Guild Wars 2

(Continued from post above.)

I still log on and still play when and where we can.

I’m the leader of a Blackgate PvX guild that has been able to quietly make very large contributions to our PPT during very odd play times. I lead in WvW.

I’ve been an avid sPvP player for some time.

I have plenty of things to do and to work on.

I run fractals, and I have many, many alts.

I’ve played virtually every living story to achievement completion.

I have multiple characters decked in full ascended.

And I’m running out of hope.

The response to this should not be “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it if you’ve decided to leave.”

No.

I’m asking, and pleading, for you to understand not just my own, but my guild’s and my community’s concerns.

There needs to be a concerted, centralized effort to poll the player base and get a firm grip on what expectations and desires for the direction of the game are. Back in the Beta’s, there was an incredible system that asked for player input and feedback on the spot about different features. It was an inherent part of the game, and allowed players to write short statements along with it.

This metric needs to be introduced in a large, broad “Guild Wars 2 Survey” that polls the entire playerbase, optionally, through the game interface, asking a series of questions about the state of the game, it’s direction, and what forms of content matter most to them.

Questions like, check all of the things you’d love to see more of in the game:
[ ] New Zones
[ ] New Dungeons
[ ] New Fractals
[ ] New Living stories

Or, better yet, rank order each of these. This will help inform development priorities based off what players care most about.

Do people enjoy seeing existing content destroyed? Figure out if things like the Lion’s Arch attack were viewed positively or negatively by the player base. Find out in statistically valid means by using polling systems in-game, so that not only the feelings of forum posters are represented. Ignore the non-input of those who do not exercise their ability to provide feedback in-game.

Regularly re-do these large, broad Guild Wars 2 Surveys every six months to make sure players and developers are on the same page about the direction of the game.

If there is a wide disparity between what players care about, as indicated in statistically valid and quantifiable ways by the survey (this should be a basic marketing exercise) and what developers are prioritizing, please understand that the result will be situations that look like this one now, where hardcore, diehard GW2 fans are coming out, and writing long-winded but heartfelt posts to developers, trying desperately to explain this horrible path to people who are confused, irritated, and personally insulted by all of the “toxic” and “inflammatory” posts appearing out here.

Many of my guildmates are no longer willing to waste their time.

They do not believe that ArenaNet is either listening, or willing to listen.

One of them is off playing with player housing, quite happily.

Last night, we were playing new dungeons.

At one point, in the middle of a Wildstar dungeon, all four of us stopped, and sighed.

“I wish we had new content like this in GW2.”

At one point, my co-GM finished building a player house.

“I wish I had this for my toons in GW2.”

Another guildmate and I were out in a new zone, struggling with challenging mobs.

“Man, I wish we had zones like this in GW2!”

Truth be told, we all hate the graphics in Wildstar.

If GW2 had content like this, we’d be back in a heartbeat.

I wish we did.

I hope this post helped.

I have done my best to explain calmly, simply, and earnestly my observations of my guild, my server, and these boards over the past two years.

I genuinely care about this game.

I hope there’s something in the works that will help all of us change our minds.

We were sad to leave, but there’s only so many times you can run the same encounters, while your server community is destroyed by megaservers, and WvW is allowed to decay while core imbalances, bugs, and problems sit unresolved for months and years, so long that players stop bothering to post on the forums.

I want GW2 back.

And you need our help to bring it back.

I wish you the best.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

If these posts are deleted, then I’ll have my answer.

A sad part of me expects they will be.

Best regards,

Matipzieu KyA
Guild Master of <KyA>, founded 2002
Guild Wars 2 since closed beta.
Blackgate since before launch.
Guardian, Necromancer, Warrior
PvE, Fractals, PvP, WvW.

(Continued from previous post.)

As soon as the living story landed, and began adding content only to remove it shortly afterward, opening up no permanent zones, adding no new dungeons, no new play, creating innovative new play (the invasions, for example) that could and should have been new challenge-packed zones and permanent encounters with replay, I got to play once, or maybe twice.

And then we were back to running the same old dungeons again.

We have this huge swath of painterly, beautiful map.

It took two years for a single new permanent zone to be added.

Lion’s Arch, one of the most bustling, beautiful, and active zones in the game was destroyed.

Throughout all of this, we went from an active, engaging fantasy world with Zhaitan an the Orr, and a deep connection to the original GW1 lore over to Scarlet… who looked and sounded like a caricature out of a Saturday morning cartoon.

When Scarlet appeared, the epic “tone” and “feeling” of the game world dropped this down from an epic MMO to cheap cartoons.

That was a deep, deep, painful blow.

Guild Wars 2 has only barely begun to recover in its ambiance from that blow.

There are masterful writers now at the helm desperately trying to salvage the game’s “feeling” from the damage left by Scarlet, her cheap antics, and content that only lasted a few weeks before being removed while old content, re-used dozens and dozens of time, was left without relief.

Dungeon play has been ignored.

WvW has been ignored.

New classes, not on the table.

New abilities, barely.

One new zone, dense, but filled with tricks and gimmicks on the front end that dissuaded many of my guildmates from stepping into it. (“How do I move around this zone?”) But a step in the right direction, except for the decision to gate the front-end of it with movement gimmicks. It’s fine for me, but instantly disgusted many guildmates who were already on thin ice with ArenaNet and this game as a whole.

No expansions, which are desperately needed.

We’re just now beginning to see rumblings of a dragon, thank god, but I’m deeply worried that this will be far too little far too late.

Right now, Guild Wars 2 needs new content. New replayable, dense, immersive content. The living story steps introduced over the past month-ish have been a helpful step.

But they are also two hours of solo content.

We need hundreds of hours of group content.

More dungeons, more fractals, more zones.

Now, I understand intimately that a resource-strapped developer with people who are pushed to the limit already, who care deeply and passionately about their game will look at that list of needs and blanch in horror: you’ve got to be kidding me! There’s no way we have the manpower to do that, much less do that quickly!

But please understand, these are things that the player base has needed, asked for, cried for, begged for, for two years.

Instead, Lion’s Arch blew up, and was replaced with ugly smoldering craters.

Events that took real time, energy, and effort to work on were completely removed from the game.

If every scrap of content that had been introduced over the past two years had been permanently added to the game, and resources were shifted towards creating a steady flow of new combat zones, new dungeons, new fractals, and real improvements to sPvP and WvW that were based on understanding player needs, player desires, and responding to those needs and desires with player’s input, I believe there would be far more people playing GW2 today, and those posting here would be much more content.

Right now, the players are frustrated and angry because we have been clinging, very stubbornly, probably stupidly, to hope that things will get better. We have been loyal. We have been buying gems, and we have been playing.

But it feels like what we want, and care about, as players has not been even remotely interesting to developers, much less noticed, understood, or acted upon.

Please understand that I am now a Wildstar subscriber.

I didn’t want to leave GW2.

But it’s been difficult, with so little added or changed for so long, aside from fleeting living stories that give us a few hours to play in the middle of busy periods of work and always leave a lasting scar on the world. Content drops that leave the game worse when they’re over, and feel like nothing has changed, because nothing has been added.

Things have only been taken away, forever, like Lion’s Arch. I’ve never played a game before that has actively destroyed itself and removed content as time has gone on, rather than adding it.

(Continued in post below.)

(Continued from previous post.)

If anyone out there is determined to help fix problems like this, break through communication problems, get people who speak different languages and see different things to sit down together at the same table and start agreeing on things, by God, I’m one of them. This is what I do professionally and passionately.

And I will be blunt, and honest:

I have been unable to ply my trade with ArenaNet.

And I gave up.

Please understand the ramifications of this statement when thinking about how badly communication between developers and the player community has atrophied.

I’d like to take a moment to express what many people in the community believed and hoped would happen with the direction of the game, and what actually happened. This is not to chastise. This is to help inform, and my guess is allow ArenaNet developers to stop looking at the “toxic, inflammatory” mess of the forums as an irrational rampaging mob, and start looking at it for what it is: a bunch of people who have been loyal customers, trying, believing, holding on, who have been let down and pushed aside again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again.

There should actually be about twenty-three agains there.

What you see before you now are the last of the die-hards who still care enough to be angry.

My hope is to help shed some light on why that is, and what can be done about it.

If the attitude is that “these players are inherently toxic, irrational, and there is nothing that can be done about them” (bearing in mind these are the folks who cared the most passionately about the game, and have hung in there for two years of neglect and mistreatment) then I regret there is nothing more I can offer, and nothing I can write no matter how patiently I attempt to explain will be useful.

I sincerely hope that this time, my words are not ignored. There is a tiny spark of hope still left in me that Guild Wars 2 will rise up from the dead and return to help move MMORPGs forward. Right now, it’s a code blue.

I’ve hung on as long as I can, but to be honest, I’m not even sure it makes sense to bother doing my dailies any more, unless something changes.

And I stood before my guild telling them to hang on, and kept my guild in this game for an extra six months, while folks were getting antsy. I’m not sure you’ll find a more hardcore GW2 fanboy than me, because I love this game, and I love my characters. I don’t mind playing the same content out for a year. But two is getting very hard.

What did players expect at launch?

At launch, the game was amazing. It was healthy. It was hard. It was groundbreaking. Every ounce of pride that the original development team felt at launch, I shared as a player. Holy hell, these guys set the bar. Wow.

The two months before launch, for the first time since playing MMORPGs, I went two months without a subscription to anything rather than play anything else, because I couldn’t wait for GW2 to launch.

I have never, ever done that before.

Learning the timing, the movement, the dodging and the no-trinity style of play was a completely new beast. This game took time to master, and my guildmates and I were pushed more than we’ve been pushed before. This was just amazing.

The world was huge! We had space on the map where new zones could and would be added.

We had five more dragons.

We had limitless potential for living story content.

The dungeons were incredibly well done. The addition of the fractals a few months after release boded extremely well.

And World v. World! We’re old DAoC fans, and this was the best we’d ever seen since RvR finally flamed out, and DAoC died.

I wanted this game to be my “home” for the next four, five, maybe even more years. I could see playing this game for a long, long time.

We killed Zhaitan off around Christmas, and plunged into fractals, rolling waves of alts.

The quiet rumblings around the Norn starting zone happened…

Oh, my god, Jormag! YES!

…. and then it all went to hell.

(Post continued below.)

Hi Colin, Chris, and all of the other fine folks from ANET out here reading,

I’d like to offer a serious post out here. I understand the past few days there’s been a push, for whatever reason, for the folks over at ArenaNet to take a great deal of person time, energy, and effort (much of it outside of work and on their own time, out of their own interest) to work on this.

I understand what that commitment means, and I understand it can be personally very daunting to walk out here into what can at times be a “toxic” or “inflammatory” environment.

However, I’d also like to offer some perspective, and help provide some understanding about what has been happening the past two days, because it’s a result of what has been happening the past two years.

When Guild Wars 2 first came out, it was a blockbuster, a breakthrough, and a breath of fresh air on the MMORPG scene with a number of massive innovations. I remember walking into the low level personal stories with their cinematic, personally involved design and thinking “wow!” and even little details like everyone having their own instanced mining nodes helped to build community. Loot problems vanished when loot became personal. This was an interactive, artistic, community-driven game.

It then felt like a few months after release, attention to the community, and an active interest in seeking community input, vanished.

Please understand.

This is not a toxic post, this is an attempt to provide some understanding about what has happened.

The community can be one of the most powerful and helpful tools in a developer’s toolbox. We understand the issues. We understand the bugs. We understand the problems. We understand what works. We understand what doesn’t work. We understand what’s fun. We understand what’s not fun. We understand what can be done to improve them.

We also care just as deeply and passionately about the game.

The reason there is so much anger is because those few of us who are still left in this dying game still care about it, because we see the potential, we see the hope. Yes, there’s the China launch, and that’s probably contributing to the bottom lines.

But please understand the community’s anger:

Our game is dying.

And we are trying desperately to save it.

For many of us, it has been dead for a very, very long time now.

And we’ve given up hope trying to save it.

This game was such an innovative breakthrough. The art is stunningly beautiful. The world, before it started being chewed up and destroyed with no hope of restoring it, was beautiful. Now it’s feeling not like “there’s a dragon out there trying to stop us!” but “the world itself is mirroring the slow decay of the relationship between developers and the community, and the poor upkeep of the game.”

I understand the folks over in the building are hopelessly tired and overworked, passionate, dedicated, and driven. I understand there’s a sense of pride and dignity about the game in the building. I understand there’s a sense of accomplishment.

And in my line of work, dealing with very large issues under so many layers of NDA’s that I can’t even legally speak about them anonymously, with long lead times and frustrated clients I deeply understand on a personal and professional level what it means to have your hands tied on communicating with your customers.

But please understand: that’s not an acceptable excuse to the customers.

We don’t care about corporate policy. That’s behind the scenes to us.

This doesn’t mean we’re unreasonable.

This is really, really important.

What has happened, over time, is that things players do not care about have been a development priority. Things that have actively damaged the world for no reason, and consumed developer resources that could have been better spent on things players cared about, have been used in the worst possible way.

There has been virtually no useful communication with players about what to expect, the direction of the game, or opportunities for discussions on a strategic level.

The dangers this game faces, right now, are not at the detail level. They are at the strategic level.

I’d like to take a moment to share some of the community expectations. I have attempted to voice this, loudly, many times through appropriate channels (including internal ones) and have been ignored.

(Post continued below.)

I would be careful about going out to WvW at such a low level.

If you’re in PvD situations where it’s just the zerg running around capturing objectives, yes, you can level reasonably efficient that way, though in many ways you’d be better off leveling outside.

I commend you for taking a brave stab at the game, and taking the Anet’s comments that you can (technically) level from scratch solely in WvW at face value. Yes, technically, you can.

What I will caution, however, is that the instant you get into real combat, you should expect to be one-shot.

You will not be able to survive siege fire.

One decent player, either at range or melee, can and probably will take you out with minimal effort.

One of the biggest things you need to understand is the role of rallying in WvW combat scenarios. In a zerg on zerg fight, you can have 10 people in downed states on both sides; as soon as one player fully dies, if they’re targeting wisely (and fighting, say, JQ or SoR/SoS back in the old days, I’ve actually seen this happen) one uplevel can actually turn a fight, because ten of those players can suddenly hop up and keep going.

I would agree, do understand that you’ll be taking flak from your realm mates. You will probably be called a “rally bot”, a derogatory term for a character that contributes little value at high risk of rallying enemy forces.

However, I commend you for taking a shot at it.

I would agree that you’d be best off playing a necro (largely staff from range) or a warrior (longbow from range). These classes have inherently higher survivability due to base hit points, plate for the warrior, and death shroud for the necro.

Couple quick notes. Firstoff, I am not a lawyer, but I am a second-year law student (I have had training in criminal law and criminal procedure).

If you are seeking serious legal advice, hire an attorney. Goldenwing above cited the correct secondary source for criminal law in California, but just like she and the poster above her said, you should always contact and speak with a full fledged attorney when dealing with legal issues.

I would strongly encourage you (as a random individual on the internet, not in a legal advisory capacity) to (1) file a report with ANet, before you do anything else. Next, if you are uncomfortable, I would (2) encourage you to file a police report. If you’re still worried, (3) speak with an attorney.

Good luck and stay safe. It’s really sad that things like this actually happen.

Ran into this issue today. I have a simple belief: Obsidian Sanctum is a jump puzzle first, and a PvP area second.

It’s really annoying to put so much effort into the puzzle, only to get knocked off or killed at the end.

I was out trying to do the achieve today (and got it, first run through). I play a necromancer on Blackgate; at the moment, our server is not exactly favorably regarded by our fellow tournament matchups, which I understand.

What I do is work my way through, and I don’t attack first. Actually when I got to the dark room today, I ran across a little asura from another server who got lost, and I helped him find his way through by lighting things up (without attacking or putting down red circles) and pointing in the right direction to go. Got the little guy through, hooray! He scampered ahead. I got to the chandelier room, and got attacked by a ranger, clearly hoping to get a free kill.

I left his corpse two feet away from where I feared him off the edge.

I had another thief take exception to my presence; I left his corpse ten feet away from that.

I had a third thief attempt to resurrect the former, and left his entrails scattered across the wall.

With that taken care of, I proceeded to quietly and cheerfully go about solving my puzzle.

Funny thing, the other players in there suddenly decided to leave me alone…

Poor goldenwing (my guildmate and co-GM since 2002), now she has to listen to me grumble on the boards too.

Glad to see our guild isn’t the only one out here appreciating the rigorous challenge. It’s very refreshing!

Personally, some of us out on Blackgate (who have, for example, been steadfast members of the Blackgate community long before release to say nothing of our rise during S1) are enjoying the added challenge and pressure.

I categorically refute any suggestion, as a WvW-active Blackgate PvX guild master, that 2v1 is any form of exploit or any kind of situation that requires any sort of developer intervention. Categorically incorrect.

The entire premise behind the 3-way WvW design, based off DAoC’s RvR mechanics, is that when you get into a situation where a major power (i.e. Blackgate) starts completely dominating, the other two forces are SUPPOSED to band together to punish them in a way that is EXTREMELY difficult to counteract. This is the whole point of the system! That’s how you maintain equilibrium and prevent the entire system from simply breaking down when one side gets too powerful.

In other words, this is what’s supposed to happen when a server like Blackgate is dominating! I’m just surprised it took this long. I had us pegged for “dead meat” as soon as the first week of S2 started.

(See also, for the more academically minded: basic game theory, basic strategy, any cursory examination of a history of international relations viewed from a power context.)

On behalf of those of us Blackgate players who both (1) understand the system and (2) appreciate the added challenge, we apologize for the tears. From what I’ve seen in chat and out among the Blackgate WvW community (at least during the weird hours my guild plays) it is categorically not reflective of the majority of BG players.

Cheerfully,

Hi Shyhalu,

I’m a guildmate of goldenwing’s. In the core PvX group that we use to, among other things, 4-man explorables, fractals, and even some lightly (player) defended towers and keeps in WvW on Blackgate we run with a pair of what I’ll call “power/well/tank/dps/support” necros. We’ve discovered ways to use a combination of spec, gear/stats, particular weapons, and wells that we’ve found can deliver very compelling offensive and defensive support simultaneously. I’m personally a very large fan of wells, dagger/warhorn, and staff.

Among my other mains I have a guardian and a warrior. Both are very heavy buff-providing classes, my warrior particularly is a long-boon-duration sword/sword/longbow build that uses healing shouts.

I’ve found the necro, specced and played with finesse, outperforms the warrior (offensively, defensively, DPS, durability, and overall contribution to the group) by a nontrivial margin, but requires a great deal of skill and practice to fully leverage.

Not all of the ways to support a group necessarily look like stacks of might from blast finishers. There are plenty of ways to make a necro shine (well, in that dark and scary kind of way. )

I might call your attention to using the healing well, as well as some traits that modify wells.

Good luck!

I have an incredibly stupid question.

If one of the core problems we’re looking at is trying to halt karma trains and instead promote defensive objective gameplay (i.e. defend keep, defend tower) which in turn would promote more zerg on zerg fights, wouldn’t a sensible solution just be to increase the amount of PPT that objectives give over time?

This would provide a real, tangible defense reward, and would encourage greater levels of (1) fights, and (2) upgrading (meaningfully claiming, and getting excited about “this is OURS!”).

Here’s an example of what I mean:

Tower: held for 0 minutes to 60 minutes: 15 PPT per tick (current)
Tower: held for 60 minutes to 2 hours: 20 PPT per tick
Tower: held for 2 hours to 3 hours: 25 PPT per tick
Tower: held for over 3 hours: 30 PPT per tick

Keep: held for 0 minutes to 1 hour: 25 PPT per tick (current)
Keep: held for 1 hour to 2 hours: 30 PPT per tick
Keep: held for 2 hours to 3 hours: 35 PPT per tick
Keep: held for over 3 hours: 40 PPT per tick

Stonemist: held for 0 minutes to 1 hour: 35 PPT per tick (assuming we keep current SM)
Stonemist: held for1 hour to 2 hours: 40 PPT per tick
Stonemist: held for 2 hours to 3 hours: 45 PPT per tick
Stonemist: held for over 3 hours: 50 PPT per tick

Supply camps (these would be meant to flip, so maybe a little different):
Supply camp: 0 min to 30 minutes: 10 PPT per tick
Supply camp: 30 min to 1 hour: 15 PPT per tick
Supply camp: over 1 hour: 20 PPT per tick

The particular amounts that I’ve assigned don’t necessarily matter. This was a first-pass suggestion that I came up with that would slowly accelerate the value of the targets. This would create increasing incentives to both defend and attack key objectives, and would reorient the game towards objective-based gameplay, AND encouraging fights without completely revamping the existing system.

However, something like this would need to be carefully thought out. One of the major risks is that in a server set where we have gross imbalances already, this would perpetuate them. (For example, servers A, B, C are going after each other. A is consistently dominating and has a clear point lead every week.) I believe the correct counter to this is that when a server hits a certain ratio of low points for that week, that server should acquire an “underdog” buff, which enhances the amount of PPT gained under this system (10 instead of +5 for every increment held, for example) or decreases the amount of time (for example, an “underdog” server gets the full 3 hours bonus as soon as they capture an objective).

Still bugged; been watching the thing for a little while now and it seems to be stuck in the 24-25 player range. To my knowledge no one from BG has been able to either get through the queue or make it to the map. (Of course if someone can correct me, that would be very welcome. )

From a design angle, it seems to me that we have an interesting force that we can leverage: if we can get server populations stable and spread reasonably well, and create environments where most people want to stay put, that will go a long way towards allowing the community and realm pride to heal. Agreed full with Nuzt and Bertrand above (+1 to both) that on low pop and up-transferring servers undergoing guild flight, we’ve got a hemorrhaging situation that needs a swift fix ( +1 to Baels.)

I respectfully disagree, however, that the only way to do this is by switching to a color versus color scheme. I think there are other options. The key here is to create incentives that match and ideally overcome the pressure to move upwards. If incentives to move downwards can be implemented, many entrepreneurial guilds will do just that.

It occurs to me that one option to do this is to leverage individual incentives (getting prizes, bonuses, winning stuff) and align them with community incentives (want to encourage down-transfers and then stability closer to the bottom).

Right now, we have tons of folks flocking to the major T1 servers. This is hurting everyone. A lot of that flocking is now being driven by the proposed very high rewards for S2.

I have a radical off the wall idea: would it be possible to implement and publicly advertise “underdog rewards”?

In effect, when you go to place a bet (say, horse racing, not that I have much experience with it) you get odds. The less likely you are to win, supply and demand say you have to get a big payout if it actually happens. Same works with investment. Interest rates on losing propositions are really high, etc, etc.

If the goal is to get some competitive feisty-oriented leaders to transfer down, there are a few tools that I would propose implementing:

(1) Identify hemorrhaging servers. Find some metric (and frankly, the best bet will probably be a combination of population, coverage, overall WvW score, and community assessment) and then target those servers for receiving large bonuses.

(2) Provide some baseline reward, or better yet guarantee of a reward, for playing a season/just playing weekly on low-pop servers. Ensure that there is lock-in so that players on high-tier servers can’t just “hop down” when it looks like they might lose. This needs to be a very real reward; an extra 20s chest every week is not going to do it. Extra shots at season end rewards, or guaranteed increase in end-season rewards (example: an extra ascended) I’m definitely willing to bet would. An example here would be in low-pop hemorrhaging servers to guarantee an extra 10-20% loot (say, one bonus ascended item would be enough to make a huge splash) for those that fight exclusively on these low-pop servers whether they win or lose. This will attract a lot of people, especially if it’s heavily advertised. While this would be messy as all hell at the beginning of the season, by sending a clear signal that this will be repeated in the future for all low-pop/hemorrhaging servers into the future, it will create a “reverse pressure” that helps stabilize population shifts upward. (Ideally, upward and downward movement would reach equilibrium and then stabilize.)

(3) There should be increased rewards for winning in a low pop/hemorrhaging bracket that are above and beyond those available in higher tiers. The idea is to equalize the risk/reward curve between playing on a T1 server and playing on a T5 server. I believe the bulk of extra rewards should occur here, in the “extra win award” space. Many players will attempt to maximize wins, and this could revitalize competitive guilds moving into low-pop spaces. Rather than use a one-size-fits-all hammer approach here, the more dire straits a server is in, the bigger the reward should be to help stabilize it.

To reiterate, however: this is a Band-Aid. A very ugly, messy Band-Aid. There is ultimately no substitute for building a strong community; these changes would just be designed to get people onto the ground on these low pop servers, a core requirement for beginning design changes and revamps that encourage people to stay on their home servers.

Longer-term solutions should ultimately reward server loyalty. The sorts of decisions that support and strengthen community building should be supported by in game incentives, though not so much that people that have real reasons to leave servers feel trapped. Incentives like extra rewards for low-pop/underdog servers (measured by objective indicators of how the server is doing) are a great first step, but they should be tied to dedicated play on that server to prevent abuse. The goal is to reward revitalization of the servers, not hot-dropping in at the last minute to pick up some extra loot.

Best,
Matipzieu KyA

(continued from above)
To illustrate: The Tale of an Epic Stonemist Fight at 8:48 on a Random Wednesday Night: Sea of Sorrows and Jade Quarry each have 3 and 7 players roaming around the SM Courtyard. Henge of Denravi, who opened up the wall, bring a group of 25 players in, and proceed to massacre all three Stone Sentries. The event display reads “3 of 3 Stone Sentries Killed” and displays a progress bar. Because there are 10 enemy players to Denravi’s 25 players in the ring, Denravi only has 250% (2.5:1) of the players in the courtyard, and aren’t allowed to begin capturing. This provides a serious incentive to both fight and to not run away in the outer ring. It also encourages double-teaming…and then the double-teaming worlds to duke it out for final capping rights. Suppose two of the JQ players, upon seeing the Denravi zerg, port out, taking it to 25 to 8, and then two of the Sea of Sorrows players run into the zerg and are killed off. Now it’s down to 25 to 6. Under a lenient setting (400% or 4:1 threshold) Denravi begins to capture the courtyard. Under a strict setting, Denravi would have to split up and hunt down the holdouts in SM, at which point they can begin capping.

Once Denravi caps, they own the outer walls, and the porting rights through the gates/walls. Suddenly SoS, which still owns SM lower and SM upper, is in trouble. They have a few players up in the citadel, who are now trapped by the oncoming army, and have to do their best to defend it. Their main force meanwhile loads up rams, catapults, and omegas to try to break down the door of their own fortress to try to reclaim it. Meanwhile, the Denravi force inside has a few minutes’ breathing room try to push through and open inner, take lower, and then fight up to Upper.

Suppose Denravi manages to open up inner before SoS is able to take down outer. (Recall, right now, SoS owns SM lower, SM upper, while Denravi owns the Courtyard). The PPT timer ticks; SoS gets +25, Denravi gets +10.

The timer restarts again, and Denravi manages to take Lower: they kill the lord and then claim the pad. Suddenly the inner doors reset to full health, belonging to Denravi. SoS breaches outer, and claims the courtyard. The pressure is on and it’s getting tight. The five SoS holdout defenders now in upper are sweating bullets, and two jump down to join the main zerg now racing to bust through inner. Denravi manages to crack the last door into Upper—they had to PvD because they were out of supply—at the same time that SoS manages to bust through inner. Just as Denravi is working on the Upper SM lord, SoS smashes into them with a zerg of 15. An epic fight on the upper floor of SM ensues, with bodies flying off the balconies and blood splattered everywhere. Somebody wins, but since it was a hell of a lot more fun than two realms just racing through two different doors to the lower lord pad (SM has an upstairs?) a good time is had by all no matter who wins.

(Alternatively, there could be three small citadels or open-space “lords”, sentries, or whatever we want to call them, at three points inside the SM courtyard, and as others have suggested, maybe set it up so that all 3 pads must be taken—possibly in sequence, like a classic outdoor event—before the courtyard flips.)

And with that, I’m probably about to burn dinner. Fascinating thread, and I hope these posts are useful.

Apologies for the broken post. Wish there was a way to up the character limit for serious threads like this. Since Devon has been kind enough to take the players seriously, I figured I would return the favor and go all-out in this analysis. Thanks again for hosting the thread.

Best,
Matipzieu KyA

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SUMMARY: I am deeply concerned about the prospect of removing the “World” from World v. World not because of an irrational attachment to that particular model, but because the presence of an enduring, inclusive community is a crucial element of WvW, and I can’t envision a suitable alternative to the World model. Alliances come close, but I believe they would be better suited as an addition to worlds, rather than a replacement for them. I am concerned that moving towards an “EotM” model will devastate and drive off many players, like us, who derive the majority of our interest in the game from being a part of a community.

To analogize: what would the Super Bowl be if it was just Red versus Blue? That’s what WvW would be like without Worlds. Trying to take the enduring, inclusive communities out of WvW is like trying to do modern sports… without teams.

2: Comments on Revitalizing Stonemist

There are a number of really interesting ideas about how to revitalize Stonemist that are floating around. These are fascinating, and I’d be really interested to see how they pan out. However, before I dive in and help out (honestly, as a GM that’s been WvW active since long before Blackgate was anywhere near an interesting server, haha, this sounds like it could be a lot of fun!) I do want to toss out one quick concern:

Whatever changes go through, new players who still need the Stonemist Vista and Stonemist Point of Interest HAVE to have a way to still reasonably be able to get them on low-pop servers. If there is ever a WvW season/tournament achievement for a certain number of Stonemist captures again, this becomes an even more salient point! Because we often play at really odd off-hours (I suspect many of the top commanders on our server wouldn’t even recognize us) two of my guildmates were almost unable to get credit for capturing Stonemist enough times to get the WvW achievement, and we were hardly slouching off during the season. Eventually we had to concoct a hair-brained scheme to get one last SM capture in involving a large number of Omegas, a handful of mesmers, and a few dozen lucky rabbits’ feet. While epic, I’m concerned that whatever change is made to SM has got to make sure new players can get their Map Completion—be it for their Gift of Exploration/Legendary, the principle of Map Complete, and achievements—and the best way to accomplish this might be to make it easier to access both the Vista and PoI if SM becomes harder to capture. For example, expand the radius of the SM PoI to include anyone that manages to make it inside the courtyard (past the first wall), and place the vista on a nearby hill outside of SM (leaving the existing vista as a legacy, of course, since it’s an awesome view, but not one that counts). Or reduce the number of vistas necessary for map completion on EB by one.

With that preliminary concern for new players out of the way, the idea of breaking Stonemist up into several different capturable objectives is really interesting.

An alternative to towers/citadels: stages

Just to toss this one out: an aesthetically and possibly much easier to code alternative to adding a series of 2, 3, or 4 towers inside SM (which would entail artwork and engineering redesign) might be to break SM up into a series of separately capturable stages. For example: SM right now is worth 35 points/tick, central lord pad in the bottom.

An alternative might be to break SM into three objectives:
- SM Courtyard (outer ring) (breach the first wall and occupy the ring) – worth 10 points, with a reduced re-capture timer (say, 2 minutes instead of the usual 4).
- Lower SM (breach first wall, breach inner, capture current lord pad) – worth 10 points with a 4-minute timer.
- Upper SM (breach first wall, breach inner, storm up from the lord pad and fight through a third, single door to take a lord, say, somewhere in the upper area of SM.

Personally, I could almost see the chat: “Inc outer SM, retreat to lower” – “Just took lower SM, get to upper” – etc.

The key to this system would be to devise a way to capture a large, awkwardly sized objective like the outer ring. I would suggest drawing a large “O”, including the entire courtyard. Have three roaming “Elite Stone Sentries”—equivalent to standard tower lords—that respawn every 3 minutes. Once all three are dead, a progress bar emerges. Here, instead of driving every single player from such a huge area (I’m thinking virtually the entire area consisting of the ground inside SM, from inner wall to the inside of the outer wall) allow the attacking realm to begin slowly progressing the bar as soon as they have either 400% or 500% (4:1, 5:1) of the current enemy players in the ring.

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(E) Many players have suggested that game-wide communities can be established. But how much community is there on sPvP or EoTM? This is one of my biggest concerns about removing the “world” from World v. World. We have a simple test case: in sPvP, you have short-duration set matches composed of players that will overwhelmingly never see each other again. This allows players to get into the game and play it very quickly and easy—great! But it’s important to let people who like to eat pizza to order pizza at the restaurant, and people who like steak dinners to order steak dinners. sPvP is a market niche. It’s great for players who are killing-oriented, enjoy fast-paced very small-group combat. Typically strategic play like you see in WvW is minimal. (Disclosure: I have played sPvP since release. To illustrate the point: sPvP is what I do when I’m solo and want to go “shoot some hoops”, blow off some steam, or shake up my daily laurel routine. WvW is what I do when I’m dead serious about kicking some kitten at a strategic level out with my guild. They are two totally different games, like Halo and Starcraft.)

(F) Game environments that are not anchored by community quickly stagnate and turn into cesspools. This is a blight, and leads to a blighted experience that drives away more serious and mature customers. Furthermore, the customers driven away are those that are more likely to be (A) loyal and (B) able and willing to pay more at the gem store to support the game.[/u] Suffice to say the transition from DAoC to WoW was a very kittene for my guild when DAoC’s developers decided to put a quiver of arrows through their golden hen. The culture in WoW, which has been the subject of more than a few dissertations at high-level universities, was for a very long time ranked highly among internet cesspools. The overwhelming majority of incentives were zero-sum and oriented strictly towards personal gain. Many incentives were such that the only way to personally advance was to do harm to others (guild hop upon gear acquisition in raiding). The opportunities to create, support, or contribute to a larger community were virtually nonexistent. Many other games that have followed have encountered similar problems. WoW managed to attract tremendous subscriber bases in spite of its player community, not because of or alongside it.

One of the things that attracted my guild so strongly to GW2 as soon as we started watching Colin’s videos back in early 2012 was because not only of the incredible community of old GW1 players that were coming over, but because the game world created incentives for players to cooperate and help each other out, with WvW as the epitome of those incentives. It was an incredibly refreshing change of pace, and the closest we’ve ever come to the old DAoC glory days. GW2 has the staying power and fundamentals to prove that the genre of community-oriented MMOs can compete with the big boys and deliver a far more fulfilling community experience. I would hate to see a major part of that brand, WvW, harmed. I think a great many players share that sentiment.

(G) Many customers, like myself and every single one of my guildmates, both enjoy WvW and continue to play GW2 for two things: epic dragon fights and something larger than ourselves. Since we’re currently fresh out of dragons, and given the current, er, direction of the so-called Living Story, there is not a single member of my guild that expects to see any more of the content we actually keep hoping for in the next year, if not two. The only thing keeping us actively playing and purchasing from the Gem Store today is the feeling that we are contributing to our home server. We do not like to play anonymously. We like having a home. We like defending it. We like taking things and pulling off impossible feats for the sake of it. Our playstyle often has us blowing enormous amounts of guild catapults, which are expensive to manufacture (and once we even bought gems to replenish our stockpile of them off the TP in the middle of a fierce match during S1 when things got heated up). There is no way we would ever consider spending real life money on gems for an anonymous match that didn’t matter, and we definitely wouldn’t go bragging to old DAoC comrades about how amazing GW2 was if there was no sense of community that we could belong to and contribute to. Absolutely no way. I doubt we would continue playing for more than maybe a month if community was abolished.

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When you go out to WvW, you’re a valuable resource. Every server (even BG) needs every incremental player we can get in order to be successful out there. That scarcity and the player owning the supply—like a really nice job market—enhances both the value and play experience of the player. Inclusiveness is a key ingredient to creating a positive play experience. This is the part of the recipe that made DAoC so great. I remember way, way back in the classic days when Level 50s (max level in DAoC in 2001-2004 glory days) would run around lowbie zones welcoming new players to the game—I’m not kidding, by the way, even though this probably sounds insane in the MMORPG world post-WoW—and handing out gold and the occasionally semi-rare but pretty sweet looking piece of armor or weapon because they hoped that level 1 running around in ragged cloth and getting killed by a water beetle because they were having a hard time figuring out which key to punch to start swinging would grow up to be one more decked 50 out on the field when it counted.

The best part is that that inclusion is automatic: it just happens. You can’t not be included and benefit from inclusion, by game design. With an alliance system, there are additional barriers erected to inclusion. And if that doesn’t sound like much, it’s the difference between the LFG tool and map chat in Lion’s Arch. Yes, the determined and more socially-minded players will always have a home. But what about the people that play to get away from having to deal with all of that in real life, or who don’t have the time or emotional bandwidth to deal with yet more social situations like that? It’s really important to keep an eye on the new player experience when contemplating massive game design changes like this, not just on the jaded old vets who’ve been here for a while, because having the right mixture of old-timers and infusions of new players is the key to getting to celebrate the game’s ten-year anniversary.

COMMUNITY: This goes without saying. There needs to be a community for WvW to continue to be the experience that appeals to the players it does. Without community, WvW is just expensive, long-match PvP that happens in your PvE armor with a few doors and stuff in the way. With community, WvW is an explosive, heart-pumping, adrenaline-running and nail-bitingly epic experience. When S1 came down to the death match between JQ and BG and JQ was pulling ahead for the first three days of that week, I can’t remember seeing the players come together and fight side by side since 2002. WvW is intrinsically linked to community. For some, yes, the rewards and the EoTM experience are enough, granted. I’m actually very glad that the folks that love that kind of arms-length play have found a happy home. But for many of us, you can’t take the “World” from World v. World.

To put it simply: you’re just not going to get a video like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdecWAAJcMQ with the title “Blue Worlds Win Season 4.” Not going to happen. Personally I’d rather try to figure out ways to deliver this kind of experience to T2 and T3 and T4 servers, rather than reduce everything to generic colors that you can pick at will.

© Right now, without the ability to form alliances, Worlds and Servers are the only vehicle through which that enduring, inclusive community exists in GW2. Shifting the focus to Guilds and Alliances, as some posters have suggested, is probably the next best bet.

(D) Even if an Alliance system were substituted, this would be an enduring, but not necessarily inclusive community. I’ve already described my concerns with the inclusiveness versus inherent exclusiveness issue above, but I could in all seriousness see using guilds as a next-best platform. It would be a little bit like reducing the international system from relations between nations to a global patchwork of city-states (where some will be huge and powerful, your Londons, Singapores, New York Cities, and some will be tiny little Fresno, CA’s) but with alliances, it might be possible. I think a better solution would be to continue using worlds and building in an alliance system (with “alliance chat” and possibly some other in-game features) to cement, help create, sustain, support, and energize world communities. The more opportunities players have to put down roots, the more fun social players have, the more fellow kitten -kickers killer-style players have beside them in WvW, and the longer everyone plays, has a good time (and buys gems).

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ENDURING: The key ingredient of building relationships, reputations, and the feeling of walking into a familiar place (think “Cheers” or “Friends”, but with a healthy dose of “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Lord of the Rings”—that’s the sweet spot) as opposed to something awkward, faceless, and random. Trying to extract a sense of community from sPvP (without setting up a special private server ahead of time, which is a totally separate issue) is, well, like trying to have a meaningful heart-to-heart with a stranger on a social networking site. It… just doesn’t work. There is no substitute for creating that sort of emotional, familiar connection with a place and a community than having a place for that community to exist.

Rather than running a “race to the bottom” and equalizing the community experience across all servers by removing the community experience, an integral ingredient of what defines WvW, altogether the focus should be on trying to find ways to create, foster, and enable that community on lower-pop and other servers where the play experience is currently broken.

It’s difficult to imagine “World versus World” without the World part, but the underlying issue is that there needs to be a way for players to repeatedly interact with the same players (though, preferably, not always the same enemies) again and again. You can get comfortable, recognize names, and (for many players, most importantly) be recognized on a server only if you have the chance to get to know the community out there, and the community has a chance to get to know you.

With a randomized, “color-only”, there is no ENDURING component to the play experience. Interactions are arms-length at best. It’s incredibly easy to go from pleasant to hostile because you’ll probably never see the other people again.

A second issue with the “enduring” component is the importance of having an enduring community that exists outside of WvW as well. On Blackgate, one of the reasons I honestly think we were able to do as well as we did is because we had an inclusive, welcoming PvE culture in the open world on our server during release. I think a lot of that culture transferred into creating the culture and setting the stage in WvW. Yes, there were other factors, and as a GM of a guild that was on BG at head start when our rank looked pretty terrible, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what they are, but that inclusiveness moving out into WvW helped not only give us coverage, but create a fun place where people want to play. Personally, if Blackgate fell to T6 next month, I know every single member of my guild would still be here for that community.

This is the crux of my concern about removing “worlds” and switching to a purely “pick a color” scheme. When you join EoTM, you’re a color. It’s predefined for you, and it matters just about as much as joining a particular side (red or blue, who cares?) in sPvP. The color has no meaning except as a temporary identifier of which side you are, and which side they are.

INCLUSIVE: One of the ideas that’s gotten traction on this thread is to replace “worlds” with voluntary “alliances.” Let’s assume for the moment that this is actually feasible, and that every guild serious about winning S2, S3, or S9 for that matter wouldn’t all just try to band together and that there was a way to solve the “alliance hopping” problem in an equitable, reasonable, sane way. Okay. The next problem is that switching to this model of “World” association is that it is by definition exclusive, not inclusive.

With Worlds, you have to join one to play. It’s a mechanical process with no pressure at all. Hey, this server has a cool name (that’s how our guild picked it back around Head Start), let’s play there! Or, far more often, hey, my friends/guild/significant other plays on X, so I’m going to go play there too! No pressure, and voila, you’ve got a home.

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Hi Devon, T1 GM of a PvX (WvW active) guild here.
Firstoff, thanks for posting and hosting this CDI thread. It’s very good to see more folks from ArenaNet with their sleeves rolled up down chatting amongst the masses, which reminds me very much of the old “Management By Walking Around” – there’s a lot of good information out here, and I’m glad to see ArenaNet out speaking with their community. This kind of dialogue is really valuable for both the health of the game, the community, and for improving and innovating better game design.
This is a great thread, but I’d like to both offer a series of suggestions and a few very strong words of caution with the best explanations I can muster in the midst of a busy work week. Apologies if I’ve got a few typos, I’ve probably had as much sleep as many of the folks on ANet’s staff…
I also wanted to talk this thread over with my guildmates before posting, to make sure that when I posted I was also speaking for them as best I could. When you’ve been the GM of the same folks for over a decade, I guess it’s a hard habit to break.
I’d like to address two main topics that I’ve seen here. First, the issue of whether worlds should be abolished (I have some very serious concerns about this proposal) and secondly, possible changes to Stonemist (which, if executed correctly, could be very interesting).

1: There Must Be Some Form of Enduring, Inclusive Community: Servers/Worlds Are It Right Now

There have been innumerable posts from folks concerned about removing world identity and the communities that are created and fostered on servers, and very serious worries that this would irreparably harm if not destroy the WvW feeling, sense of pride and accomplishment, and possibly even WvW as a brand. I share these concerns and am somewhat alarmed that the notion of abolishing servers in favor of anonymous, randomized masses like EoTM. To me, that’s no longer WvW, that’s sPvP.

My guild and I are old-time DAoC vets. We were there in Classic and were really active during the golden days of SI and were very active both as raid leaders and in our server community during the ToA years. We have seen the best and the worst. What finally drove us out of DAoC—and away from RvR/WvW until GW2’s release a long, terrible decade later—was when DAoC’s developers began systematically damaging the RvR/WvW play experience against the advice of countless members of the community and their internals testers (which included myself every one of my officers). I am deeply concerned that a movement to remove the enduring, inclusive community aspect of WvW, which today is accomplished through Worlds/Servers, could begin a “spiral-down” process like that which finally killed off DAoC. However, rather than wave my arms and caution that the sky is falling, I’d like to spend a few minutes walking through the basis of my concern.

(A) To even matter, much less feel epic the way WvW should, there has to be a point to it that’s greater than personal gain. This should sound like a very familiar, comment sentiment across time and many, many games. The reason my guildmates and I were willing to go all out during Season 1 on our server, and for months before then, was because we felt like we were able to contribute to something bigger than ourselves and our loot bags. That sense of being a part of something bigger is a huge component of what leads us to play WvW/RvR style games, and why we’ve been dedicated to GW2 for as long as we have (since Beta 2). There’s only so much farming or sPvP you can take, as a guild of players who think and feel the way we do. While it’s fun to run dungeons, that feeling of contribution under uncertain circumstances is the best ward against boredom and staleness we’ve been able to discover. Without that feeling of something bigger, the value of WvW for players like us would be greatly diminished.
(B) This something greater is provided by enduring, inclusive community. I’d like to try to delve into just what that elusive ”thing” is that many posters have attempted to touch on when it comes to why worlds matter so much for WvW, whereas others have argued against them. To clear up the confusion, the best explanation I can offer is this:

It’s not about worlds, per se, it’s about an enduring, inclusive community. I’ve picked these three words very carefully to try to hone in and distill the meaning that I’ve been reading on these boards and elsewhere for a long time, and seen reflected on this thread.
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Those numbers sound really off. No character has 48,000 health; I’m not sure even extreme vitality builds (which would be of marginal utility) would crack 30,000.

If you’re taking damage like that, I just have a few questions:

(1) Are you upleveled, and if so, from what level? A Level 2 fighting in WvW, for example, against level 80 ascended armor, “glass cannon” high offense builds would probably be close to one-shot by skilled players.

(2) If you’re not extremely upleveled, do you have enough (A) toughness and (B) vitality in your build?

(3) At the time, did you have a high number of stacks of vulnerability on you?

(4) What profession and what build are you using?

“Different opinions exist.

Different playstyles exist.

Opposing opinions exist.

Opposing playstyles exist.

Gameplay etiquette will continue to evolve."

-The Zen of online gaming

I’ll keep this short and sweet and simple: community and server pride, that sense of belonging to this server and this server mattering, is the vast majority of what is keeping my guild and I playing this game.

If that leaves, the amount of reasons we have both to play and to make purchases at the gem store will probably not be sufficient to keep us doing either.

I hope that there will be more emphasis on interesting story (not “scarlet” type Saturday morning cartoon antics, but epic dragon-slaying stories with a personal touch, like the original lure, appeal, draw, and dignity of GW2, as befitting the legacy of GW1) as well as opportunities for actual PvE, full dungeons, zone content, and WvW to be improved and expanded. These game dynamics are important, but the community and server community context of this game is a crucial part of maintaining GW2 as a mature and interesting MMO, instead of a cheap cesspool knockoff like so many others my guild and I have fled.

We enjoy GW2. But if it devolves into that cheap cesspool, I’m not sure many of my guildmates would be able to stomach it—or the sad loss that it would imply.

Apologies if this was a little blunt: it needed to be said.

One simple solution would be to check every 12 or 24 hours whether someone from that guild has been present in the zone. If not, alert the guild and begin a one-hour countdown to the objective resetting to guild-neutral. (To be cautious, if there are no guild buffs activated.)

It makes sense from both a gameplay and a lore standpoint: if your guild has abandoned the objective, what claim do you actually have to it?

Good news! As mentioned above, you can just talk to your class trainer and select “I’d like to retrain my points.” This will cost about 3s50c at level 80. Have a nice night!

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(5) The core thrust of these concerns revolves solely around the gold storage and centralization mechanic, and the fact that players no longer have the OPTION of choosing how to store their gold. Players like me are not arguing that there shouldn’t be a wallet. Far from it. I have explorable tokens, fractal relics, and WvW tokens spilling over multiple bags. Players like me are celebrating and happy about the Wallet in terms of addressing these also very real problems—we’re impacted by them too! However, the way that this has been implemented leaves no room for players to choose how to manage their own gold reserves in the same ways they have both since launch and across multiple years (in my case, over a decade) of MMO gaming.

Solutions:

(A) Do not remove the gold deposit to bank function, but keep the entire remaining implementation of the Wallet mechanic. This would in effect keep the “opt-in” current system of the banking system. Players who do not actively want to store their gold centrally have no need to do so. This preserves player choice, and allows those of us who want the system to continue to secure and store our gold with dignity and ease, which will not be the case if we are forced to use personal one-account guilds at nontrivial expense to re-create the same base functionality that has been removed. Players who do not wish to store gold in the personal bank are not impacted by this design. I am struggling to see the downside to this from a player perspective.

(B) Create an option for whether gold is stored in the wallet or stored separately across characters. This would be the ideal option, and would allow players to play the game the way they want it to. I’m assuming that this would create some minor technical challenges. As a player, however, I am much more concerned with my gameplay experience than with the potential behind the scenes work.

© Create an option for whether personal bank gold storage is enabled or not. This would literally allow different customers (those in the “I want my gold stored account wide with no controls via wallet” segment as well as the “I want the option to store my gold in a secure vault” segment) to have exactly the gameplay experiences they want without impacting each other in any way.

(D) If there are severe coding difficulties, allow players to purchase “gold bullion” items that are bought in 1g, 5g, 20g, 50g, 100g, 1000g increments, account bound, that sell to merchants for the exact same amount that they are bought. This is an incredibly crude, rough way that personally I find a significant step down but would allow players to store gold in a very safe way. Again, many of us would simply prefer to be allowed to keep the existing deposit gold to bank system.

• * *

I believe that these concerns are valid and have a real impact on the level of stress and enjoyment that many players like me have in this game. Given their seriousness, I believe that it is not unreasonable to request both serious consideration and an equally thoughtful response from the developers. This seems even more of a reasonable request given the (at least to outsiders) apparent simplicity with which many of these issues could be resolved without impacting other players who enjoy the new system and without damaging its implementation in any reasonably discernible way.

Thank you for your consideration.

Best regards,
Matipzieu, GM of KyA / Blackgate
Established 2002

Hi guys,

I’d just like to take a moment to make sure everyone on the thread is on the same page looking at the same problems. Several members of the community have raised serious and valid concerns about the change eliminating players’ ability to store gold in their personal banks. Again, these are serious and valid concerns.

These concerns are:

(1) It is no longer possible to “securely” store gold. This is a real issue and will make aspects of the game more stressful and less enjoyable for many players.Many players are concerned from a gold security standpoint about accidental expenditures either from merchants or the trading post. This and other similar threads are filled with anecdotes (and this has happened to me as well) of click or trading post malfunctions, which the system is prone to, leading to accidental spending. Personally, I am as a player concerned about this change because I, like many members of the community, keep my gold reserves secure in my vault and take out what I need when I go to make large purchases. This is not a trivial issue. I have personally accidentally overspent by up to 10g due to some combination of latency, client, and server issues that regardless of root cause resulted in unintentional large and irreversible gold expenditures.

(2) Many players liked being able to keep character gold individual. This functionality has been destroyed. Many players prefer to keep cash separate on separate characters. Personally, I am among these. Many players like being able to keep track of each character’s progress; many players like being able to ensure that each of their characters are net gold positive. Yes, there is a convenience feature to being able to access all gold at all times. That is not the issue, and players are not arguing that there is no benefit. We are arguing that there is a basic functionality that has real benefits to many players that is being unceremoniously removed from the game.

(3) Many players liked being able to centrally store gold. This functionality has been destroyed. Many players prefer to keep gold separate from all of their characters and like being able to centrally deposit that gold. Many players on this and other threads have mentioned, for example, being able to save up large amounts of gold. Personally, I’m working towards assembling the gold necessary to put together an Incinerator on my necromancer. The way that I go about saving up large quantities of gold is to simply stuff it into the vault when I have it in a reasonably large amount. This is a way that I can structure my play to let me keep what I’ve earned without worrying about whether or not I’m going to intentionally or accidentally (i.e. this is a self-regulating behavior) spend the progress I’ve made towards my goal. The current proposed wallet system destroys any ability players have to separate out their gold. All of it is available for spending at any time. It is important to me, and many players, to be able to “put my gold away” and save it. Many players like me are upset that we are losing this function. This function allowed for a more pleasant, less stressful, more fun gaming experience. This is not an unreasonable or trivial concern. Given the emphasis that’s placed on large expensive endgame systems, this is also a nontrivial portion of gameplay overall.

(4) Many players, myself and my guildmates included, feel forced to create and expend influence on creating personal guilds to re-gain the gold storage feature that has been destroyed in this patch. This is the step I and my guildmates will be taking to restore our peace of mind when it comes to gold saving and security. This is a ludicrous step that we are in effect being forced to take given this feature’s implementation. It is unfortunately an abuse of the guild system and the guild vault mechanic. It is also extremely annoying and inefficient. (I must now put together 1500+ guild influence, either by buying it or consuming suitable guild influence boosters, such as from Zhaitan/Claw Island kills.) This will also result in a proliferation among personal guilds. It annoys me that I will need to switch guilds to access my personal gold reserves after this patch, however I have no alternative given the implementation of this design.

(continued in next post)

I second goldenwing’s opinion above.

I’m also in the category of folks who prefer to just continue to use the bare minimums of beginning a sentence with a capital letter and ending with punctuation; occasionally to make a side remark I won’t bother, but I just feel I’ll say “healthier” using proper form. I don’t mind others not; but to imply that those who are doing it correctly are doing something wrong strikes me as, shall we say, getting things backwards. (pleasant smile)

(2) Ensure that the ACTUAL guild missions are capable of down-scaling to small guilds (3, 4, 5 players) so that small guilds are actually physically able to complete the objectives. It’s okay to scale down rewards slightly so that there is an incentive for epic snowballing with dozens upon dozens of players, but do not create a “haves”/“have-nots” situation. Right now, the perception is that small guilds have NO ability to either access or complete the content.

(3) Immediately open strong, transparent dialogue that actually engages the real concerns of the community. It is crucial to accept that the way consumers will use the product will vary from how developers intended it. Ultimately, developer expectations that stay in Washington are irrelevant to the experience and dignity of players around the world who are having tremendously different experiences.

(4) Engage the community in a constructive, serious manner to seek input and solutions. Do not discount the community’s ideas because they are different from notions during development of “how things should pan out.” These are irrelevant. The customer experience is.

I sincerely hope that one or more persons in positions of influence or power within ANet will take the time to read through this analysis and consider its points seriously. I have made the decision to take the developers seriously. I hope that they will extend the same courtesy to their player base.

Best regards,

Matipzieu SilverSmash
GM of KyA since 2002
DAoC, EQ2, WoW, LOTRO, RIFT, GW2

(post 4/4)

Core problems:
(1) This mechanic has created a disparity between large and small guilds.
(2) This disparity is that large guilds have better, faster, easier access to large content.
(3) The consequence of the disparity is that there is extreme pressure on small guild players to leave their small guilds and join larger guilds.
(4) The practical effect of this disparity is that it creates an unfair and unfun tension within small guild players: they must either sacrifice their friends, their guild, or their ability to enjoy content as first-class players. (Options: (1) Have the entire guild merge into a larger guild, the small guild dies and the special relationships they have are diluted in the big guild, assuming they are all folded into one and can find one that suits their taste, culture, habits, language, environment… this can be a destructive process. (2) Splinter and join large guilds separately, losing the friendships. (3) Endure as a small guild with unequal access to content.)
(5) Players in large guilds, whose incentive maximizations are already satisfied, do not have this problem. They both do not have any incentive or structural reasons to understand why small guild players are “whining”, “qqing”, etc, and do not see any reason that the current system is wrong.
(6) It is uncertain that small guilds will even be able to complete their guild missions at all under any circumstances, or if so, that they will only be able to do so under reduced circumstances, effectively meaning small guilds are barred from guild content, or that small guilds are not legitimate/acceptable under ANet policy. If this is the case, it is EXTREMELY offensive to small guild players, like myself, who believe that our guilds while small are just as legitimate as large guilds.
(7) All of the above are destructive to many guilds and communities. In effect, this patch has done harm to the community that it sought to promote friendship and playing together within. It has had the opposite effect for many players.

Problem-Solving Goals:
(1) Erase disparity between large and small guilds.
(2) Find a way to lessen the disparity between how quickly large and small guilds can access content. (Use per capita math tools that track membership.)
(3) Reduce the pressure on small guild players to leave their guilds for larger guilds.
(4) Remove the tension that is placed solely on small guild players to choose between their friends and maintaining equitable access to content.
(5) The system is working fine for large guild players. Do NOT attack or drag down the large guild play experience. This is EXCELLENT! Instead, focus on AIDING small guild players by equalizing using per capita mechanics to bring them up to the level that large guilds have. Do not take action that will force a political backlash by satisfied large guild players.
(6) Ensure that small guilds are able to actually physically complete missions. Incorporate scaling to allow missions to be completed with few players when guilds are small. Small guilds include groups of 3, 4, and 5 players. Small guilds must be taken seriously, as they are a nontrivial portion of MMO guilds and are worthy of the same dignity and respect as any other guild in the game.
(7) Stop doing damage to the community by creating classes, wedges, and incentives that force some players to choose between content and friendships.

Specific Solutions:
(1) Implement a mathematical scaling system similar to level downranking to allow smaller guilds (measured per account) to have smaller influence requirements to gain access to new content. Obviously, this would need to be designed in a way to prevent exploiting by “everybody quit the guild, we’ll complete it fast, then have everyone pile back in again.” This would be even worse and would negatively impact large guilds. Have better returns to scale with large guilds so that there is an incentive for guilds to grow. Force the rate of benefit to be more favorable than the rate of scaling down, such that there will always be an economic incentive to be in a large guild, but not a prohibitively massive one. It needs to be a gentle push, like taking an 80 out into a level 20 zone, not like the current hard wall. This should also allow upward scaling so that large guilds have the ability to work towards large goals the same way that small guilds do as well. If the content lasts a week in some guilds and six months in others, neither section of players has benefitted. Unfortunately, now that many players in large guilds however expect access in time measured in days to weeks at most, converting this upward now for this content is dangerous. This scaling system should have been thought out in advance, and needs to be implemented in future content.

(post 3/4)

Unfortunately, a simple mechanic added to the game to foster feelings of guild cohesiveness, because it was not run past people with their “economist” hats on who could recognize that people can, will, and always have maximized rewards for absolute minimum effort and thought through what this means for their incentive structure design.

It’s crucial to understand that this is not a cynical argument; it’s a practical common-sense amoral point. Translated into the context of having fun in an MMO, it runs like this: "If another player can get access to the same content or accomplishment for less effort than me, or faster than me, or if it seems impossible that I will ever see it whereas others can by virtue of some random different variable like guild size will have access to it tomorrow, I feel like I’m a second-class citizen, that this isn’t fair, and that I’m not having fun. " It’s important to recognize that this is not just an entirely reasonable and valid sentinment, but that the fact it’s appearing means something in the macro-level structure of the game environment and its driving incentive structures has gone horribly wrong.

Summary:
- This mechanic has created a spectrum of guilds where the larger, the easier it is to access the content, and the smaller, the less easy it is to access the content.
- This feels like a “haves”/“have nots” system. This is not fun and it is not fair. Many people play MMOs to get away from dealing with this system in real life. It has no place in a fun game world.
- Many MMOs have died because developers have refused to deal with the “haves/have nots” problem in useful ways. Until this patch, GW2 did not have this problem.

- Practically, this is because of differences in guild size (how much influence can your guild create per week) compared to content unlock requirements (which are static across all guild sizes.)
- Players in small guilds are encouraged to leave small guilds and join large ones.
- Putting this pressure of “Do I want to be effective but leave my friends, or stick with my friends but be ineffective” is a burden that unfairly falls ONLY on players in small guilds.
- Players in large guilds do not have to make this tradeoff or feel constrained.
- There is no solution given existing game mechanics of this patch that reconciles the issue for small guilds without leaving them feel like they have LOST something (either their friends, or the ability to access content competitively).

It is crucial that someone in a position of power or influence understands that these are the perverse incentive structures that have been created.

Problem 2: Can small guilds even meaningfully DO the content?

It is unclear at this point whether a small guild like mine, consisting of four to five players, should we at some point that we estimate to be 4-6 months of fairly constant play down the line, be able to spawn the guild events… can we even complete them?

Right now, the perception is that not only are small guilds, like mine, barred from playing with the new content, but that even if we somehow manage to push through and gain access to spawning them (something that will take us months, whereas large guilds will be able to do starting within days)… is this a type of content that we can even access?

This is not just a problem endemic to my guild. It is a problem endemic to EVERY small guild.

It is crucial that ANet understand their mechanic is DEEPLY divisive in the community and creates a structural environment that is fiercely pushing for the destruction of small guilds, and far more valuably all of those relationships, because the entire gameplay incentive structure rewards participating in large guilds and punishes participation in small guilds.

It is crucial that someone in a position of power and influence near the development team working on these mechanics understand that the impact this is having is doing damage to the community where the spoken intent of the mechanic is to do the exact opposite.

+ Problem-Solving Goals and Potential Solutions: +

Before getting into potential solutions, it is crucial to understand both the problems and the goals that are to be accomplished by any proposed solutions. This seems trivial, but is a very common place where this kind of thing goes horrifically awry.

(post 2/4)

Martin, Izzy, et al:

Firstoff, thank you for being willing to come out and have a serious discussion with your playerbase. That’s one of the major positives that has set ANet in another class compared to many of the games and developer experiences my guild and I have had over the past decade plus.

However, I’d just like to calmly and quietly drop a friendly reminder about incentive structures and their impact on the game environment, the social dynamics of the game world, and destructive consequences that can come from poorly designed incentive structures.

This is a long, analytical post. My goal in making it is to shed some light on structural problems and more importantly the perceptions of stakeholders that have been overlooked. My intent is to take both ANET and the players of this gaming community seriously not because I like hearing myself talk, but because I believe there’s something here that’s worth fighting for, and that we’re facing a problem that can’t be fixed without some in-depth analysis and thought.

I have been the GM of the same small guild of four IRL friends who have known each other for now over twenty years, including at least seven different MMOs over the past decade.

I also do real-life work on large scale incentive structure and policy design (hey, who says gamers can’t be smart, right?) and just wanted to quietly drop a couple of friendly warnings about some things I’m now observing ANet coming out and doing in this latest patch.

When you’re designing incentive structures for large groups of people in competitive environments, which all MMOs are, one of the things that it’s crucial to do is make sure several people on the design team are able to put on their “economist” hats and think about how the people interacting with that incentive structure are going to behave in order to narrowly maximize rewards for the absolutely lowest amount of effort possible. This is what folks will do; it’s common sense and basic policy design. At the same time, it’s also crucial to have people in the same room wearing their “equity and human dignity” hats and thinking about whether this min/maxing behavior is going to break anything: legal systems, social systems, etc. Finally, you also must have someone in the room with their eye on the bigger picture of what you’re trying to accomplish not just in terms of the narrow intervention, but its impact on the broader picture.

For the first time observing this game evolve, I’m concerned that all three of those sets of people were not present at the table.

In concrete terms, here is what I’m observing:

Problem One: This Mechanic Has Created Unfair-Feeling “Classes” of Guilds

The new “Guild Missions” system has been rolled out and advertised primarily, on ANet’s end, as a way to (a) allow guilds to be play-relevant, (b) allow large numbers of people to play together in organized, coherent ways, © provide a dump for large amounts of existing guild influence in large/wealthy guilds, and (d) provide a series of long-term goals for guilds generically to work for.

As a general design strategy, this looks clean and efficient, because it provides content for a missing chunk, creates long term goals, and allows people to play together.

Here’s the problem with this analysis: nobody put their “economist” cap on and considered what actual behaviors would result from this given reward-maximizing and absolute-effort-minimizing behavior. To summarize, here is what players will actually do as a result of this system, including the reasoning behind it:

(1) Players will attempt to access this new content as rapidly as possible. People play games to access content.

(2) Rapidly accessing the content will require large amounts of influence quickly.

(3) Because there is no per capita/per player check or mechanic baked into the system, there is an instant inequity created between large guilds (who have the influence bankroll to immediately begin researching and working on this content) compared to medium and particularly small guilds, including mine which consists of four players, which will not see that kind of influence for a very long time.

(4) This creates a blatant situation where some people are able to access content and some are not.

(5) This creates feelings of (i) anger over the unfairness, (ii) a sense that players need to choose between their friends and accessing content, (iii) a sense that small guilds are not acceptable, (iv) a sense that small guilds are not viable, leadin to (v) small guilds rapidly being emptied or broken up, (vi) and many players abandoning their guilds to join larger ones.

It is crucial for MMO developers to understand that their games live or die by access to content and the long-standing social interactions formed.

(post 1/4)

kiba.2768:

so if any type of avoidance including the use of LOS, terrain, player movement(dodge included) and player skills/utilities counted toward the daily, you’d be satisfied?

I will say this: I don’t believe the daily dodge was anet’s way to increase player skill. that may be over interpretation(though to each his own). if you are a competent dodger, then what bearing does this have on you other than when partying in dungeons or highly difficult events? if someone is a poor dodger, I doubt this daily was designed to better their skills. am I to believe that daily harvesting is to increase my harvesting skill? or how about any of the other dailies? I’m playing Devil’s advocate here in the hopes that I understand what you want out of this daily. if you can complete it, what does it matter to you how others do it?

What I’d like to see is the entire flaw-ridden mechanic either grossly overhauled or removed. The daily dodge requirement is plagued with a number of issues that, while not rendering it impossible, certainly render it a very poor quality gameplay experience far below ANet’s standards. While every problem element is by its own solvable, the totality should not have gotten past beta, and certainly not red team testing, as many others with solid dev experience on the thread mentioned.

(1) Artificial: players to complete it quickly are often encouraged to go run out and farm evades.

(2) Fails to capture full evasion and, obviously, will never structurally be able to do so as you’ve pointed out.

(3) Gross disparities across multiple professions/specs: particularly when it comes to examining elementalist and mesmer specs that rely on strong positioning and never being somewhere where it is necessary to trigger an evade to begin with, as compared to thieves/rangers/etc.

(4) Not all players have been doing this or are really good at this, and the daily will be teaching many who aren’t there yet poor play: Yes, I know how to do the daily, quickly, efficiently. Yes, I have the playskill to dodge a kleenex box across an inner gate and come out unscathed. This isn’t about me, this is about the other players out there I will be grouping with, playing with, WvWing with, and not for my own sake because I want the advantage of them being better players around me, but for their own sake, intrinsically.

Something about actually caring about the community. Call me old-fashioned. Thanks for the posts.

kiba.2768:

then perhaps if anet changed the wording to ’ daily evader.’ would that satisfy you? I do see a tangible difference between avoidance and evasion

Mmmh, not quite, but thanks for your post. As a few folks on the thread have pointed out, my concern isn’t about quickly doing the daily (though that is still annoying and artificial) but the fact that the daily is mandating and therefore teaching very poor play in some cases while requiring trivial play in others.

A few functional definitions:
(1) Actually avoiding a hit: taking some action, whether dodging or moving, that causes a mob to not do damage to you when it’s trying to, which includes but is not limited to a dodge that registers an “evade.”

(2) Dodging: pressing your dodge key or double tapping to do a dodge roll, consuming endurance.

(3) Evading: the only thing that is measured and counts for this daily’s completion, which I am concerned about. An “evade” occurs when you are by some means in a dodge rolling or in an evasion state and an attack is attempted on you. As several folks have pointed out, this can occur through dodge rolling across a ground AE or by being attacked while an “evade” skill, such as ranger GS 1 (third attack in chain) is channeling.

My concern is not over nomenclature <chuckle> but rather the fact that evading is only a small component of avoidance. The daily is teaching that the only thing that counts is evading.

Hope that cleared up my position — sorry to be unclear, long day and low on sleep.

Greetings!

I have a fairly direct concern about the new daily dodge mechanic requirement and ArenaNet’s recent response to the “moa farming” that resulted from its implementation. As we’re all aware, the daily was annoyingly quasi-trivialized by hunting down and “bear-wrestling” local mobs known to do long channels, allowing you to get multiple evade credits per dodge.

I believe the rationale behind this daily’s implementation was to “encourage/teach players to dodge more” likely as a high-level decision to try to “advance” player skill. Or someone just thought it would be cool without considering the ramifications.

The problem is this: tallying “evade” responses to a mob hit is a very poor indicator of good play when it comes to dodging. My guildmates and I have played together for well over a decade through multiple FPS and MMOs, and are generally very big fans of ArenaNet, GW2, and the entire design philosophy that’s gone into the game (kudos)! Particularly relevant is the fact that GW2 moves the genre closer to being skill-based rather than relying on soulless mechanistic play, gear, and frustratingly micromanaged and optimized group/raid composition. We play at a very high level, and have been four-manning explorables for some time now.

Many of the folks in my guild play on characters and in ways (particularly on mesmers, necros, thieves) that result in lots of dodging and maneuvering but a very low count of actual countable “evades.” Many of us are now both extremely irritated and not particularly amused that we need to play recklessly and foolishly in order to farm “evades.”

Yes, if you’re on a defensive guardian/warrior, you can walk into a pack and get it quickly. Yes, if you’re on a GS or s/d ranger, the requirement is utterly trivial. When you play classes (i.e., ele, mesmer) that revolve around well thought out precision positioning, having to clumsily walk into combat and roll around is really, really frustrating.

Not all maneuvering and dodging that actually results in mobs whiffing and no damage taken properly registers an “evade.” No, it will never be measurable. This daily requirement needs to be reevaluated for consistency and equity across professions, specs, and playstyles, and may never be fully workable. It is encouraging suicidal and reckless behavior in many characters, and utterly trivial in others.

No problem if most of the posts that follow here are flames, this is just presenting our guild’s experience and frustration, and that may or may not be reflective. However, the structural flaws in the mechanic remain, which are:

(1) “Evading” an incoming attack captures from our experience less than roughly 30% of all attacks actually avoided from a combination dodging and maneuvering, including from professions/specs that predominantly play and stay at range, and

(2) The “evade” credit can be easily racked up by some classes that have built-in evasions (i.e., ranger with a greatsword, thief underwater) whereas others (i.e., staff or scepter elementalist) must recklessly endanger themselves through mandatory poor play to complete the daily.

Respectfully concerned,
Matipzieu / Blackgate
GM of <KyA> established 2002

I’m a little troubled by some of the incentive structures created here as well, and for a reason that should probably send up some red flags—it’s immersion-breaking!

The entire premise behind our character’s stories is that we’re heroes that go out to save the day, and that we’re here to help people.

Well, I came across a pack of NPCs fighting a series of mobs. The daily was 0/10 allies revived.

For the first time that I can remember in this game, I realized I could do my daily much faster by standing there and watching those allied NPCs die. So I did. Then I revived them, and realized that by training aggro onto them, thereby killing them in the process, I could complete it all in one go.

It’s a little frustrating that the incentive structure for our “good guy” story-driven game is now “play evil and grief.”

I’m worried what happens the next time I run into another player in a similar situation… or when another player runs into me.