Guild Wars 2

Esmerine.9465:

Judging by the level of communication and commitment from the team-members we’ve heard from, it sounds like they’ve got this under control. I, for one, am not yet willing to rescind all of my trust. Furthermore, I think the communication about and, to use somewhat of an industry buzzword, “ownership” of bugs like this in an organization like ArenaNet is impressive. It is a nice thing for a team-member to come out and communicate that a fix is being worked on—but it takes real guts to communicate the bad news (i.e., the delay due to merging with audio changes).

I think we will all be cheering in this thread when the fix is out.

I think such judgements are always personal, so let me say that I’m disappointed by the “ownership” of this bug. Another thread has been closed 12 days ago by the Head of the Global Community with this single line: “Well, Jeffrey has given his answer, I think this has run its course.”

That was the equivalent of a door rudely slammed in the face of customers who had (and still have, to this day) a problem. I don’t think that’s good service although some steps have gone in the right direction since that happened. Yet I can’t say, in all fairness, that this bug has been handled the way I would have liked, and I don’t believe that the different attitude in answers given by Anet members can be ascribed only to the different role of the members in the organisation: such inconsistencies can also be considered a bad signal and that’s how I interpreted the whole chain of events.

I just hope such opinion of mine is based on wrong conclusions so I’ll be more than happy to be proved wrong. But as of now I can’t say that I’m satisfied, and I think you won’t see me cheering here: the problem will be fixed and I’ll continue the personal story of my character just as I should have been able to do two weeks ago when I encountered this blocking bug.

Count me in the number of customers who are extremely unhappy with your choice of making things more inconvenient than before for some bucks.
As soon as I realised the motives behind this additional hassle are purely economical I became extremely disappointed.

In fact moving crafting stations near the Mystic Forge and the rest would have cost NOTHING to you, but it’s a good incentive to shell out for what I could call an inconvenience item, just like removing a feature in a program and then make the customers pay for the same feature just to make some quick bucks. Nobody will be happy, except the ones who are too sentimental to judge what you did from a business, engineering or ethical point of view.

As a system technician and observing what you did from a generic software development perspective, I cannot applaud your move. I hope you backpedal soon, this is a bad policy. Kudos to the Asura genius who had this wonderful idea of disappointing customers.

One thing I never liked of some other MMO was that dueling could not be turned off, so people came and wanted to duel while you were doing something else, so you were clicking something and suddenly you clicked, inadvertently, a request for duel that popped up. I personally don’t like duelling, so the fact has been so annoying that I left that MMO because it wasn’t up to my liking. It included zones where PVP was mandatory. I think the philosophy of GW2 is different.

Dueling could be fine, but it’s prone to abuse if not implemented correctly. It’s a very delicate issue. GW and GW2 solved this issue with strucured PVP. I understand your desire but unless it can be implemented without griefing, I think it’s better if it’s left out of the game entirely. I know there’re a lot of possible solutions to avoid griefing, but in this case I trust the developers entirely (and I’m not that hopeful generally).

Costume brawling was just costume brawling. I think you’re underestimating the emotional impact of being defeated while wearing a costume versus the emotional impact of duelling with the real abilites of your character. It’s a completely different thing, in my opinion, and it’s something that, always in my opinon, has already been considered by the developers.

So, as long as there’s a way to appease and protect all kind of players, seeing what ArenaNet is doing at the moment, let me say: I think you’ll have it sooner or later, unless it could amount to griefing. Maybe I’m an optimist and since I’ve been let down for a long time before I shouldn’t be, but let’s not give up hope. It’s not the kind of thing ArenaNet can overlook. I just hope they put it in the right context.

Esmerine.9465:

Maybe I’m just jaded by my experience in the software industry, and what is poor service seems good to me by comparison—I’m certainly open to that possibility.

I’m on the opposite side since my experience with software (and also hardware) when it comes to contacting major (and also most of minor) players has almost always been positive, but probably that’s because in a productive environment calls to support are treated as incidents, especially when you deal with ISO certified firms which should have, at least theoretically, strict QA procedures and management.

So I’ve seen excellent response times and bugfixes being produced on the fly (for instance IBM rewrote instantly the firmware of a SCSI controller to correct a timeout, and Microsoft almost stalked me until everything was fixed and fine and my incident could be closed) to avoid the problem of a single customer. But then again, that’s the productive environment: you have to treat your customers well.

As for the gaming industry, I doubt customers are treated the same way. Here you have an example, as I said, of a door slammed in the face of someone who was reasonably expecting something to work in reasonable times. And you can talk about complexity, interactions and the like, but that’s no excuse for bad customer treatment. I would have gladly used some money to buy gems to support the developer (as I already did in the past) but at the moment I have decided that I won’t put any more money in Anet or NCSoft products until I see significant improvements. That’s what I can do, apart from quitting the game altogether.