Guild Wars 2

Mirta.5029:

Other than that you deserve nothing except for the base content that was there when you bought the game and you are not entitled to anything.

Exactly. You’re not entitled to anything, not even the base content. The User Agreement is clear. All we can have from NCSoft and ArenaNet is regulated by that agreement. Thinking differently is legally wrong.

But then again, what we can expect from a company, what we like as customers, is regulated by our idea of business ethics, which is something that goes beyond legal agreements and is strictly personal. I thought, as a customer, that I deserved more and better than what I had with the introduction of an Airship pass.

I have completely stopped playing for the moment since I’d have no fun, I have no good feelings about the game now. I thought that making permanent picks account bound (and not soulbound) was a good move, overall. Customer friendly. I would have paid for that conversion and I was surpised there was no fee for it, and I wouldn’t say pleasantly surprised, because I felt that not paying for such conversion was unfair to early adopters who bought multiple sets for their toons (I bought a complete set and I have 9 lvl 80 characters, I bought gems with real money for the slots and other commodities and I’m prepared to do so for actual content that satisfies my tastes despite the convertibility of ingame currencies). But I don’t like what happened in this case and dropping out of the game – either permanently or temporarily – is my reaction. I’m not happy about it since I overall liked GW2 but hey, life is complex and undeniably short if good, and there’s life before, during and after GW2, so I’ll cope with it.

I’ll add that I could sell part of my inventory to get gold and then convert to gems to have the passes I need, but that’s beyond the point, because money isn’t the point in this case, at least for me: it’s what that money is for that counts.

Of course, I also voice my discontent in this forum, so ArenaNet knows. Many people feel the same and there’s nothing inherently wrong or good about it. It’s just a decision about rewarding a compay or not for its practices.

Carighan.6758:

In short, I really fail to see the problem here.

Yes, it’s a failure, because you don’t consider this a problem of yours; and it isn’t since it doesn’t affect the way you play this game.

I think it’s a problem because it affects the way I play my game. If the same services were conveniently restored elsewhere and there was no ticket for an entrance to get what you had before I’d say that the story explanation provided in this thread by ArenaNet would hold up, but we all know it’s not this way. We all know there’s an entrance ticket. This is a business decision and the only way to deny such explanation would be to remove the entrance tickets (and this won’t happen) or restore services the way they were, and this will happen only if many people drop out of the game, and I consider also this event highly unlikely.

It may not a problem of yours but since I see this as a problem it’s a problem of mine. It’s a pity since I liked Guild Wars 2, but as someone else said in future games I play I’ll be more careful about choosing a company which doesn’t engage in business practices that I don’t agree with. And that doesn’t equate to consider Arenanet employess bad people or stupid people, although the “story” explanation provided in this thread by an Arenanet employee is one of the dumbest things I’ve read in my whole life (and I read a lot, including a lot of stupid stuff); and this isn’t even, like someone thinks, a moral question of good vs evil, it’s a question of what a single player can accept or not.

I may be swallowing Arenanet’s justifications or not, but it’s up to me to decide whether I consider this move a bad signal or not, and for me this is the worst premonition of bad things to come as of now, and I’m not referring to poor story lines.

Puro.8501:

Wow, just wow. I cant believe people are complaining over something that’s already available in the game.

Luxury?
I paid for this game. Arenanet has chosen to remove a long standing convenience to make it premium, so this game is actually becoming closer to a freemium model (minus the initial and not so negligible payment). I wouldn’t mind shelling bucks for real permanent content, but this is a business practice I don’t like at all. Narrative devices are only that: narrative devices.

When you tell a story you take decisions, and those decisions contribute to the narrative, which is an artificial construct. A seemingly unimportant decision such as keeping the Mystic Forge far from crafting stations (or more inconvenient than before, and that’s undeniable no matter how little you consider hassle) has a rationale that doesn’t come from narrative, but from business decisions. Thinking differently is dumb.

Being unhappy about such decisions when they’re damaging you is normal, even healthy. I think you’re much too adapted to this game to understand the underlying reality. Hint: taking a look at NCSoft’s pre-GW2 financial information (especially the Arenanet sections) could help you understand how much GW business model was costing.

I expect more and more of this stuff to keep this hybrid business model viable, and that’s a negative outlook for me.

[quote=3660863;ShinjoNaomi.1896:]

Lowen.8157:

Imagine that not gaining money was their goal but actually giving us the feeling that tyria is at war and that we shouldn’t take anything for granted cause it can be taken away any second.
It’s up to you to decide if you want the easy way out and buy a ticket or use another city and run some more miles.
War isn’t for whiners, give it your all or go home

Seriously speaking: narratology (being the study of a narrative structure) would tell us that the economy is the cause, the narrative is the effect.

I cannot “imagine”, as you say with your naive comparisons with facts that have affected the lives of hundreds of millions, that the effect is the cause and the cause is the effect. I know I’m inside a narrative. My disbelief isn’t so much suspended to blur the confines of fantasy and reality. I know I’m no warrior, I’m a player behind a keyboard: when my backpacks get filled with truckloads of items no human, asura or whatever could carry without driving an 18-wheeler I know I’m playing. Everybody knows. Reversing cause and effect would make me feel – as a player, a customer and human being – immensely stupid, because this would prevent me to understand that this move by Arenanet is a very poorly structured narrative device.

Let’s not kid ourselves, imagination shouldn’t be this poor.

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.

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.

CyberKnight.8941:

Really? I can not believe you just said this…..

“However the majority of the people here feel like they’re wishing mass death on the QA team, and Jeffery for the lack of communication; which is another grave mistake.”

Why not? I believe it. Inability to read emotions is an enormous problem, in this case. This was why I consider his posts way too emotional (as I said before) to be useful. Besides that, I have a problem whenever someone drops his “you don’t know who I am” hammer and “won’t say more” about it while using unconvincing, technically wrong language (which should completely be avoided by a tester who understands his role)… I mean, I could easily think such self-proclaimed tester tested The Hatchery, and I’d say to myself “Ha-ha. Understood.”

StygSec.7163:

The majority of you in this thread just need a break. Take a chill pill, relax and do something else instead of camp this thread and tell everyone how much this game sucks and is stupid and horrible and should never be bought or played by anyone because of one simple story choice that people have made involving skritt.

That’s because the story choice is popular AND broken. I don’t need to relax, take pills for a choice I made in good faith and I wasn’t warned. I can’t take a look at the Wiki before doing a storyline quest, that would deprive me of part of the fun, which is discovery. Then, there might be some particular attachment to a toon, as roleplayers know well. Put that together and you have emotional responses, although far less emotional than your accusations.

StygSec.7163:

Noteworthy mention: The Hylek, The Quaggan, and the Grawl work fine.

And Skritt are considered funnier than the rest, as I came to learn during chats, so it’s likely the broken choice is the most popular in that quest branch. There’s no way to go back once you choose, so you’re stuck. I’ve stopped developing a toon and concentrated on another since I want to do the storyline the way it’s intended.

StygSec.7163:

Also I believe the opposite quest of The Hatchery is not bugged, and working fine as well.

That doesn’t change the fact that The Hatchery doesn’t work and at the moment I can’t go on or back.

StygSec.7163:

Complaining violently will never solve anything.

Oh, the violence, the horror. Hundreds of brutes and minions rampaging and killing everything in their path. The horror, the horror.
Please tone down your words, if I ever saw an attack that can be considered vicious, it’s yours. I guess you don’t realise that a lot of people work in the IT industry and, more or less, have their opinions on development and release process and times. I work in IT support and I have to know better how people react than how computers react, and I’m too old to lose my time reading confused and confusing things like “all game are betas at release” when this, formally, is far from being correct. I understand perfectly what you mean, but perhaps confusing Beta and Beta state doesn’t help your cause, because it makes a huge difference since the game is in Beta state but this isn’t Beta stage. That’s not what I paid for. Nonetheless, this bug has been handled very badly, also at PR level. I like the game, but this is worrying.

Count me in the number of persons who are disappointed by the answers given, because the issue will “run its course” when it is fixed.
I’ve hit it now so I can’t complain like all the others, but my jaw dropped when I took a look at the forum. Let say I don’t consider the final answer given in the locked thread satisfactory. If I answered that way to a customer of mine because he/she’s not able to perform a task with the software I sell I’d have to do a lot of damage control and apologise personally to customers, then face disciplinary action. But not all firms, I recognise, work that way.

This communication failure is extremely sad.

I was able to complete the quest this morning despite the problems I had yesterday. There’s no apparent change client-side, so other players who have been unable to complete it yesterday may be able to complete it today.

Same issue here, logging from two different networks. I’m stuck on the loading screen then the game client loses the connection.

Both networks are fine and both computers too, I never have problems with disconnections (except, obviously, when there are server-side issues).

Network activity during the process is very low, the 2Mbit and 5Mbit connections I use were idle.

Server: Piken Square (EU).