Guild Wars 2

Gaile Gray.6029:

Ok, here’s some info on these specific comments:

• No, the game is not lacking direction. Nor is it lacking vision or goals, plans, ideas, concepts, or any of the other properties that guide our future. The quiet now is not an indicator of anything other than the fact that, at this time, the company is not talking about the future but is, instead, working on it.
• Game companies, like most major industries, experience a certain level of turnover, and hire to fill those spaces. They also hire for new or expanded roles. Nothing startling here whatsoever.
• The silence is decidedly not a distraction effort. As Mike O’Brien said, "We’ve set a clear policy in the past year: “We don’t talk speculatively about future development. We don’t want to string you along. Creating fun is an uncertain business: sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t; sometimes we go back to the drawing board over and over before we get something right. If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers. So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.”
• Living World and holidays are important, yes. They are not the only thing on which the team is working, quite clearly, when you see substantial updates coming out on a regular basis. (Case in point: feature packs, the coming PvP update, etc.)
• We are not “afraid” to lay out a roadmap. Quoting Mike again, “The intention of the CDI threads is to talk with you about the roadmap.” If you’re not participating, you’re missing out on a means of sharing your feedback and a method that we may use to give information, when the time is right.
• No, we’re not fearful of player reaction to our plans; we’re simply choosing a different path in communicating in the here and now.
• In general, with nearly anything, there are ebbs and flows in communication. If we’re in an ebb right now, you can count on there being a flow in the future. That’s just logical.

I’ve bolded the parts I want to repond to.

• We respectfully beg to differ. If the game isn’t lacking direction, then why won’t you at least share it with your concerned players? To hell with the policy… we want to know where the game is going. Gaile, put yourself in our shoes for a minute — wouldn’t you want to know too?

• CJ must be ruing his announcement (last year?) in a vid on youtube, about precursor crafting before the end of 2013. Disregard the fact that it was announced to people looking forward to this particular feature that it wouldn’t make it in the feature patch that it was supposed to be released with — in the interview it shouldn’t have been discussed at all.

• These ‘substantial updates’ have very little actual content involved. It may be an LS update where a new zone comes out, but that’s hardly what a lot of people here are looking forward to. When you see quite a lot of complaints about LS being pushed too hard over actual player-retaining content releases (ie. stuff people actually want in the game and have been crying out for for over 2 years), then ‘what’ is substantial to ‘whom’ would have to be brought into question. The latest feature packs have been broken from the start, and no attempt has been made to either fix them or at the very least communicate with us why there is such a major delay in fixing them. You’ve brought out a couple of new zones in the recent LS updates; don’t pat yourselves on the back too hard.

• You say that the communication ebb and flow is logical, but that doesn’t mean that it’s right. It might be the ‘done thing’ with you, but to keep invested players in the game, you communicate with them about stuff that’s going on, you know, keep them excited for something. This is why we’re so concerned about the direction the game is going in, and silence DOES NOT HELP IT.

The bottom line is we’re looking for a direction this game is headed, mostly regarding actual content and less so about LS. While no one knows what direction it’s headed, and no one who knows talks about it, the air of uncertainty thickens. And while you’re marking time with LS and not fixing stuff like the player story, traits, feature packs from previous patches, etc. players will continue to leave.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Ok, I’m back. About Harry Potter…

I think that the whole basis for the presentation in this and other threads about communication has a few pillars. And it’s one of them that I’m thinking about. J. K. Rawlings wrote a series of well-loved books, and I am sure (although I didn’t follow it) that people gave feedback to her on every release, heck, probably every nuance of every release, and that they also provided suggestions for future books. It’s a natural thing: People were highly invested in the series, loved it a bunch, and wanted to know more, or to have input.

In that small sense — and yes, that’s only part of the communication question — I don’t think I’d want our team to communicate about the game’s direction. Like, “Yes, so in the future, all frogs will become sentient, treble in size, and take over Lion’s Arch, leading to the elimination of all non-amphibian races. Yep, yep, that’s where we’re heading with the story.” NOTE: This is NOT where the story is going. This is only a wildly-improbable scenario offered for purposes of… umm… providing a wildly-improbable scenario.

My question: Do you agree that it’s good to not share that sort of information, information related to the actual direction of the game saga as a whole?

If so, then my sense is that you want to know more about the nuts and bolts.

• “Are you looking at XXX new feature?”
• “Do you intend to improve ABC functionality?”
• “Is ### working as intended, or is it bugged, or will you incorporate player feedback to change it?”

Again, this is a small part of the discussion, but I wanted to make sure I was looking at that part accurately. I wondered if generally, no one is asking about the whole “Tell us where the story is going” bit.

Gaile, please… we may be the end users of this game but that doesn’t mean we need to be insulted. I couldn’t give a crap about where the story is going more than most of the other players here, but what I want to know is why you can’t even get back to people (or even redirect the question/comment to the appropriate person) about stuff in the game that needs fixing.

I can point out 3 active threads right now (but won’t at the risk of infraction) where they’re all dealing with the same subject and not one ounce of Anet feedback has been posted about it. Do we know if it’s supposed to be bugged? Why is it bugged? Why wasn’t it fixed in a patch just after release? WHY IS IT BEING NEGLECTED?

I’m sorry Gaile, but you’re copping the rap for this by posting in this thread; I’ve invested far too much of my gaming time to idly sit here and be either lied to or ignored about a LOT of the game’s features that need so much fixing, and no one has done a thing about it. We get this little tid bit about communication from your boss (Mr O’Brien) and suddenly the floodgates open about talking to your players. Such a facade. Us players are not the plebs you’d believe we are, and you should know that already from your interaction with us here on the forums.

I won’t support a game that doesn’t support its players. Anet’s whole philosophy is “sod the playerbase, sod their wishes for the game, we’re gonna do what we want to do, the way we want it, and if anyone has any objections to it (on the forums) they’ll either get ignored or infracted for daring to raise such issues to the broader playerbase”.

Your lack of communication with us about the game’s direction is exactly what has us all on edge, and not edge of the seat either… I’m talking about driving us away from the game. If you can’t see this then I suggest you remove your blinkers. Yes you’ll talk to us about trivial crap but NOTHING ABOUT THE GAME’S DIRECTION.

To be honest I’m not sure I want to know where this game is going anymore. I was so excited to be able to play it during the beta’s and now after all this time you’re managed to suck the life right out of it. You’ve made most of your veterans leave the game (early on I might add) because it’s nothing like what you (Anet) hyped it to be. All this because your tight-fisted POLICY won’t allow any part of the game’s direction to be revealed, or the status of any fixes. This is NOT how you communicate with your customers, by treating them like mushrooms.

Since the inception of megaservers I’ve noticed that with world boss kills/meta events that it’s getting increasingly hard to land enough hits on bosses for the loot. I personally run a zerker staff ele as my main, so AoE damage is no problem. Tagging is no problem. The only problem I’m seeing now is that tagging isn’t enough anymore. The way the game deals out loot is like a massive DPS race. You do enough damage, you stand a better chance of getting loot.

On some champions I do the most amount of damage that I can, and don’t even get a champ box/bag drop from it.

This is becoming a legitimate issue (if it weren’t before already), and this thread is here to help find a resolution to this problem. Is there a way to re-orient the system’s loot tables and reward-for-kill participation a little better to accommodate the advent of megaservers?

Every time I see someone ping the 4 components for the forge to get their legendary all I do is smh. Still sitting on 3 gifts that are getting rather dusty. I’m in the same boat as a lot of people here, but Anet decided we weren’t worthy of their time for the features patch.

I found this topic had been partly discussed about 9 months ago (before beta’s), and we never got any real recent feedback about how either small or one-man guilds would be affected by the current constraints of the Guild Hall creation.

Personally, I’ve never done any Guild Missions. I’m a one-man guild with my nephew and his girlfriend being online occasionally to help rep, but that’s all. I don’t go for big guilds, medium guilds, etc. I’ve tried them all and they either don’t do my style of gameplay all that often, or are never online to help out, and if they are it’s at times when I’m not on. A guild of my own is my way of saying that I can create something for myself within the game, with whatever time I have left to play the game (which these days isn’t much).

Now, Anet throws a royal spanner in the works by making the creation of a guild hall dependant upon the success of a guild mission. So, what am I supposed to do? Bring on some helpers in a game map for some cheap labour to help me get the guild hall creation going, and then bugger them off later, like ‘thanks for the help’? Why can’t a one-man guild get a guild hall like the bigger guilds? Ok, obviously I’m not going for the upgrades and all that jazz, but seriously, obtaining a guild hall in GW1 was a ton easier than this is.

I really don’t like the idea of putting people in my guild temporarily just to get a guild hall started; like I said, I’m a one-man guild with very occasional help, and I’d rather do something for myself like I could in GW1. I have a GH decoration to hang but no guild hall to display it in.

Let me offer up an example of how to offer constructive criticism. It’s based on a positive attutide system called praise —> correct the issue —> praise again. It starts off being a positive introduction so as to not get them on the wrong foot, evaluates and offers correction to the problem or issue at hand, then praises them again to continue their efforts to correcting the issue.

Destructive criticism, by contrast, is precisely the opposite… and will see the biggest wall of defence put up so that nothing is said that can impact a person’s decision to change something (for better or worse) can get through.

The forums are largely the latter.

Having said this, I’ll provide an example of why Anet needs to listen more attentively to it’s playerbase than what it does. Say there’s an RNG issue or a particular in-game mechanic that needs to be dealt with, when someone on the forums creates a topic and arcs up about it, and the following 9-10 posters all agree that something needs to be done about it, with minimal resistance or fact bias to the counter, then by all means Anet should pay heed and correct it.

However, often is the case that someone is criticised of qq’ing on the forums, and the message of the OP is lost in a wall of confusion by some supporting and others opposing the OP’s viewpoint. This is where Anet gets lost and deems this topic and it’s respective issue to be thrown into the too-hard basket forever more, and the thread is lost in the annals of the forums.

Bringing up an issue on the forums would be more well-received if it were delivered with a constructive criticism method than just open up with a bunch of flaming, either from the OP or the respondants to the thread. This might even actually get a dev to respond directly to the topic at hand.

dlonie.6547:

…I’m not asking for any specific content, I’m only asking that they share what their direction is…

WHAT?! Anet share their direction?! Ludicrous!!!

What’s even more ludicrous is they shoot themselves in the foot because of their ‘policy’ and leave players in the lurch, wondering what’s gonna hit them next.

Not a great way to run a business, or get people excited for your game.

Romo.3709:

lordkrall.7241:

Romo.3709:

China is getting smooth release, while we’re dealing with issues and problems. Sighs…

None of which are game-breaking and thus ArenaNet is rightly focusing on something that might very well decide the future of the company.

Game-breaking, No. Immersion-breaking, Yes.
It is true that they’re in the middle of something that might decide the future of their company. Especially since they’re treating China as their only customers right now.

It’s because of this that I’ve had to cut my time on GW2 right back. I was (mostly) happy playing my own game from a few hours a day, now it’s about 1hr a day or less. Such a shame because I was just starting to enjoy my first self-made (ahem, not TP-bought) legendary, and I’d been waiting since headstart to craft it… shame that I only really got to enjoy it for one day, and that was before the megaserver crap hit the fan.

Yes, it’s been mentioned hundreds of times and it’ll be mentioned again. Megaserver is not good for the game. It serves to unify a very small number of people into much bigger crowds and has far more cons outweighing the pros.

From a PvE-only standpoint:

• no immersion. Anet want to assure us that it helps people get together and do stuff in maps (on one hand), but on the other it serves to alienate just as many (RP’ers).
• barely any loot (elites and champs I’m looking at you).. is this what you’d call a trade-off for making our armour repairs free?
• far more annoying people/trolls from other servers
• DPS race
• massive lag, on top of lost packets
• daily achievements trimmed (big mistake)

So now while Anet and minions are waiting hand-and-foot on the new Chinese playerbase, we’ve been forgotten, yet again. If there’s no communication, it’s for a reason. I can think of several actually; Anet are typically bad communicators, who have a bad rep of scalding any loose-cannons who offer their advice without Anet vetting the advice first (you vill do sings by procedure!), also their history regarding correcting horrendous mistakes is far from laudable… the procedure is; silence, damage control, optional apology and even further optional recompense to try to get those they’ve wronged back into the game.

To me it seems like Anet choose the wrong channels of communication, if any, because it looks like communication based on a committee. Get together to decide how to respond to people upset with the game, choose a popular answer that is totally politically-correct and PR-based (eg. overly positive-from-negative with a big helping of spin), then finally reply to those who are already on the verge of a full-fledged revolt.

Bad form.

Hyperionkhv.1978:

Low expectations. Scepticism. Doubts. Mistrust.

There’s no arguing that they’ve brought it all on themselves.

…. there goes another grain of salt

It’s Anet’s policy that the squeaky wheels get ignored. This we’ve seen many times over. Unless there’s been a CDI established on a certain (albeit contentious) topic, then there’ll be no mention of it unless there’s a release in an upcoming patch, or the topic has attracted so much attention that walls of text (and outrage) demand some kind of intervention (traits thread says hello).

What brings me down about GW2?

• The forums. People looking to nit-pick every single thing about it. Noted that there are definite issues with it, but searching for people’s responses on what they think is wrong is no guaranteed way to get the dev’s to fix it. Having said that…

• CPU usage and lack of multi processor core usage. AMD could use more hyperthreading, but in saying that the engine could use a lot more optimisation like going from DX9 to DX11 and making more use of the vid card’s capabilities instead of being so processor reliant.

• The relentless nerfing of everything including karma gain (you don’t know what you had till it’s gone), all professions (excluding warrior, go figure), the most ridiculous RNG I’ve seen anywhere ever and the introduction of Ascended gear which by default is pretty much useless, unless you actually have a use for it in higher level fractals where every little bit counts and that’s providing they don’t make any nerfs to the build that you’re running otherwise you’re left with useless and costly Ascended gear.

So if you want a bucket list of all the hottest topics on GW2’s shortcomings thus far, look no further than this thread. >_<

Raid? Isn’t that a bug spray?

MisterOiZo.4359:

While I do get your point, I really do think that this is kind of on purpose. A guild is not a solo thing, it’s a group thing. So build your guild to at least 9 guild mates and you are good to go!

I’m sorry, but I don’t agree. A guild is whatever the owner of a guild wants to make of it; be it for whatever purpose or design they need it. For example, I’ve had my own guild which was largely a solo-effort since 2009. It was just something I wanted to have since I had the cash to make it, and it was a place to just AFK for a bit, do trades with merchants when they weren’t available, etc. A lot of other people I spoke to in GW1 had the same designs for their guilds, be they solo or massive multi-guild alliances.

Creation of a guild for a solo purpose should NOT be a difficult thing to do, and I believe the designers of guild halls have overlooked this.

I’m talking about end-game content, such as revisited version/iterations of Fissure of Woe, Underworld, Urgoz’s Warren, The Deep, etc. That was end-game content. It required skill, knowledge and a good cooperative team to execute successfully.

What we have right now is fractals (which some people get bored of very easily) and not even a hard mode for dungeons. Just because you have two new L80 zones which are getting thinner by the day (yes I’ve seen it happen for myself) which are LS-invoked hardly qualifies it as veteran content.

Obviously the game needs more challenging content in ALL modes of gameplay, but our voices aren’t being heard… and even if they are, there’s no way they’ll respond back with “yes we can implement this”… why is that? (besides being mentioned in a CDI) Oh that’s right, the policy, again.

Galowin.6089:

Omg, stickfigures dance circle on LA beach the memories
Alsof stickman doping SAB would be AWESOME for a day.

I wasn’t gonna do it, but here they are. April Fool’s ’08, stickmen hilarity. The way it worked was that anyone who was sub-Level 20 was still a normal toon. But anyone that was Level 20 was turned into a stickman. All the stickmen were chasing the regular toons around LA, “fast-food” style.

The dance employed was the male Ranger dance, ie. the breakdancer. Lining up at the steps of the old barracks for sync-dancing… and later at the LA fountain where it was stacks-on and people doing /rank in a massive ‘energy ball’ stickman dance.

Fun times … bring ’em back Anet!!

Ok I don’t care what’s been written in here about the megaserver system so far, but from what I’ve glimpsed so far it’s proving to be a very bad idea. I’m just here to drop in my 2c worth.

I don’t take advantage of very much of the game’s modes, and that’s totally my fault; I know what I like playing and what I want to do in the game, and that’s relatively limited. I don’t usually partake in WvW unless there’s something worth doing (S2 achieves recently done), I disagree with PvP and I don’t like the expectation of dungeons and fractals. It’s not my kind of content and it doesn’t go well with the style which I play.

So that leaves me with regular PvE and world events. Back on my regular server this wasn’t a big deal, but now there’s lot of servers pooled together to create their own problems.

• Zergfest. This is the product of putting a number of servers together for events being scheduled for a certain given time. Not only does this scale up the events unbelievably, but there’s no loot for you to be had thanks to lots of Champions not having loot assigned to them on kill, and Elites in particular not being worth the kill because, let’s face it… they don’t drop anything, and from what I know, their loot tables have been bugged since inception. I’ve attached a pic of one of tonight’s events below describing said laziness and general apathy of the situation outlined.

• Lack of immersion – I might as well not be there at the events because it doesn’t feel like my presence is doing anything more than scaling up the event. The bottom line is I’m playing second-fiddle to the bulk of the damage dealers, even though I’m wearing full zerker gear and trying my hardest to do the most damage possible. To me it feels like these events are no longer worth my time because I’m not being rewarded for what I do, my presence there is nothing more than an up-scale (and the arbitrary gold badge for event completion at the end), and it seems like no matter what I try it’s tantamount to kittening against the wind.

Give us our old servers back where we actually felt like we did something constructive and were rewarded for our time more than we currently are.

Something to consider — below: first phase Claw of Jormag event, and more than just a few that are fed up with the unbelievable amount of crowd control from this event, and the general apathy for the upscaling (multiple champs that don’t drop any loot and loot-bugged elites) hindering the progress of the event.

What a nightmare.

In 3 words, that could sum up the whole experience. I don’t mind a challenge, but this ventures into ‘frustrating’ territory. Take nothing away from the layout of the map (ie. features, details, etc.) it’s beautifully put together… but why so much verticality?

I’m rather tempted to say… no I WILL say that this map is on par with Tangled Depths for directionality and ease of use to get to objectives. There’s just nothing simple about it. And now, not only do we have to fly places but also use the oakheart essence to get to even further out of the way areas. For me this presents a rather large issue, because it means I can’t just use my arrow keys for directionality anymore. I gotta switch to the mouse (not so difficult for you all that use it already) but I can’t adapt to that method of play as easily.

Further to this, there’s points of interest that are just not viewable on the map. Burial Chamber and Zeta Vault are two such PoI’s. In fact, Zeta Vault and Druid’s Grotto fall in between two layers of the map, so that’s not really fighting fair, Anet.

You had a good thing going before gliding was introduced, now you somehow feel the need to exploit it to the N’th degree. So no, I don’t agree with the way the map is designed, and the sheer verticality of it all.

Here’s a suggestion – if I want to get from A to B, and travel between 3 layers of map, may I suggest that you make a 3D map reference? 2D in this game with gliding having been introduced I feel just doesn’t cut it. This would give the map designers a fair challenge while alleviating stress on many frustrated players like myself who are over the up’s and down’s of navigating maps that are 3D in design, but only represented by a 2D map.

I’ve always believed that the devs here aren’t speaking from their own free will to do so, but from a reactionary standpoint.

I’ve been playing this game for over 2 years (including beta’s) and browsing the forums for almost as long, but not always posting. I like to get a feel for what the atmosphere is like in these forums before being respondant, and a good 95% of all that time, the atmosphere has been toxic.

Thanks to the dev’s policy of “we can’t talk to you about this yet, it’s still in the works”, it’s basically hamstringing them of free speech to talk about anything upcoming in the game. And no matter how ‘excited’ they get about something coming up in a patch, I’m sorry but I can’t get as excited as they do.

The reason behind this is because of Anet’s past and the god-awful long time it’s taken them to start listening to the playerbase at large. As excited as they get about something they think will really knock our socks off, we’re playing this new patch (I’ll refrain from saying ‘content’ because that seems as thin and sporadic as their communication) and finding endless bugs and glitches with it. We pipe up and complain about stuff that isn’t working as designed/intended and waiting weeks for a resolution. Still the communication is less than forthcoming on what’s actually happening to get the bugs fixed. A simple acknowledgement on what’s bugged and an approximate ETA on a fix would be great – however this essential info is still lacking (I’m looking at you, Collections).

I’ll go back to my first paragraph: they’re communicating from a reactionary standpoint, nothing more. They only communicate because they feel they have to, not because they want to. Whenever they do it’s on twitch or youtube and it’s always this same façade about being excited about something new, never about having problems fixed or a glitch being worked on. It’s that essential info that would make the forums a little less toxic.

It was quite the opposite in the original GW. The intention of it was to have somewhere to AFK as well as a place to put in your own upgrades, plan and organise elite content, etc. I can’t figure out why one-man guilds have been stiffed like we have in this game.

This one is a bit of of left-field, but just bear with me on this.

In my mind at least, there comes a time when you can only bear to look upon so much negativity and angst upon a certain entity (Anet’s policy being the case).

What would happen if the forums suddenly went silent?

Would Anet even bat an eyelid at the very thought of no one piking up at the first minor concern about the game? I’d guess they would have less to worry about because no one would be complaining. Would it be presumptuous that an inverse-logic would take place and that all was right in GW2? I see over 1300 pages in the General Discussion forum alone, and I guarantee 95% of it is complaining, ideas gone by the wayside or just toxic backlash based on something wrong with the game.

But in my mind, that’s the very crux of the problem — this is why we post on these forums, because we care about the game, where Anet (or indeed, its policy) seemingly does not care about its players.

We want it to be as good as it can possibly be; we want to get excited about something that’s coming up, something that we’ve been looking forward to, not just what the devs think is what we want, only to have us whinge about how it was all done wrong and that they should have talked to us (be more transparent) in the first instance.

We don’t want to see the game fail. But I feel this is the direction it’s heading, the less we know about what’s in the works. I don’t understand Anet’s “mushroom” policy (being kept in the dark and fed on sh*t); it doesn’t help them, it doesn’t work for me or indeed any of us players in the long run.

It does make me think, however… since their hands are so bound by the very ‘red tape’ their policy has created, that they can’t talk about anything in the works… what would happen if they were stonewalled in return? If we told them nothing about the game, would they incorrectly assume everything was hunky-dory?

But we know this isn’t the case. We only voice ourselves because we care and want to see this game become something much better than it currently is – something it was destined to be but just isn’t.

Communication is reciprocal. You made a game for us, we play it. We find something wrong with it, we tell you. You tell us it’ll be fixed. It never gets fixed. More of these problems add up, the same “we’ll fix it and then release a big patch” attitude comes along, where you’ve not fixed the problem but made it worse. Time goes by, the fix still isn’t in and people are getting antsy about the progress of the game. What will be fixed? What will be added? Where’s the content? And we find ourselves exactly where we are right now, where this stagnancy has amounted to nothing more than mockery, contempt and seething toxicity. Fair dues, I applaud your recent efforts of communication, but we’re still no further along the lines of proper communication (again, the policy).

So again, I ask you, what would happen if we told you nothing about what we experience in the game?

Walk a mile in our shoes.

Yang.5138:

Although every time I make stacks of Bolts of Silk, I notice that it needs 3 whereas the other parts require only 2 per piece. Is their a particular reason it’s special? I dunno.

They did this with soft wood as well. At the start there were surplus quantities of this ‘useless’ material, until suddenly ascended tier rolls around and guess what, it becomes useful again. That said, there’s no reason to make the quantity of these materials higher than others to fabricate into their final state (scraps to bolts, logs to planks, etc.)

The surplus of the materials when they were considered useless wouldn’t take even a month to clear out once ascended crafting was introduced. But yet, the recipes for condensing these items still requires a heavy ‘surplus’ cost (4 logs instead of 3, 3 scraps instead of 2, etc.). I say heavy because when you take into account how many of each item you need, it really adds up.

Why they did this and never reverted the changes after the surplus had diminished I’ll never know. To me it just beggars belief.

From the Dulfy site:

• Brewmaster Collection (not able to activate)
• Fine Wining Collection (not able to activate)
• Hero of the People Collection (not able to activate)

This has been the same for nearly 2 months, and not a word from anyone as to why it hasn’t been fixed or even if there’s an ETA.

What’s going on guys?

While you’re on the subject of hats, give our toons HAIR with the hats please.

This has been mentioned so many times since the game began even with the [Celebration Cap]. Unless you created a bald character, you’ll feel something is amiss with the lack of hair, which is very noticeable.

It’s beyond time.

It’s probably 18 months past when veteran content should have been added.

Unfortunately Anet won’t implement it because we’re not worthy.

Tyops.5894:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi Tyops,

Thanks for posting about your concern. Could you clarify what you mean by insular in this case please? This way I can have a better understanding of how to reply to your concern.

Chris

Certainly,

Sorry I couldnt get back to it until now what with being at work. To be perfectly fair I was probably being overly cynical, but part of the concern remains.

I am a habitual lurker in the CDI threads and routine dev-post stalker, and through natural progression it appears to me that the CDI threads have already become quite clique-y. There is a small group of high-volume high-profile poster who tend to discuss more or less only each other’s posts and also tend to draw most of the interaction from devs.

Although this evolved entirely naturally, unless you’re in it, it can make the community appear insular.

Taking it a step further and codifying how this community interacts with a series of semi-arbitrary rules developed by that community can make it appear markedly less accessible to outsiders, lurkers, and other low volume users.

That is largely where my concern resides.

This. Although I’m not sure I’d term it as insular, more like silently-exclusive. Other people can have a say but not all will be heard, if you get my meaning.

Celtic Lady.3729:

SidewayS.3789:

• WvW removed from map completion

Wow, can’t believe they’re actually doing this. I remember all the people asking for it and all the people making fun of them, saying L2P and this will never happen.

Look who’s laughing now.

I bet the notes forgot to mention “only for VIP Chinese clients”.

If it sounds too good to be true….

So I’ve been wanting to post about this for some time, but I thought I’d say something about it when it wasn’t lag from my end.

Adventures are nigh on impossible to even get a bronze completion with the kind of lag I’m experiencing. I tried the “A Fungus Among Us” adventure in tandem with yesterday’s dailies, and after about 50 attempts, the lag killed the challenge for me, and made it more of a challenge than it needed to be.

In this country (Australia), anything that requires rapid movement from one place to another via use of a skill is at the mercy of rubberband lag, which is exactly what I experienced 100% of the time last night. It’s bad enough in normal combat, but I’m living in Sydney on a decent ISP, and I’m still getting 300-500ms ping to ANet servers, which makes enjoying my ‘adventures’ rather limited.

Are there any remotely viable (and non-extreme) measures to remedy this?

+1 to OP.

Not sure why they’re so silent, perhaps the karka got their tongue.

I do miss the joke skills that the wiki had for April Fool’s in GW1. I don’t think we’ll see the same from Anet this year, as it’s a different Anet that brought out GW1-style April Fool’s and are a bunch of humourless kittens.

Last year they had SAB as their joke, so they were kind of let off the hook.

^ what he said. I’ve had all my gifts since Nov ‘12 and I’m in the same boat. No ‘The Legend’ for me either. I mean it’s not like I don’t try for it. Are we the unluckiest players in the game?

Mike O Brien.4613:

So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.

Sorry to say this Mike, but Colin has done precisely this, time and time again, as have some of your other figureheads. You’re (as an entity) very reluctant to talk about anything substantial to the people that play the game.

This interview that we saw earlier in the week on guildmag.com was completely farcicle. I don’t know who vets these responses even getting out to the public, but if you’re not there to talk about the question at hand and completely sidestep it, then why have the interview at all?

From what I’ve seen of the machinations behind GW2, I think a lot of you have missed your calling in life as politicians instead. You’d make a lot more money, be under as much stress and still be at liberty to sidestep questions thrown at you.

Seriously though, we need some concrete information on what’s happening with our game, not airy-fairy, half-thought-out presumptions on when we might see content. As a lot of people have suggested already, much of the most requested stuff in the game is almost 2 years old, and still yet to see the light of day. I don’t think I have to give examples of what I’m talking about; it’s usually seen on the first page of most of the sub-forum categories.

Anyway, we need a bit more action on these in-game areas, and far less talk and redesign. While you’re in the backrooms milling over how to release something, you have thousands of people waiting anxiously on what’s actually going to make a certain release and what isn’t. We need less of this and a given timetable of what is due for release, and if it can’t be done then someone comes in and tells us what won’t make it and why. This is why you’re such poor communicators; because none of this happens.

ColinJohanson.2394:

You will absolutely see a way to create a precursor available in the future. As detailed in our plans for the second half of the year here:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/looking-ahead-guild-wars-2-in-2013/

As mentioned at the end of the blog, as always things are subject to change as test and prepare various systems. Most of the stuff covered in the blog you’ve already seen implemented, or steps towards being implemented, however the precursor building (and corresponding additional legendary items) is the one highest at risk to not make it this year.

It is still something we absolutely plan to do!

Typical Mr Johanson, or as I like to call him, ‘the seagull’…

• flies in
• squawks
• craps on you
• flies off again

I’m sure we can appreciate the dev’s have a tough job to do, but really? Prioritising the most wanted item in the game shouldn’t be THAT tough. >_<

Gaile Gray.6029:

….I do wonder something. I want to ask, and hope nobody will bite my head off here.

You mention wanting to know there will be more to the game. The new and continuing episodes of the Living World count towards that, right? The fact that players know there’s a team working on new content and features, and that there are releases on a regular basis? I fully understand that may not fulfill every desire, but it does show a continuing commitment to “new stuff” for us players, wouldn’t you agree?

As long as the content being developed right now doesn’t have anything to do with what we’ve been begging and pleading for years for you to release (and fix), then no; not to me, not to anyone else who has posted here who has even a vague concern for the game’s direction.

I mean come on, you can’t even tell us if something is bugged or not. All we’re left to do is find out for ourselves, ‘oh no, it doesn’t work’… why not? Anet can’t even grace us with an explanation. Would you play something that has a development team which can’t even talk to their players about the game and its future? Short-, medium- and long-term goals are what need to be discussed and implemented, and not just in CDI form.

The releases don’t mean anything to any reasonable player if there’s nothing new to add to the game. I’m not talking about how hard you push your gemstore, LS episodes or LW content; I’m talking about stuff more tangible to the players who will appreciate it more, and you know as well as I do the stuff that’s being asked for in this game.

It’s more the fact that we don’t know what you’re working on and Anet’s too tight-fisted to release any information to keep us excited for what’s happening in the game. LW content only stretches so far. As a GW1 veteran you should know what we’re looking forward to in the game. The LS episodes and LW content can be enough to keep the newbies entertained for a while. The veterans (quite rightly) expect a bit more from what Anet can deliver, and to talk about such stuff with it’s longer-term players.

This isn’t an option, Gaile, it needs to happen.

I’m a primary PvE’r as well. When I think of other games modes like WvW, I keep thinking about what CJ was saying about it. I’ll paraphrase… “some of you already love WvW, but others may come to like it as well…” or words to that effect; it seems to me like he’s got someone at his back trying to push the WvW mode on us.

I for one, am not into WvW, mainly because of limiting outside factors. Those being that the hardware I have is in need of an upgrade so I can’t model more people on my screen like others can, and above all, my internet connection is not only strained but the furthest away from Anet’s servers! This forces such a lagstorm upon players in this region more than anywhere else. Mainly for this reason I just can’t find enjoyment in WvW; I’m hamstrung by outdated technology and location.

PvE is becoming just as bad thanks to megaserver and now the dailies sometimes including specific events, like the recent maw. There’s ALWAYS a crowd at those certain events, and thanks to this game being damage-based (you don’t hit, then it’s pointless doing the event), then it’s harking back to my original DPS-race topic I made several months ago, when megaserver became the norm. What was fun once, now has become ‘competitive’… it’s you against the rest of the other players for loot and event credit.

It’s… a Revive Orb… on a stick.

Not to mention ludicrous fees for travel. Three silver for second level, and five silver for third? If I were traversing the entire map in one bound then maybe, but this is just one area.

There’s no need for this blatant ripoff especially when there aren’t enough people to help you run places with. And in case you haven’t noticed Anet, the 3rd level isn’t exactly easy.

Each time I see someone post up about this item, nearly everyone butchers MEMO*IR*ES for MEMO*RI*ES. It’s simple, switch the I and the R around and instantly you look less of a dope.

Memoir (n.) a record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation.

It’s easy guys, say mem-wahr.

smh -__-

/rant

Mo Mo.1947:

Just a quick point about GW1 content release speed: Guild Wars 1 was a much simpler and smaller game. Building and upkeeping an MMO is a beastly task.

GW1 was a very different game with devs that actually knew what it meant to release a full expansion. They got things right. This game still has a reasonably large playerbase from GW1 and understand that it’ll never be GW1 again, but still want the content that that game delivered.

And still, the silence from Anet… is deafening.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Please-fix-the-dead-camera

I made this earlier as I didn’t know there was already a topic opened on this. This was fixed for probably over a year. Before that time it was as you see it in the game now. Very irritating and uncontrollable.

Please revert to the way you had the camera fixed before the feature patch, or if you so choose Anet, pls implement an option to choose whether or not we want to suffer the way it is now or tick a box to have it go back to the way it was.

Mokai.2480:

As a temporary fix, cant we consider replacing all player character soundbites with Traherne monologue?

“Commander, to me.”

You know you want it.

bewhatever.2390:

coglin.1867:

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

Legendaries – why on earth can you sell them on the trading post?

Why shouldn’t you ?

You put the time and effort into it, why shouldn’t you be able to sell it for a gold injection into your account as a monetary value of the time and effort spent?

Because then the Legendary doesn’t reflect a player’s skill or achievement, just the ability to get their wallet out. And from the number of incompetents waving Legendaries around, it seems the wallet solution does happen.

The same could be said about commanders.

Careful, it’s a can-opener to a rather large can of worms.

Sure I’ll post some feedback for it completely fall on deaf ears.

Map – waaayyy too vertical, get the deisgners to investigate 3D map references/layouts. Make ALL PoI’s visible on the map layers.
Story end – not enough time to get the final enemy down with the mechanics in place, look at expanding that.
Collection – too many and far too vertical using map-only mechanics to get to some of them. Not my cup of fleas.
Jumping Puzzle… WTF?!?! Seriously do you have Josh Foreman designing this for you? It’s a sadist’s dream.

Ok you can take your ear muffs off now.

Lishtenbird.2814:

Revised points 1-5, started adding some extra formatting.

Valandil Dragonhart.2371:

One more to add to the list:

• Precursor Crafting

Long overdue and plenty of debate on it from hoarders, TP ‘gurus’ and people who legitimately want a non-RNG way to obtain the hardest-to-get item(s) in the game.

Could you provide some links to representative threads?

Here are some (found in my upvoted section of profile), but this is just a few from the 2+ years of threads created about this very topic.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Precursor-Rage

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Precursor-Bull-Kitten

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Is-precursor-crafting-going-to-happen-or-not

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Is-this-a-fair-fix-for-precursors

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/gw2-precursor-recipe-scavanger-hunt-news

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/The-living-story-and-Precursor

Some of these are quite old and have EXCEPTIONALLY good ideas implemented in them.

Revilrad.1962:

Very very very very bad idea.
There is almost NOTHING in this game which is not aquirable by doing mindless CoF Runs and buy it in TP.

What actually need to be done is to make Pre-Cursors accountbound so they are not tradable.
Only that would make a legendary an actuall long term goal and reason to farm.

Fixed the second paragraph for you.

I deliberately did not elaborate on the method of acquisition of precursors and their bound-state because I was waiting for a backlash response like this. Go to ANY one of the threads I’ve just linked and see how many people will actually go and save enough gold to pay for someone else’s good luck. This is not the point, and certainly not the method being discussed. Save gold & buy… chump method. In those threads also you’ll see the cost of precursors as they were back then (about 1/5th the amount), and compare them to the cost they are now. The bottom line here is your first comment isn’t necessary and is subject to a lot of adversity from people championing the scavenger hunt method.

The method is mostly about getting an account-bound precursor from a scavenger hunt implementation of some kind. It’s been suggested for virtually as long as the game has been live. It has no reliance on RNG, it doesn’t reward the lucky with heaps of gold so you can feel ‘legendary’, no; in fact it’s more about acquiring something that you can work on FOR YOURSELF, which I have advocated for as long as I’ve been playing.

I just hope they don’t make the mistake of awarding more than one skin per account, no matter how many wrappers are deposited. One thousand skins should go to one thousand different accounts.

Raine.1394:

Thanks for the compilation. Would highly recommend you stick with the actual plural of gear, which is gear not gears. It always hits me like, How many deers were in the road? The plural of deer is deer and the plural of gear is gear.

Same with sheep, and (arguably) fish. While we’re in the English lesson, ‘a lot’ is clearly two words not one, and ‘thAn’ is to replace ‘thEn’ when discussing one determining factor over another. Just because people type it like they’d say so, it has no clear reflection on commonsense and understanding common spelling. If people cared about their typing as much as they do everything else that bugs the crap out of them in this game, thEn it would be so much easier to understand what one person is trying to extract from their brain through to their fingers. It really does hurt the eyes to see so many people go out of their way to misspell common words like they do.

Back to normal programming.

/anal rant

Vayne.8563:

Well I’m sure there are more than just hundreds considering in my guild alone 98 people logged in and played last week. And we’re not a huge guild.

Interesting point – to show just how flawed the metrics in this game are, did you know that 16 people logged in last week from my guild? I find that kind of interesting, since I’m the only one in it.

I don’t put too much stock into the figures/metrics this game possesses, and neither should anyone else. And it’s no surprise that I and others are trying to redirect the topic of the thread back on course from another Vayne segué.

On topic, I like the idea of getting more constructive and somewhat definitive information in the form of updates on the game’s direction. If we can be told what to expect in some more defined type of outlook (stuff that we know will be happening, not could be happening, as clarified by Gaile) it would go a long way to appeasing the ‘angry mobs’ here, helping the dev’s focus on certain points of the game and giving the players something to look forward to.

A lot of the karma items have mysteriously disappeared as well, including collectibles without which we cannot achieve. I’m looking at you, Brother Vince in Eldvin Monastery, and several others.

We all know that this is a very hard title to get. What I’m proposing is that every giant (especially Orrian ones) and not just champs attribute towards the Giant Slayer title. This is the ONLY species of foe in the game (that I’ve seen) which doesn’t have kills adding up in the ‘slayer’ which are less than champs. Why is this? Why make one title deliberately harder to obtain than the others in the Slayer category? Why can’t Veteran giants count for this?

I know this has been raised before, and many times, but something needs to be done about it.

Search function on these forums has been broken for well over a year. No attempt has been made to correct it.