Showing Posts For Zaiteki.3265:
Five months of “This is ridiculously bad” and we did finally get a “We know this exists and you would like an answer,” so that’s progress. I almost hope whatever person authorized these Trait changes gets pelted with Post-It Notes and jeered at every time they walk into the office. “Got any more bright ideas? I know! How about we randomly re-name everyone’s characters! No, no, what if we make the Elementalist a purely healing class? That’s a great idea, right? Forget it. Go get the coffee and donuts and leave the design to the adults. You had your shot and you irritated a vast swath of our player base. Maybe we’ll let you write some NPC dialogue. One sentence. I take my coffee half-and-half. Go.”
Obviously this is bitterness talking, but honestly, if people in a normal workplace makes a change that is universally loathed, without even the benefit of some rationalization (“We’re making you log in to a different domain to access a more central network share and more robust Exchange server,” “We’re recalling your vehicle because it can explode and kill you,” “We’re banning perfume because Gladys stinks to high heaven and no one wants to work in an Abercrombie and Fitch when they’re older than 22.”), those people would have some answering to do by the powers that be. Again, even Micro$oft realized that Windows 8 was a bad idea and is dropping much of what people hated for 9. See also: Windows ME, Windows Vista. It’s called listening to your customers.
Unless of course, ANet doesn’t like money and is trying to devalue their stock so that they’re more attractive to companies who may want to buy them out.
I can see where they may be coming from, re: silence. If you don’t say anything, then you can’t be held to anything. This is a strategy that businesses use on their social media over minor kerfuffles, since it usually dies down within a few days. Remember the Applebee’s receipt controversy a year ago? Most people don’t, and Applebee’s tried to keep quiet on it, so people still go there.
The problem is that this is five months worth of people describing precisely how terrible this decision was and are passionate enough about it to keep on floating the topic to the top. This is not “They burned my hamburger and told me I couldn’t have my money back because I ate 3/4 of it!” here. I do wonder if the community relations people would LIKE to comment, but there is some sort of war/conflict/scoffing at the Dev or Producer level over this. It’s quite clear that a vocal percentage of the player base thinks that whoever thought this was a good idea is a insert clever yet derogatory analogy here, but it’s also quite clear that the go-ahead to revert or to tell the players to stuff it hasn’t been completed yet. With such a passionate topic, anything they say will be held to like welded steel.
I honestly don’t know what the hold-up is. I almost wish I did, but the silence, while deafening and incredibly insulting, is understandable. I just wish that whoever the insert another insulting and derogatory name was who authorized this could be held accountable by the people who would like to play their alts again. A game becomes a ghost town VERY quickly if people stop playing alts, and I’m already seeing a lack of actual other people in the lower levels.
RiverSong, I don’t disagree with you entirely, however, there are many people who have one or two level 80s and really enjoyed being able to play with their traits all along the way, including the last 20 levels. There is a joy in leveling alts and playing the same zones differently due to different class mechanics. However, that falls incredibly flat when all of a sudden you’re slammed up against a level gate that wasn’t there before.
As I’ve said, I’d love to play my alts (I only have a single level 80, a Necro), but this new game system is incredibly insulting and, as however many have said before, just plain not fun. The traits are un-intuitive to find their unlock locations (unless you go off-game to a wiki), and many are higher level than where you’re able to safely explore. So, you don’t get a chance to play with trait combinations at all, and you don’t have real freedom to enjoy swapping them out until max level. This may have been thought out around the boardroom table, but at some point, when you have fifty pages over five months of players screaming about how much they absolutely loathe this change, it’s an almost incompetent amount of arrogance on the part of whichever Dev/Manager/Whatever to tap ash off of their cigar and say “Let them scream, I don’t care, I have their money, and if it’s not fun, then forget about them. We’ll get new players who won’t remember when the game WAS fun.”
It’s a very very poor business model to thumb your noses at the people who WANT to purchase and support your product. It’s not very difficult for this many people to make a great deal of noise on various social media, review, and discussion sites about how much people should certainly not waste their time and money on a game where the Devs quite obviously either have zero power to remove a detestable change or zero inclination to do so.
(edited by Zaiteki.3265)
I can’t agree with the above people any more fully. GW2 is a great game to bounce in and out of, but now with these locked traits, I have pretty much given up most desire to play. Level 30+ and the only way to more quickly open traits on my alts that my mains do is by doing specific quests that I have to open a Wiki page to find out about, and that are ~10 levels higher than where I am? Ridiculous and very NOT FUN. People play games to have fun, and in this case, the devs who approved this have gone the precise opposite direction. If you think that being hamstrung is fun, boy, you should give the ole “programming with boxing gloves” a try. When you are ready to retire, you can remove your boxing gloves and THEN you can use all ten fingers.
I and many others have paid for the game and multiple extra slots with real money, and this is how you reward customers? By slapping them in the faces and removing the fun? At least you have people telling you this is bad. Even Microsoft has realized that Windows 8 was a stupid idea and are removing loathed “additions.”
This is pages upon pages of people who actually care enough to comment. How many more will you need, Devs, or is this simply another case of “Well, they will just do what we say and they’ll get over it”? We don’t have to get over it. We can choose not to play. Fewer players, more ghost-town of a game, less interactivity, more games on the horizon. That’s how you lose customers.
(edited by Zaiteki.3265)