Guild Wars 2

As a MMOer for about 12 years now and a frequenter of many MMO forums I’ve made a few observations. What people should be looking at, in my opinion, is message volume. I believe a good indicator of a games health can be found in the posting frequencies on the forums of that game.

Regardless of the content of the messages, if the front page of a forum such as “General Discussion” is the recipient of enough new threads that at the very least most older threads are pushed off the front page in a reasonable amount of time then the game (to me) appears to be healthy. I’ve found that a fairly trifling topic that usually does not generate many responses will have a lifespan of anywhere from one hour to a day on the front page in a healthy game. Anything over that and you may have indications that the game is in trouble.

For example, if I post a thread titled “Hey guys, where is Lion’s Arch?” it doesn’t matter how many responses this generates or even the content of these responses. What matters is how long it stays on the front page. The results I would expect in a healthy game would be somewhere between 2 and 10 responses and then it quietly slides down off the front page in a short amount of time. If two days later, this message is still on the front page, then I think your game is in trouble.

Basically, if you take population as a whole there will be the players that will post on the forums (minority or majority makes no difference, they will be there). In my opinion, a company should get worried when these players no longer even bother posting on the forums.

Just some observations I’ve had that may or may not be valid.

I don’t know if this is the way it’s always been, but I have not had this problem with any of my other characters. The bandits in Brisban Wildlands with rifles are spamming knockback. Making it nearly impossible for melee type characters to even get close enough to attack. Dodging does not help since you use your two dodges and they spam a third knockback just as you get within range. If you get more than one, then they just play ping pong with you until you can get out of their range.

Well since playing EQ starting in 1999 I’ve always been entertained with how developers repeat the same mistakes over and over. Here are my favorites:

• SWG: The NGE. Never has there been such a clusterfark in all of MMOland. Sony Online Entertainment basically replaced an entire game midstream. Before a major expansion release even. What’s humorous is the expansion even promised items for classes that had been REMOVED from the game. Many people still swear never to buy another SOE product again. This is why you never change the core game design midstream.
  A brief rundown

• Vanguard This one is a wonderful lesson in not believing the hype and putting all your faith in so-called game designer “geniuses” such as Brad McQuaid. The man literally spent more time stroking his ego over on the “Fires of Heaven” message boards under the guise of “promoting his product” than actually working on the project itself. Also, letting your people get fired in a parking lot and not even having the guts to be there yourself shows that this was a weak man that had no business building anything much less a game. This interview sheds some light on some of the stupid things going on.
  Disgruntled Employee

• EQ I was there as a monk for the monk mitigation nerf and yes in the context of the time it was one of the stupidest decisions ever made in a MMO. It appeared to be done solely for the purpose of nerfing something to appease the playerbase (someone at SOE mixed up the meanings of appeased and incensed apparently). But what I thought was one of the funniest fiascos that plays along with GW2’s one-time Lost Shores event was the Sleepers Tomb from EQ. First make an unkillable mob, Second watch players succeeding in trying to kill it, and Third despawn it because you didn’t think players could do that and you hadn’t given it loot tables. Why there is not a class in a university somewhere for MMO developers to study at so they can learn about past mistakes before they jump in the real world I don’t know.
  Sleeper fiasco

• DAOC Trials of Atlantis Master Levels? Fractal Levels? Hmm read the paragraph in my link on Master levels to see if you can see another similarity with GW2. Once again, learn from the past people.
  LFG FoTM 1, Anybody out there???

• Warhammer Online The DAOC community had such high hopes that Mythic would make what was basically DAOC 2. I don’t blame them. DAOC’s RvR system is probably the best game dynamic I’ve ever come across. Where they screwed up in Warhammer was “NO THIRD FACTION” (oh, and you were basically pvping doors). I mean how hard could it have been? And it would have made all the difference. This is where I give GW2 props for basically bringing in that 3rd faction in WvW. Now if they could spice it up a lot, and I mean A LOT (can we start with autoloot? DAOC has had it for years!) then I will be here a long, long time.
  Spiting your face

There are many others that I could name, but most of them would just amount to boredom (Aion, Rift, and AoC come to mind). The point that I would hope ArenaNet takes from this post is this…There are a lot of veteran MMO’ers out there who are taking a mental checklist every time you pull one of these blunders mentioned above. At a certain point they realise that your just repeating history and move onto the other thing. You will have to actively avoid these screwups to keep a nice playerbase. (BTW, three months in and you already have more checks than you need, in my opinion).

I really like the game and I’ll just offer one more last bit of advice, not to the developers but the players. Watch out, do not believe what a designer says until it is actually done. The number of times I’ve seen things like the AMA where the catchphrase of the day is “We’re looking into it” turn into years of nothing being done is more often than you would believe. You can hope they will follow up with their statements, but its not gonna happen until it happens, and it may never happen. They tend to forget that “the player never forgets” and most players don’t throw a fit on the forums but quietly pack their bags and leave.

juicifruitz.6251:

Now for the YB Folks, Grow a heart and show some pride in your server.

any ways I have left YB because of the lack of heart and pride people in the server have. So I wish ya’s GL with your future battles.

So what you’re doing is chastising the entire server about “heart” so you can feel better about moving to another server? I gotta admit that takes “heart”.