Guild Wars 2

Donari.5237:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Anyone who isn’t in high school or college or retired or a government worker with use-or-lose leave has been working all week and is still working until 5:00 tonight.

FTFY (whoa, first time I ever did that, it feels odd). I guess “unemployed” should also be in that list.

Though obviously the ANet people are not retired, by definition. Still, a lot of people save up their leave to use during these holidays, so they most likely have a diminished staff on any given day.

Anyway let’s see what sales, if any, happen tomorrow. The promotions tab of the gem store is covered in flags warning the sales are ending tonight, which will make room for more.

I work at a factory and my last day of work was December 23, I don’t go back until the 5th. No vacation or holiday pay as I haven’t been there long enough yet. The reason I’m not working is because of plant shut-down. I have also worked other jobs in the past that do this as well.

I used to be under the impression that daily’s were the be all end all. When my mom came to visit in late October of 2013, we were out shopping and she was just taking her time. I was getting aggravated at the time because I had told her I wanted to get home to get my daily done. I don’t think she was too happy about that. Fast forward to April 2014, right around the time of China release, I became very disappointed with the lack of communication here on the forums so I took a break. Did it kill me? No. Fast forward again to present day, I’ve done the daily several times and I actually enjoy the rewards and extra achievement points for only doing 3 of them. Fractals, I wasn’t too crazy about doing that as I haven’t played them in awhile and was very rusty but I did them anyway, not only just 1 fractal, but the whole set. I also did the Brisban daily’s as well. Now, I have a major problem. My old computer is no more, my mother board has to be replaced but my computer is so old, I decided just to buy a new computer. It might not be much of a problem for some people that I see post on the forums as they have a lot of money to spend, but for me it’s another dent in my credit card debt. I have no idea how long it will take me to pay this computer off. Anyway, was going to play today, in the process of downloading the game but it’s taking a long time. I called my service provider and they claim that there is no problem. So when I wake up later today, I’m going to talk to a service specialist to diagnose my problems. I hope to be able to play this game again soon. I know I’ve been disgruntled in the past if anyone cares to look at my posting history but right now, despite all the problems I’m having, I’m actually in a better mood about the state of the game. I’m really not sure why though, go figure, lol.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Robert.4197:

Exxcalibur.6203:

responding the meaningful stuff again, eh.

I’m glad Gaile is responding. Most of the time, this time of year, we hardly see any posts at all from ANET. Also, she seems pretty active in the daily thread. So Gaile, if you’re reading this, thank you for taking time out of your time off to post on the forums.

Thanks, Robert. At least someone looked at the clock (12:30 AM Pacific) and the calendar — a day off from work — and figured out I maybe shouldn’t be judge too harshly for where I choose to post.

You’re welcome It’s 3:33 am where I live but I’m a night person, lol.

Exxcalibur.6203:

responding the meaningful stuff again, eh.

I’m glad Gaile is responding. Most of the time, this time of year, we hardly see any posts at all from ANET. Also, she seems pretty active in the daily thread. So Gaile, if you’re reading this, thank you for taking time out of your time off to post on the forums.

I think I had a pretty good suggestion in another thread:

Robert.4197:

I was thinking and maybe this has been suggested in the past, what if some neutral/ unbiased forum members volunteered to read the forums on a daily basis. Every week the members would post the most important issues in to a single thread and then if the devs agree, approved issues could be copied in to a locked sticky thread with weekly or monthly updates. Another possible solution is maybe take a weekly poll/vote on top issues of the week. Maybe all forum members can participate in this one.

If you guys agree/disagree or have your own suggestion on how to improve communication, please post there.

Well, I replied to my ticket:

Thank you for getting back with me. I wasn’t sure what else I could say on the matter only that bumping threads for the sake of bumping threads is against the forum rules. Also pm’ing staff members is frowned upon. I’m not sure exactly what I can do at this point to be honest, it’s hard to just let something go. I just wanted to know if this was intentional or not. Is there anyway you could pass on this info to the devs that were involved in this and find out? Thanks again, Robert

Their response:

Hello Robert.

Thank you for getting back to us.

The Guild Wars 2 Support Team is unable to reach the developers for situations of this nature. For that reason we always encourage our players to post on the Guild Wars 2 Forums so our developers can review our player’s feedback or suggestions.

The developers team are constantly reviewing the forums. Even though you might not get an immediate reply to your post, they will definitely look into it.

Regards,

GM —-——
Guild Wars 2 Support Team

So I guess at this point support was just a waste of time. I guess since Gaile is no longer posting here, we have no guarantee this thread is being read by the devs.

I was thinking and maybe this has been suggested in the past, what if some neutral/ unbiased forum members volunteered to read the forums on a daily basis. Every week the members would post the most important issues in to a single thread and then if the devs agree, approved issues could be copied in to a locked sticky thread with weekly or monthly updates. Another possible solution is maybe take a weekly poll/vote on top issues of the week. Maybe all forum members can participate in this one.

Piogre.2164:

Robert.4197:

Keeping a forum thread alive is the best way to reach the development team’s attention.

HA!

Woah:

Gaile Gray.6029:

titanlectro.5029:

I ask because it seems like she has chased a lot of stuff like this down. Honestly, getting Gaile to look into this seems like our best bet of getting a reply.

I can try. In fact I was writing a response without looking at the most recent posts. The fact that I can ask about this does not guarantee that we’ll be able to answer the basic question, which I sense is “Are changes coming for this situation?” right? But yes, I can certainly see if there’s info to share.

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

Guild Wars 2 Support Team:

Keeping a forum thread alive is the best way to reach the development team’s attention.

Never mind the fact that bumping threads for the sake of it is against the rules and gets you infracted.

Which is why I’m not posting too much any more, I really can’t think of anything more to add.

Finally got an answer from support:

Hello Robert,

Thank you for contacting the Guild Wars 2 Support Team.

I understand your concern about this matter and I’m really glad to know that there is people like you who still cares about the communication between a game company and their players. We believe in this as well.

Unfortunately, the support team is able to provide much information on the topic. We focus on helping players with their accidents and mistakes that could affect their experience rather than provide information on specific areas like Lore, or background story of the NPCs. Our official Wiki can provide much more information on this subjects.

Regarding your question. The development team would be the most fitted to answer it. They could provide information, or at least a hint about what is going on there, and if this was planned or not.

Keeping a forum thread alive is the best way to reach the development team’s attention. They read the forums daily, and although they usually cannot respond to individual suggestions, the fact that team members can review those suggestions in a public forum helps them gauge the level of interest in a particular idea, and also allows other players to discuss and offer feedback of their own.

I suggest to keep your threads alive and gather as much details as you can from other players. This also will help to the development team to have a better idea of the issue, in case they don’t know.

I understand if this was not exactly the answer you were expecting, but as I said, the support team can not provide information about this matter. But, please please let us know if you have any other questions we can address.

Regards,

GM —-——
Guild Wars 2 Support Team

This isn’t really the answer I was looking for, I haven’t responded back to the ticket yet but I don’t think we will ever know since the event is over with. This thread was kept pretty alive during the blood and madness event so it didn’t do any good any way. Hopefully someone sees this and can either take it out completely for next Halloween or fix it to where everything is working properly.

Ticket #998087 sent 3 days ago

I just wanted to post to say that I have submitted a ticket to support about this issue. Not going to state everything I put in there but I will say this much, the lack of communication on this issue was so off-putting to me that I did not participate in the blood and madness 2014 release. I hope an official response comes as to what is actually going on, probably just a bug. Anyway, since this thread really serves no purpose. other than to highlight a possible bug and ANET’s lack of properly communicating, I believe this should be closed. No point in digging up skeletons in the closet. I’m off to bed as I have to work again, have fun everyone.

Zaxares.5419:

It’s one of those things that can only be addressed by having a staff member whose specifically involved looking through the forum and responding to posts, alas. I can’t think of any way that this could be automated because people would find a way to get around it; only a real life human reading the thread would be able to make that call.

(As Gaile said though, somebody constantly bumping their own thread would run the risk of getting their thread locked or moderated.)

I agree but I have one question. We all know that ANET doesn’t/ can’t read every single post in every single thread, it’s not humanly possible. So how does ANET pick and choose what they read and respond to? Is it catchy titles? Reported threads? Maybe even a pm to a staff member (which is not allowed)? I have no idea but it’s back to work for me tomorrow so I might not be posting as much. If anyone cares about this thread, please keep it going. I’m not talking about bumping it up for the sake of bumping it up either. If you have any more thoughts or ideas to contribute, please do so.

As stated though, you can’t go by the number of views and posts in a thread. Some people will just bump posts to keep them up. A thread with just 2 posts in it might be just as important as a thread with over 500 posts. How does ANET pick and choose what is important?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Maize_balm

Yeah, what IC said, so if you want achievements, you have 28 hours 22 minutes left.

Yes, it is a guild tag, and only ANET can have the arena net logo.

^ninja’d by Garambola

My guess is any time after 1700 UTC if I’m understanding correctly.

TheBlackLeech.9360:

Has anyone in this thread held onto their Candy-powered Matter Meter?

If I recall you needed that item to scan for the ghosts in the other areas.

Has anyone tried using it, or are you guys just going to the locations empty handed expecting the ghosts to appear?

Kallandra.2610:

Serene, the ghost in LA, won’t talk to most of my characters. The ones that she does talk to get as far as the cemetery in Queensdale where no matter what they do the ghost doesn’t show up. In some shards there’s a Priest of Grenth, in others absolutely nothing. I’ve still got the Candy Powered Matter Meter from last year and that doesn’t work either.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Oh, I thought the second sentence meant, that when you had money to spend, the list was right there to consult.

Not sure what it means, though, really. /shrug

That’s a possibility as well. Hopefully OP will come back to clarify.

hi Phys,
By deployed i mean live yes.
Thanks for your reply. I was just talking about the design dev process primarily. We do have a QA team that tests the work and an Alpha group for feedback.
The process i described above is definitely not about speed (-: It is a quality iteration process as well as a best working practice that allows us to learn and improve the quality of the experience as we go along.
I will ask Ed Hocking our QA director to comment about the QA process and Gavian (our production director) to talk about production practices on Monday.
Once we have the feature ‘as designed’ i would love to chat about the design side of the release regarding NPE.
Hoep this helps.
Going to watch the game now.
Go Hawks!
Chris

minbariguy.7504:

I honestly don’t think stickied threads will help anything. As ANet peeps frequently point out, they read the forums. They know what threads are there. Common sense is enough to determine which topics are due for at least some kind of response or acknowledgement. If they have not yet responded to one of these types of threads, it is most likely being intentionally avoided.

In fact, the “My Greatest Fear” topic mentioned in the OP is a good example. When the issue with the Personal Story came up, here are some of the many responses that were given over a month ago (found in the “Communicating With You” thread, ironically):

“Leah is looking into it and we will update when we have more info.”

“We are absolutely not going to ignore it FYI.
we will have more info soon.”

“Probably an update Monday if you don’t mind. Super busy today.”

“First of all thanks very much for all of your info. We have actually been using your posts to investigate (or rather Leah and her team has).”

“I have asked them to post an update but they are super busy. So if they don’t today I will swing by and then update on their behalf. I have been forwarding yours and others info to them and they have been using it. So thank you very much.”

“I or Leah will update as soon as we can and we intend to at the minimum to get things back in order.”

First things first. The response to this started out excellently. There was acknowledgement that there was a problem (even if they wouldn’t come out and say if it was intentional or a bug…there seemed to be some confusion on that front). Then they said they’d give an update. Soon. Then it was reported that it was still being investigated, and player feedback and information was being used in the investigation.

All excellent communication.

And then…nothing.

Since then, as far as I can tell, there’s been silence. If I am mistaken and I have missed something, I apologize, and I hope someone will correct me. But I know that the players posting in the “My Greatest Fear” thread don’t seem to know what’s going on and there hasn’t been a red post there since about a month ago, and that post contained no information about the status of the issue.

So, obviously, the devs know it is there. They are choosing not to post updates. No amount of stickied threads will change that. If we want to improve communications, then we need a dev team that is committed to keeping the players updated. No communication on an issue that has been the focus of an ongoing investigation for an entire month is not good communication. It is a ball, dropped.

To be honest, I’m not even all that concerned with the “My Greatest Fear” issue, personally. But when I see issues handled in this manner, it severely erodes my confidence in how my issues will be handled if and when they arise. It just doesn’t look good. Again, apologies if I have missed some kind of communication that was given. It is not my intention to misrepresent how that particular situation is being handled.

Otherwise, I see and appreciate the increase in red posts, and I want ANet to know that. I don’t mean to sound harsh. You guys should feel good about that, and I will certainly give credit where it is due.

TLDR: Stickies: Not the answer. (My opinion, of course. YMMV)

Yeah, lots of things were left unanswered before the thread was locked including this https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Communicating-with-you/4412293

Will copy paste post below:

@Korrosive I saw it, if you think it will be deleted, I didn’t see a need to reply to it.

I think he means something like a Christmas wish list that your friends can put what they want on it. Also, as far as having money available to pull from, I think he means something similar to lay away or a flex spending account.

Edit ^ninja’d

My thoughts on how this was handled can be found in this thread https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/SUGGESTION-Improving-Communications Since Gaile has pretty much lost interest and no confirmation by any dev as to what is going on has been posted, I urge anyone experiencing this bug to submit a ticket. If the canned response is to post on the forums, than link this thread in the support ticket. I know nothing will be fixed and that a response might not even happen until after the event is over but at this point I think it’s the only way to get an answer.

Rococo.8347:

Why are you all avoiding the Traits thread Gaile? its been a ‘hot topic’ not off the front page for seven months…

She posted in that thread twice yesterday. If you are talking about today, it is the weekend, I doubt we will see a reply today. I could be wrong though, she has posted on Saturday’s before.

insanemaniac.2456:

Robert.4197:

Actually, I do either until it dies off or gets locked or deleted.

tolunart.2095:

insanemaniac.2456:

when you post in a thread, do you continue to follow the thread every time you see a new post in it? for every thread you ever post in?

didnt think so.

You thought wrong, then. Personally, I look for the “arrow” icon that shows I have posted in the thread, and when I see an updated thread with an arrow I always look to see what the new post is. Even if it’s a necro’d thread from last year.

Now, with regards to Gaile, she can’t post in every thread every day “no news to report today,” nor can she hunt down those involved and torture them until she gets an answer. So if there’s nothing to report, she’s not going to report that there’s nothing to report.

it is completely unreasonable to expect someone else to do this just because you do.

i see it happen quite often that gaile will say “how cute” or “thats nice” or equivalent in a thread and just having a red post generates more posts because people are attention kitten.

its perfectly reasonable to expect her to read subsequent posts when she asks for input. not when she says something like “how cute,” because often that cute post would have just died without her saying something.

maybe you should try pming her if you think she needs to bring her attention (back) to a silly thread.

I can’t pm her, it’s against her rules. Anyway, I don’t expect her to read the forums 24/7 but I would think at this point she is aware of the issue but is choosing to ignore it. I will say this though, when she was support liaison, she actually did make an effort to follow upon every thread she posted in.

In regards to point #1 I had:

Cayena.9647:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Arikyali.5804:

Oh, that is so awesome! Thank you for sharing this!

Yes, thanks a bunch!

Gaile Gray you are the biggest tease ever. What does this mean? Thanks? “Thanks for sharing this information so other people may collect the backpack” or “Thanks for pointing out this bug so we can REMOVE IT AND CRUSH YOUR PITY LITTLE DREAMS”

._. I nearly got a heartattack seeing this post. I want it soo bad. it’s my number one regret in gw2.

I think this is a very good response/question. Now the thread was made 7 days ago and problems were posted before Gaile had even replied in that thread. Now that tells me either she only read the first couple posts and decided to reply or she read the thread and just decided to ignore the rest. If for some reason beyond my comprehension she can’t comment on a temporary event that only last 2 weeks and is now over with in less than 4 days, then maybe she should just say so. Being silent just gets people more upset.

I don’t expect Gaile or any other dev for that matter to reply to every post in every thread on the forums but when an ANET representative does post in a thread, they show that they have taken an interest in that thread. If a question is brought up and the answer is not known then the rep that posted in the thread can go find the answer from someone else. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve had to do this. As a matter of fact, in my second example, that’s exactly what Gaile had to do.

Actually, I do either until it dies off or gets locked or deleted.

Issue#2 addressed, nice response Gaile:)

3)https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Gem-Exchange-Fix-where

In this thread people complain that they can’t get exactly the gems or gold they are looking for including silver and copper and this is your response:

Gaile Gray.6029:

daimasei.4091:

What I’m supposed to do with 1 gem???

What do you do with 1 cent in change? Isn’t it the same thing?

daimasei.4091:

Wow, they “fixed” this and now everything is on sale? Clever strategy indeed!

No, the team rushed to update the exchange because they knew there was a sale coming and didn’t want to cause disappointment. No strategy involved, just addressing player feedback.

I’m not trying to be mean here but I find this to be an unacceptable answer. To me it’s like if I by something in a store that normally costs $1.59, the store just charges me $2 because their system doesn’t recognize anything other than whole values.

Now I haven’t had a chance to play the game here lately, been pretty busy this month and was also just taking a break from the game during the mid season break and I’m looking forward to coming back soon. I just need to know that the devs have our best interest at heart. A couple of things I’m seeing here might help. If you take an interest in a thread, please follow up on it, ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. Also in point 3 above, if you guys are doing some PR, usually you tell people what they want to hear not something they don’t want to hear.

Gaile, I appreciate everything you have done for the Guild Wars community. Your job as a support liaison was outstanding. Maybe you are still adjusting to your new role as a communications team lead so I can be a little more understanding. I just wanted to point out a couple of things that I’ve noticed here lately and if this came across as disrespectful, I apologize.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I love that you’re thinking about this, and offering suggestions on how to keep on our path of improved communications. (And <3 for noticing the recent increase in posts. It’s so nice that so many forum members are noticing our increased focus and efforts!)

Here are a few questions:

• How do we keep the stickied thread meaningful? That is, how do we use it to focus on truly major issues? Because what’s major to one player may be minor to someone else.
  • (See the thread about the disabled animations if you want an example. You’ll note that some players completely agreed with the decision and welcomed the info that they would return; others were puzzled by the decision or felt it shouldn’t have happened, quite the variety, as in most threads.)
• What’s a realistic bar? 5000 reads? 400 posts? 10 pages? And, if there is a bar, can we expect that someone wouldn’t bump a thread — sure, upon risk of forum moderation, of course — simply to meet the bar?
• What about the questions that can’t be answered? I think it would be natural that a “highlights” thread might contain posts that we simply cannot answer. But it would be sad if forum members then got angry because by highlighting the topic it seemed to require addressing? Could forum members — and I know this is difficult — agree that an answer is welcome, and that the answer may not be possible?
• Wouldn’t this possibly deflect conversation in various threads? If such a thing existed, I’d suggest that it would link to the highlighted thread and that any dev response go in that original thread.
• Where does this thread live? Guild Wars 2 Discussion? Somewhere else?

Anyway just some questions that occurred to me. Let’s continue the conversation!

Gaile, to be honest I’m not sure if the sticky thing would work after reading this thread but I do have a couple of complaints about current situations. The following is a list of a few threads that I’m not completely satisfied with how they turned out:

1)https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Mad-Memories-is-back

You decided to post this:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Arikyali.5804:

Oh, that is so awesome! Thank you for sharing this!

Yes, thanks a bunch!

That’s fine but the issue I’m having is that you never followed up on this thread. The issue came up that after a few steps, you can no longer progress. NPC’s are missing or can not be found. People want to know if this is bugged or maybe just an easter egg.

2)https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Raffle-Flameseeker-Prophecies

Gaile Gray.6029:

Lodius — thank you for asking. Please allow me a bit of time to investigate this and get you an answer.

One note: You would never want to ask for a user name — that’s the e-mail address used to log in to the game and it is part of an account’s credentials (which should never be made public). I believe you may have been referring to display name or character name, either of which is publicly viewable and would be equally useful as an identifier.

Questions that people may have include, “What if this isn’t legitimate?” or “What if I get scammed? Can I get a refund?” Customer Support informs me that they would investigate, but that their ability to resolve the issue would be limited to taking action against the person or persons involved and would not include making individual refunds to victims. (Gold would be traced and removed but it could not be individually replaced.)

Please know that I am not at all suggesting that this is a scam. However, I want to provide a generic indication of how situations are resolved when something is not operated with complete legitimacy.

I will respond when I have an answer, and if this is a “go” I will reopen the thread. Thanks for asking about this.

Maybe not an issue yet, it’s only been a day so far and maybe you haven’t had the chance to find out the information you need yet.

Baltzenger.2467:

On some other matter.
Maybe Gaile can answer this for me.

About the breaks between releases and the communication about what those breaks mean for us (players). I don’t really know the reasons behind those breaks, I can guess, but I don’t know.

What I would like to know, is if what happened this year is how it’s supposed to be, or if this was just a period of adjustment. I ask this, because what I really want to know is, if next year we will have more releases than this year, like in 2013.

I try to follow the news and comments from the team closely, but I don’t recall any substantial information regarding this. Players tend to talk about how feature patches affect LS releases, and how it’s normal to have this kind of breaks, others say no, most releases on last feature pack were from the China release so it doesn’t make sense, etc.
Gaile asked for a case where an answer could satisfy the customer, well, this are two yes/no questions, and knowing the answers will at least leave me comfortable.

is it normal?
will we have more releases (more than this year) next year?

Even if the answer is more complicated than yes or no, I would appreciate an answer, at least for the first question, if the second cannot be answered for x or y reason.

My guess is that people were complaining about the pacing of the living story and also how it interfered with wvw tournaments. Also, it’s my guess that anet is releasing maps as they are progressed and not when they are completely done which is why we see a quarter of a map released with each living story chapter. Having said that though, I do hope they are taking the time to work on an expansion but because of their policy, they can’t say.

Palador.2170:

Robert.4197:

Here is the dev post about fractal leader boards from December 17th of last year:

ColinJohanson.2394:

We’re holding the leaderboard for now to see if we can’t decide on a better way to help differentiate people on it who are all at the same tier, other than just the first who got there . Once we have decided that, we’ll need to code, test, and vet it and then update the leaderboards to reflect the new tracking.

It can be found here https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/What-happen-to-Fractals-Leaderboard/3388587

And that’s been it for 10 months?!? Holy Christ, no wonder players are torqued!

Yeah, I would guess it’s on the back burner or still haven’t figured out what to do yet.

Togashi Jack.9531:

That’s honestly something that I consider to be the biggest issue – There’s no consolidation of information. If you have to go and dig through all the drek, you’re never going to find what information exists, and players are going to end up frustrated and believe that there’s nothing..

I see where you’re coming from but other than copying and pasting past posts, what could they do better? Obviously a working search engine would help but that’s already been commented on.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Thank you for finding those links, Robert. It’s helpful for everyone to see real resources, and those who missed them (or forgot about them) may enjoy reading them.

No problem, my pleasure

Here is the dev post about fractal leader boards from December 17th of last year:

ColinJohanson.2394:

We’re holding the leaderboard for now to see if we can’t decide on a better way to help differentiate people on it who are all at the same tier, other than just the first who got there . Once we have decided that, we’ll need to code, test, and vet it and then update the leaderboards to reflect the new tracking.

It can be found here https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/What-happen-to-Fractals-Leaderboard/3388587

The quote I posted above was from March 19th of this year (2014). It can be found here https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/gw2-precursor-recipe-scavanger-hunt-news/3780700

Absconditus.6804:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I don’t know. The forums bring up the whole Precursor Crafting thing again, and again. Yet the Devs posted about it being delayed, and then delayed again, and in fact, stated they had to basically start over with it.

Yet no one seems to remember, even though it’s been posted the Devs stated this many times.

Thus, I’m not sure ‘transparency’ does any good. It seems like many only hear (read) what they wish to, and ignore what they don’t. /shrug

I haven’t seen any mentions of it during 2014. If it’s in some random forum posts, yes, of course players will miss it. It’s not always about ignoring what you don’t want to hear, it can be that you haven’t even seen it, since it gets buried within hours as new topics and posts are done. Transparency should in majority come through official posts on the website, where they can have specific topics linked for discussion on what is being showcased, should that be desired by the development team. That way it’s less likely to fly past people. It’s not like Search works on these forums, it searches the active page (as if you were to do a Ctrl+F search through your browser), not the entire forum as a whole.

Now we do have the Dev Tracker, but that unfortunately has once in a while gotten flooded with responses in regards to tickets and delayed handling times (which surprise me, as I have always gotten a response within just 3-4 hours of submitting my ticket, their support team is the most stellar one I’ve ever encountered in this industry—ArenaNet, give those guys and gals some cake! They deserve it!), stuff not related to the game and its advancement. It’s also a bit out of context at times, and you sift through several posts where they are just being humans, interacting, which is awesome and I wouldn’t want that changed for the world. Even if it feels like there’s a lack of transparency at times, seeing all the communication they do, especially Gaile, is awesome nonetheless.

Here you go, took me a while to find:

Mark Katzbach.9084:

We want to let you know that the ability to build your precursor will not be in our upcoming Feature Pack. The way progression and rewards work in Guild Wars 2 have changed quite a bit since we initially talked about that feature, and our main horizontal progression systems are about to get some additional updates in the feature pack. Because of that, we are looking into several ways to integrate building your precursor into our new updated reward and progression systems we’re working on, which is requiring additional development time and iteration. As always, we’ll share details on this system once it’s far enough along in production we’re ready to discuss it.

There is also a post about leaderboards I came across in my search as well can’t remember right off hand where it is. Maybe I’ll look for it later.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Morning All,

I have just woken up and and am feeling decidedly unwell.

I am heading back to bed and will be back online tomorrow.

Chris

Please take care of yourself. I hope that you are not overworking yourself or letting us stress you out so much that it’s getting to you physically. I know we can be rough at times but we care about this game a lot too.

Malkavian.4516:

Hello Chris, I was hoping if Leah and the rest of your team were able to look into the issue me and a few others mentioned about related to the Personal Story. Thanks.

It’s still early for ANET, I think they start up at 9 am which is another hour and 23 minutes away yet.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Robert.4197:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Malkavian.4516:

Greetings, Chris

I just tried out the first few missions of Chapter 7, and I must say this: I am wholly unsatisfied with the new pacing the patch gave towards the Personal Story. I would be fine had you just consolidated certain episodes into chapters but still retained their original order. It just feels very messy to deal with to be honest with you and I would appreciate it if you would able to do the community had you can help in convincing the developers in fixing this as soon as possible. In addition to that, I already mentioned on a bug report relating to one other quest called “Romke’s Final Voyage” where I hear no voice coming from the characters in the cinematic NOR did I see any mouths opening when they were supposed to speak.

I beg of you, please help us out here in making sure that this message comes across. I am personally okay with the level gating of skills and the need to do 10 levels before proceeding to the next chapter of the story. But doing the old switcharoo on certain episodes to favor a different approach just doesn’t work unless you guys actually made serious changes to those episodes so that they can be tied together more seamlessly.

That’s all I got for now. Thanks so much.

Hi Malk,

First of all thanks very much for all of your info. We have actually been using your posts to investigate (or rather Leah and her team has).

Secondly and just to be clear in case it isn’t. I am not a customer service rep, I am a developer and thus you are talking directly to the team.

Finally I will have more info for you Monday or perhaps Leah will post. Either way we will be in touch. Thanks for your support and have a great weekend.

Chris

To Chris ( or anyone else that can answer this),

In no way am I trying to be rude here but just trying to get a better ideal of how things work. What exactly does a studio design director do? Is that the same thing as a studio game director? I ask because I figure you somehow “direct” the game, so I would think you should know what goes in to the game and for what reasons. Every time someone asks a question, you have to go get answers. Also, it seems like you guys have meetings every day. I know you can’t disclose what you discuss in those meetings but I would hope it’s about what’s going on with the game. I realize just because one dev does something, doesn’t mean everyone knows how to do it or what’s going on. For example, the people that create game models may have no idea how to write a story. Anyway, as far as I know, you are part of upper management and a director, if you don’t know what’s being added/changed in the game, maybe communication needs to be better and your daily meetings a bit more informative. Again, not trying to be rude so I apologize if it comes off that way. I thank you for taking the time to communicate with us, I really appreciate it.

Thanks,

Robert

Hi Robert,

I won’t go into all the details of my job as it could take a while and be a little boring.

As the Studio Design Director I am responsible for the health, professional growth and design acumen of the Game Design and Game Director teams. I am also responsible for the game design quality/experience of everything that comes out of the studio. As I studio director i am also responsible for long term strategy planning of the studio and its overall health as well as other areas.

I am 100% aware of any design changes that go live and up to date on most other discipline focused changes to this environment. This is because we review content right from written design phase all the way to iterative reviews to deployment.

However in regard to NPE it is not currently functioning as designed and therefore it is very hard to have a conversation about it. Thus we are working on fixes and once they are deployed I am really looking forward to a discussion.

Hope this helps,

Chris

P.S: I didn’t think you were rude at all.

Thank you for taking the time to respond:)

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Malkavian.4516:

Greetings, Chris

I just tried out the first few missions of Chapter 7, and I must say this: I am wholly unsatisfied with the new pacing the patch gave towards the Personal Story. I would be fine had you just consolidated certain episodes into chapters but still retained their original order. It just feels very messy to deal with to be honest with you and I would appreciate it if you would able to do the community had you can help in convincing the developers in fixing this as soon as possible. In addition to that, I already mentioned on a bug report relating to one other quest called “Romke’s Final Voyage” where I hear no voice coming from the characters in the cinematic NOR did I see any mouths opening when they were supposed to speak.

I beg of you, please help us out here in making sure that this message comes across. I am personally okay with the level gating of skills and the need to do 10 levels before proceeding to the next chapter of the story. But doing the old switcharoo on certain episodes to favor a different approach just doesn’t work unless you guys actually made serious changes to those episodes so that they can be tied together more seamlessly.

That’s all I got for now. Thanks so much.

Hi Malk,

First of all thanks very much for all of your info. We have actually been using your posts to investigate (or rather Leah and her team has).

Secondly and just to be clear in case it isn’t. I am not a customer service rep, I am a developer and thus you are talking directly to the team.

Finally I will have more info for you Monday or perhaps Leah will post. Either way we will be in touch. Thanks for your support and have a great weekend.

Chris

To Chris ( or anyone else that can answer this),

In no way am I trying to be rude here but just trying to get a better ideal of how things work. What exactly does a studio design director do? Is that the same thing as a studio game director? I ask because I figure you somehow “direct” the game, so I would think you should know what goes in to the game and for what reasons. Every time someone asks a question, you have to go get answers. Also, it seems like you guys have meetings every day. I know you can’t disclose what you discuss in those meetings but I would hope it’s about what’s going on with the game. I realize just because one dev does something, doesn’t mean everyone knows how to do it or what’s going on. For example, the people that create game models may have no idea how to write a story. Anyway, as far as I know, you are part of upper management and a director, if you don’t know what’s being added/changed in the game, maybe communication needs to be better and your daily meetings a bit more informative. Again, not trying to be rude so I apologize if it comes off that way. I thank you for taking the time to communicate with us, I really appreciate it.

Thanks,

Robert

hannah mee.7925:

Robert.4197:

I never had a problem with toon or rig but I have to wonder, how did the word “sick” go from something that is negative to something that is awesome? For example, if a person really likes this game, they might say "Guild Wars 2 is sick (awesome).

That…that…that…

That’s a really good question. I think I’ll do some research about that some afternoon when I’m lonely and bored.

Well I just woke up and did a search on Google and this is the first thing that popped up http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/75017/origin-of-current-slang-usage-of-the-word-sick-to-mean-great

I never had a problem with toon or rig but I have to wonder, how did the word “sick” go from something that is negative to something that is awesome? For example, if a person really likes this game, they might say "Guild Wars 2 is sick (awesome).

Pifil.5193:

Thanks Robert, I missed that.

No problem, you’re welcome:)

Crovax.7854:

Is this just fantasy?

Haha yeah, this was done before:) https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/If-real-life-was-like-GW2/4023505

Pifil.5193:

What happened to the top ten? Did I miss it?

Chris Whiteside.6102:

I really want to concentrate on the CDI so I will publish the top ten CDI impact in the next few days. That way I can just concentrate on one thread.

Chris

Sokia.3710:

Things that were removed:

- Appropriate downscaling algorithm

- Items from some karma vendors (such as some vendors in Queensdale no longer selling gathering tools or salvage kits)

- No more champions in starter zones (not that they hadn’t almost all already been removed already)

Paradox beat me to it but yeah the downscaling bug dev response can be found here:

Ryan Diederich.8179:

Hi, thanks for bringing this up.

I’ve looked into the down-scaling calculations and identified the bug that is causing this issue. There’s definitely a lot of stats being lost when scaled down that isn’t intended.