the problem and provide ETAs on fixes (where possible).

While they still don’t do everything perfectly, I think it is because of this interaction that OSRS has thrived as a game separate to Runescape 3. The number of players has dropped since the initial nostalgia/hype has entirely worn off, but the game is currently in a very strong position, accounting for maybe 1/3 of current Runescape players, which is amazing given that it has been fully Pay to Play (unlike RS3) and with a dev team a fraction of the size of RS3’s.

So what exactly is the point here?

The very small OSRS dev team remains dedicated to engaging with a fairly large and often very difficult community, even after a year of the game’s release. The reason, I believe, is that all the devs have built up a habit of posting on the forums and so have become active members of the community (albeit better spoken than the majority). They are comfortable with giving honest and open answers, even about the most controversial topics and will even call out and attempt to correct any displays of extreme ignorance.

The Guild Wars 2 forums, by comparison, have had very few developers post actively since launch. I anticipate that it is fairly daunting for any one dev to start posting when none of the others do, and so the level communication fails to improve (or even gets worse as those devs that do post do so less frequently or stop altogether). My advice is therefore to encourage as many devs as possible to begin posting on a regular basis. I think this could be achieved by scheduling in some time every couple of days for everyone to both look at respond to the forums. Once more of them start engaging, it will become easier and easier for ANet to get back into sync with the community.

As a final point, I’d like to thank you, Chris, for all the work your putting into fixing this communication issue – I very much believe that good, two-way communication is necessary for Guild Wars 2 to have a sustainable future. As a final bit of encouragement, I’d like you to remember that each time you come back and engage with people in this thread, it will become that little bit easier to do it again in the future.

Thanks again, and keep up the good work,
- Loxorz

The chart very clearly says: `Top SUBSCRIPTION-BASED MMOs titles` Last I checked, GW2 wasn’t a subscription-based MMO.

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Also Meerak the Shouter? Almost sounds like a skyrim easter egg (Miraak, which is a dragonborn who uses shouts).

Meerak the Shouter was the guy in GW1 Post-Searing Ascalon who called out lines from the Flameseeker Prophecies in one of the outposts. He was also in Pre-Searing, as a monk or something in Ashford Abbey, but didn’t say anything interesting as far as I remember.

Olba.5376:

Heck, the most obvious reason for forcing 3rd person view? The character customization. If you had 1st person view, you would barely ever see your character. That right there is a lot of beautiful design work gone down the drain.

But you get to see other player’s characters a lot more clearly, so I’d argue that you get to see even more of that beautiful design work with 1st person mode. Personally, I remember that running around GW1 Kamadan in 1st person made me look at other players a lot more compared to 3rd person, and I’d appreciate much more how they’d dressed their characters.

A (imo better) argument is that character progression in GW2 is largely cosmetic, so you can’t see your own character’s progression while you’re in 1st person mode, but even then it’s not like you’d be locked in 1st person mode; they could make it like GW1 in that you can effortlessly scroll back to 3rd person any time you wanted.

The airship cannons severely damage Zhaitan, perhaps wrecking one of his wings, but he drags the airship down with him as he falls into the city below. Your party survives the crash and you see Zhaitan retreating into his lair in the centre of the city.

You meet up with a bunch of Order characters (maybe the other airships land nearby) and fight your way through to finish off the much weakened but still formidable Zhaitan. Proceed with epic final boss fight, and much rejoicing once the beast is slain.

I made a character just before the most recent feature patch and levelled them up a bit until I heard that the trait system was being re-done and decided to stop so that I could experience unlocking traits in the new system (when it came out).

I heard that new characters would go through the new system (which I wanted to experience), and old characters would have their traits auto-unlocked, and I was wondering if this would apply to my character? (which didn’t actually unlock any traits before the update)

Possibly relevant detail: I got the character to level 11 (when you used to get the first trait point) and then stopped, at the time deciding not to assign the trait point.