Guild Wars 2

Meta-suggestion:

First, before implementing, stop and think about the different groups of players you care about, who it’s most important to retain as customers and who you’re willing to alienate. Then think about whatever is proposed, from the point of view of each of those groups, and get a sense of who’s going to blow all over the boards and who’s going to leave as a result of the changes.

Second, put a red team to work. No matter what you choose, the players will figure out how to optimize play for it (and possibly how to exploit it) by the time it’s been live a few days. Have some smart people figure out what the min-maxers will do, and what the exploiters will do, before it goes live.

Third, the real problem is that the ready availability of transfers, together with the unwillingness to do server merges, inevitably results in population imbalances. This in retrospect fatally flawed combination is really the cause of today’s problems in WvW; the scoring system is secondary and while it might mitigate some of the issue it is a tail which cannot wag the dog.

Looking at the suggestions made above, I would lean toward those which favor the underdog, that is, make the outnumbered buff more robust and reward the successes of an outnumbered team richly. Might even make it more fun to be on a low pop realm, which would be a very strong restoring force toward balancing the servers. That having been said, I guarantee any such mechanic is entirely exploitable, particularly by a realm as disciplined as Season 2’s winners were, who could cause everyone to “take a break” (log off or go to a different map) while a SWAT team finished taking an objective, doubling or tripling the reward. Whatever mechanism is designed must be resistant to manipulation and exploits.

lordkrall.7241:

daimasei.4091:

Because the last game to focus on raids is doing great… oh wait!

Well at least the big guilds are going strong… oh wait!

OK, nvm.

Anyhow, if they introduce raids I will leave this game. I can’t event do teq or the wurm because people are beyond stupid so more “sorry, you can do this unless you find 100 players with an IQ above 0” is a total nope for me.

It is a rather large leap from introducing raids to focus on raids though.

The game does have Dungeons. Does it focus on dungeons?
The game does have WvW. Does it focus on WvW?

So you will simply leave the game if they add something that you can’t do, even if it will not really effect your ability to play the rest of the game in any way or form?

The raid content in, say, DAoC ToA was itemized such that it reset what competitive gear meant in RvR, forcing RvR players to PvE if they wanted competitive gear.

The raid content in RIFT progressed fast enough that it wasn’t possible for new players to “catch up”, so the devs created dailies which gave away tokens for next-raid-down gear. This had the side effect of trivializing both the 5-mans and all the outdoor content, after enough days had passed to accumulate enough tokens to get a full set of gear.

On the other hand, other devs have put in raiding just for the experience, without giving it a gear progression. I actually prefer this design, since it doesn’t trivialize the content I most care about. But then I choose not to do WoW style instanced raiding.

No, I won’t quit if raiding is added to the game. It’s already here, as outdoor raiding, just look at the Temple bosses, Tequatl, etc. But if fixed headcount, drill team, instanced raiding is added, you won’t find me there. I’m just worried that the devs face a really ugly choice between creating a raid game the raiders will find lacking, and one which as a side effect trivializes much of the rest of the game. May all their choices be good ones.

Exxcalibur.6203:

‘The dichotomies of raiding’

Raiding translates to:

(-)

Horrendous time sinks
Two tier player culture of ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’
Elitism
Divisive power structures and player politics within guilds
A narky culture of self obsessed gamers

(+)
Greater player commitment
Time sinks
Player collusion within existing guilds and a deeper more mutually dependent guild culture

As a player with numerous real life commitments, who is not in need of a game to replace the vacuity of my life, I have no need for time sinks. But I can’t imagine players like me dominate the game.

For me, raids are the worst of WoW, so take from that what you will.

However, more Raids’/events like the Marionette would be great.

I don’t think GW2 can import WoW’s raiding paradigm.

The haves and have nots would not only wreck the community (remembering that GW2 drew not just from GW1 but also from WoW players who wanted something different — making GW2 more like WoW would just drive those players away), but also would distort WvW balance. Remember the textbook mistake in game design, where the raid drops the hammer of doom — which is needed to defeat the raid boss — but when that hammer is used in WvWvW it becomes an I-win button?

I think GW2 has a healthy and inclusive paradigm for outdoor raiding (save a few encounters where I dissent with designs which are unlearnable, hence once the community has learned and practiced the encounter a new player is inherently a detriment to the success of the raid, so the design leads to newcomers being driven off rather than included).

Would encourage the development team to build on this heritage, rather than trying to import fixed player count, designed to the edge so 25 people have to each execute optimal rotations precisely for 10 minutes straight, without a single slip up, to win the encounter. I did not choose to participate in this in WoW (save the occasional PUG run of a 1-boss hat dungeon), have not chosen to participate in such content in any of the four or five games I’ve played since WoW, came to GW2 in part because of its focus on outdoor inclusive content rather than exclusive instanced raiding, and will not participate in WoW-like content if it is added to GW2.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

More importantly, “the players” are on different pages with other players.

This is what I meant by segmenting the player base. This isn’t a million people each with wildly different expectations, it’s players preferring something between ten and twenty different playstyles with varying degrees of skill. Or maybe, there are five or six classes of content in the game, and each player prefers one or two and actually plays three or four.

If the devs grasp a segmentation that’s even close, it will be self fulfilling, because the people who they missed will all leave sooner or later. More importantly, they will be able to look at what they’re doing through the eyes of each of the segments, and will know in advance that this change or that new feature will delight this segment, and alienate that one. Customer reactions won’t be surprises any more. Plans can be tested in advance, systematically, against the expectations of each target segment.

Filtered through a defective segmentation, the player input will seem like loud, self-contradictory noise and the developers will “learn” (using the term narrowly from Psychology) to ignore that input. One defective segmentation through which the input might be viewed would be the lens only of GW1, which is not an MMO. Another defective segmentation through which the input might be viewed would be that solely of a developer of games for Playstation/Xbox/Wii. A third defective segmentation might be assuming all of the players are unmarried and uneducated U.S. males between 13 and 27 years old, which is so far from the MMO demographic as to be laughable.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

The great thing about a survey is that it’s a quick way to measure the pulse of people on a particular topic. The horrible thing is that it’s terrible about understanding why people feel the way they do and worse, they are easily misunderstood even by the people sponsoring the survey. Oh sure, there are surveys that drill deep down into understanding the issues, but those require hiring firms that charge a ton of money for their expertise. And even then, (a) you only get answers to the questions you think to ask and (b) people are still prone to misunderstand what the survey is telling them about the situation.

This is what focus groups and open ended 1 on 1 surveys are for. Getting a sample that’s actually representative is really hard, and the discipline to distribute the raw data (warts and all) is hard, particularly for weak or insecure executives.

If the survey data is going to be filtered through the biases of someone who does not understand the customers or is using a defective segmentation, then yes, it is a waste of time and resources. The continued expenditure of development resources under those circumstances is not a wise use of shareholder resources.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I think a more important thing for ANet to do would be to figure out a way to get input about the game (and how ANet handles its future) from people who don’t usually provide such input. In other words, redditors, guru-ists, and forumistas might only be 10-30% of all players who feel strongly about the game. So how does ANet get solid, detailed, informed feedback from the other 70%+?

This, I think, was the point of this thread: encouraging ArenaNet to capture input from every account holder who cared enough to respond, approximating the active player base.

Ideally, I would like a living set of survey results associated with my account, which I can change any time I am logged into the game, where I answer honestly and for my playstyle the “importance” (to me) and “performance” (how I perceive GW2 is currently doing) in less than 10 target areas, and can then name up to three other areas that weren’t on the list to rate as well. ArenaNet could weight these by gems bought in the last month, gems used in the last month, hours played in the last month, or any other objective measure they think is relevant…but should then make the metrics available to everyone in the company, not just the senior leaders.

Draknar.5748:

You can try a survey, but in the end, all we’ll be left with is: “I guess everything is terrible and also everything is great; also a lot of people want X feature added, but apparently a lot of people would quit it we add X feature…”

That’s a lot of time/money wasted to figure out the player base has absolutely no consensus on what they do or don’t want from this game. They just want this game (or whatever game comes next) to be the greatest MMO they’ve ever played in their entire lives forever…

It’s a fallacy to think that the player base is a single uniform segment. We all know it’s not, in any game. The key is mining the data to find the clusters of people — noting that only rarely does someone fit in only one category — and then figure out how to serve enough of those clusters to pay expenses with a little left over.

Kind of like winning an election, or getting a bill passed in Congress. Make deliberate choices which segments to delight, which to be good enough for, and which you will regrettably have to alienate to accomplish the first two.

Oh, and gaming customers have very long memories, so don’t ever go back and try to serve a group you’ve already driven off. They’re gone. Choose your customers well.

Three additional comments:

1. There is formal training, called QFD, which the auto industry imported from Japan back 30 or 40 years ago, in a systematic way to make feature choices in a complex product. I took that training in the 1980s. I think ArenaNet senior staff would benefit from understanding this way of thinking, even if they never applied the formal process.

2. There are textbooks on developing online games, by authors like Mulligan, Bartle, and Koster. I think ArenaNet senior staff would benefit from the perspective of each of these authors, even if they do not agree with every position those authors take.

3. One of the very, very basic philosophies in marketing, called the Kano model, is that customer needs and expectations come in three kinds: unstated needs, the needs on which products compete, and opportunities to delight. It is absolutely essential to know your customer well enough that, in pursuit of opportunities to delight, you do not run afoul of unstated needs and as a result drive your customers to your competitors because you took away the product they wanted to keep buying from you.

Pinkamena Diane Pie.8054:

And what happens when they read something they dont like the sounds of?

(See last paragraph of my post 3 posts above.) I concur that when the input is filtered subjectively, or worse, through the biases of a middle manager doing the filtering, the essence of the content can easily be lost. Just read the history books about the progress reports within the US government/military during the Vietnam war 40-50 years ago, where “we are losing this war on the ground” turned into “things are going well” by the time the reports had been filtered through all the layers of management…

Gaile Gray.6029:

I appreciate the feedback. I just wonder how such a survey could work. Most surveys are not essay questions. They’re like this:

• Should we change [this thing]? Yes/No.

That seems unhelpful. First, things are seldom answered with just a yes or no answer. Instinct is to react, “Well, I need to know more about why you’re looking at that area,” or “That’s not as important as [these other things]” or “Yes, please change it [this way] and not [that other way].”

Or maybe you’re thinking:

• Which of these things should we focus on? [list]

Thank you for this conversation, Gaile, and you raise a couple of very good points.

First, given how good ArenaNet is at metrics, I’d suggest adding another, “net promoter score”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter

Second, a tool I’ve seen used over the years is “importance-performance analysis”. The original scholarly article describing it, from 1977 is (unfortunately behind a paywall) at
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1250495
A google search found an example here, which illustrates different segments of customers having very different needs and perceptions of how well those needs are being met
http://www.academia.edu/1881603/Importance-performance_analysis_of_guest_entertainment_technology_amenities_in_the_lodging_industry

Lastly, I agree, it is absolutely necessary that the survey be tied to account, and available to every account, so that the ballot box can’t be stuffed. People will still self select for responding: it is important not to present someone with a wall of incomprehensible choices (ie a really badly designed importance-performance survey presentation) or with a survey beyond their attention span (a massively long survey will also produce skewed data, because a lot of people will simply abandon it). It is also important not to do what Blizzard did with the WoW cancel-account survey, which was to provide a list of choices so filtered by what management wanted to hear that for most customers none of the answers really captured “the message is raid or quit, and I won’t raid on your terms, so you’ve told me to quit”, or “the cataclysm expansion destroyed what I loved about this game, so there is no reason for me to stay”, or “the community environment is toxic”. It is super important to allow open ended answers and “other” topics, prompting for a short explanation. Anyhow, there are tools which send an email with a customer-unique url for the survey, with the raw data associated with a specific account held by a third party so the answers would be anonymous aggregates to ArenaNet, but would accept no more than one response per account.

PS

The classic failure of the message boards, watched and summarized by a hierarchy of CM’s, which is then summarized by management to the top, is that at each step the data is filtered both by the viewpoint of the reader/summarizer and by what management wants to hear. So by the time the data gets to the top, it’s so distorted it bears no resemblance to statistically valid data on what the various segments of the customer base actually thought was both important and needed attention. What is done to keep these biases out of the current approach?

Vayne.8563:

And herein lies the problem. This is what Anet is dealing with all the time. Here’s our consensus thus far. With 18 responses, only two items got more than one vote and those 2 items only got 2 each.

More profession/racial skills. 2 votes.
Fix the trait system. 2 votes

The rest got 1 each.

Mounts
Dueling
Enemy Cast Bar
Customizable UI
Conditions
Permanently SAB
Coyote pet for Rangers
Jumping Puzzles
Return Our Feet
Sub classes
Remove Transmutation Costs
Dungeon Overhaul
New Zones
Guild Vs Guild
Fun

Admittedly some of these are said flippantly but the real answer is this community is deeply divided and no matter what Anet does, one group or another is going to feel disenfranchised.

And there’s no game developer in the world that can do all of this at the same time, so people will continue to feel disenfranchised.

Basic political skills problem, a lot like getting a bill through Congress. Well, the Congress of a generation ago that could still compromise and get things done. The bill has something for everyone, it’s a package, and since everyone thinks they’re getting at least something there is a reasonable level of satisfaction.

But put a bill out there which benefits only one narrow segment, and watch everyone else pile on objecting.

Basic political skill.

Oh, and my real vote is for a traditional MMO expansion.

A long and well earned vacation in Hawaii for not just the senior managers but all the devs.

“Any intuitive change to a complex system will inevitably leave that system worse off.”

Jessica Boettiger.2563:

Basically removing the achievement requirement during a tournament is an experimental step we took to reduce the incentive for achievement grinding. We want people to play WvW, and not focus too heavily on satisfying achievement requirements.

If we find that players prefer having numerous things to check off a list, then we would certainly take that feedback into account and consider it for future tournaments.

“Any intuitive change to a complex system will inevitably leave [that system] worse off.” From an upper division engineering school textbook on complex systems 40 years ago, in turn quoting an earlier text on urban studies.

edit: I agree with Reverence below:

Remove EoTM events from counting toward your achievement progress if it’s that easy. What the flying squirrel.

10 minutes a week (in the EoTM karma train) can’t have been the intended level of effort for Season 3 rewards.

Geekfox.4267:

Usually when I join a mass group event that has about 140 players, the game is not keeping me up in real-time, but slowly lags me behind by massive seconds against all the actions see on screen. Where I try to go or attack is not what others see on their side until 5 to 30 seconds later, or even higher. Thus, the actions between the server and the client gets desynchronized.

I’m sure your game has more bandwidth to provide since I can download updates up to 1 MB/seconds; yet when mass group event happens, you only provide me around 40 KB/sec, which is not enough when an area filled with players are blasting all kinds of attacks. Eventually all the data gets “backlogged” and I have to run away from the event and hope all that data “catches” up, or the backlog will overflow and disconnect me from the map. It often gets bad to the point that the game is not allowing me to tag enemies during an event when I’m up close to them.

Recently your September patch promises performance improvements, but since the patch went online yesterday, the connection lag from the game has gotten much worse; thus, the performance fix failed to meet expectations and making certain events much more unplayable.

I’m pretty sure something better can be done to prevent this data from “backlogging” on my game client. No games I’ve played ever lags me behind by 30 seconds or more.

There are two relevant bottlenecks where this could occur, and my guess is you are experiencing both at the same time.

First, if your client cannot keep up with the sequence of actions called for by the stream of packets from the server, and it gets far enough behind, you will DC. I chased an issue like this in DAoC a decade ago and finally realized that the problem was that the client side engine was being asked to do a heavyweight software call to instantiate an object on each {player, NPC} affected by a spell, and then de instantiate the object. This was why 200 people could stand around just fine, but once combat began the client performance collapsed. DAoC bought their client engine. I more recently observed similar symptoms in RIFT during its first year after release, and see the same in GW2, but have honored the Terms of Service and not run a debugger on either. I believe the client code should detect that it is getting behind processing traffic from the server and ruthlessly prioritize (meaning drop) ephemeral things like spell effects to make sure the keep-alive messages are processed in a timely way.

I also observe that if 140 players each have 40KB/s, that’s a bit over 50 megabits/sec, which is quite modest traffic for the server’s NIC to handle, but would by itself fill a fairly expensive uplink to NCsoft’s ISP there in Texas. If there is a device upstream of the server which limits the peak bandwidth each server can send to NCsoft’s ISP, and does so by dropping packets which exceed this limit (a process called “policing” in the network business), we would see this kind of desynchronization between server and client: if the server to client traffic is TCP, a dropped packet means wait 2 seconds and then retransmit everything following the drop. The telltale sign that this is occurring would be a fast motion catch up after combat ends. Just a thought…

nirvana.8245:

For the inability to stomp, I believe this is carrying over to other things. Yesterday I was completing my dailies when I came across the chest with the scritt burgler. I killed him and returned to pick up the loot he drops on the way and could not interact with any of the loot bags. I believe this is an issue that is related to not being able to stomp. There was another player nearbye and he had the same issue. He asked me, “can you pick these loot bags up”. I replied “No, must be a bug”. He replied back, “nah, its a ‘feature’”.

Problems where the server and client disagree on the location of an object are really ugly, both for the player and for the dev to debug. If this disagreement is due to lag, the devs in the Anet office will never see it, because their test setup is local.

Tspatula.9086:

Massive skill lag (delays then sometimes fast motion catch ups) and rubber banding. I ran both speedtest and pingtest.net with the game running, no issues. My FPS never dropped below 40 fps during these huge lag spikes.

This combination: massive skill lag plus fast motion catch ups, is consistent with bursts of TCP/IP packet drops of packets sent by the server, presumably due to bandwidth policing done by the upstream router in the NCSoft data center. Note that if the packets were being held in the server and metered out, the fast motion catch ups wouldn’t occur. If it were an individual’s internet connection, the experience wouldn’t be widespread as described. If it were policing of traffic from NCSoft as a whole, it wouldn’t be so specific to WvW (presumably due to O(n^2) updates when n people are in one fight.

Oh, one simpler explanation: there’s a shallow buffer switch just upstream of the servers, and the server is overwhelming the switch’s buffer space (causing packet drop storms) during those large WvW fights. This seems unlikely, because those switches have fast upstream ports as well, unless someone were so misguided as to configure bandwidth policing for 1/nth of the uplink(s) for each of n servers, at that switch, which could also cause such drops.

“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.” Dragons are extremely powerful, and do act from malice. Here I need to defend the very capable employees at ArenaNet, who delivered a masterpiece game 2 years ago and who to my knowledge have never acted with malice. I simply disagree with the allocation of resources/investment which has been chosen since GW2 went live, again without malice, by the ArenaNet executives.

“Any intuitive change to a complex system will inevitably leave [that system] worse off.” from an engineering textbook on complex systems 40 years ago, quoting a textbook on urban studies

It appears that ArenaNet has too much staff making arbitrary changes to things which do not affect — or worse, negatively affect — my gameplay.

No investment is being made in the things which would enhance my gameplay, such as a traditional MMO expansion with new zones, new replayable content, new 5-player dungeons, where content is mine to explore, not linear.

I once worked in a billion dollar a year business which reached the conclusion that we were not going to attract new customers, and that we needed to do our best for the customers we already had. The R&D budget was cut in half, and a lot of my long time friends and colleagues had to find new jobs (all did, without trouble, they were good people). Customer satisfaction rose, noticeably.

It’s time to cut the staff at ArenaNet by two thirds, and the executive staff by a similar proportion, and to break the remaining staff into teams of no more than 10 people, each of which identifies with a specific segment of players and is rewarded (ie gets to keep their jobs) not based on objectives from executives, but rather based on how much play goes on in that segment (or, to be crude, how many $$ of revenue come directly from players in that segment).

Enough said.

XyAltAcc.2096:

NCsoft released their 2014 Q2 financial report.
(http://www.ncsoft.net/global/ir/earnings.aspx)

GW2 generated about 25 million dollars in the last 3 months, a little bit less compared to Q1(30 million $), which is almost the same as 2013 Q4. I don’t have early figures about the whole 2013 fiscal year, but here I can come up with some financial status about GW2. Yes it remains stable, and is probably going to reach 100 million dollars at the end of 2014. I know YoY2013 is a little bit decreasing, but if u take a look at other major MMOs on the market (swtor, wildstar, eso, ff14). I have done some research on these MMOs (each game forum, 3rd party figures from mmorpg.com), every figure I saw told me GW2 surely has the largest player base among those MMOs, but nearly gets the lowest revenue(swtor get 150million in 2013, which has the smallest player base among those MMOs above).

[snip for brevity]

Summary: Of all the mmos that was mentioned before, GW2 has largest player base, while making the lowest revenue (it’s still stable 2 years after launch which is good). Anet you really need to reconsider the stuff on gemstore and decide what to do next. Do it quickly.

—
English isn’t my native language but I gave it a try.

Good editing!

I think we can draw several conclusions from this data:

1. No hard data on other MMOs, just handwaving.

2. GW2 pricing model does not align ArenaNet’s interests with the interests of players who stay with the game. ArenaNet is incented to bring in new players (which is where most of their money comes in) but does not have the revenue stream to support continued development of content of the quality and depth of that which was in the game at release.

3. If we don’t see Wildstar revenue up next quarter, then Wildstar will have peaked at far fewer players than GW2 (even ignoring the China launch, which probably dwarfs the U.S. in player count already). However, if the average revenue per player per month of Wildstar dwarfs that of GW2, Wildstar will be able to provide at least some level of ongoing quality content in the way the GW2 business model cannot. It will be interesting to see whether GW2 or Wildstar has the higher revenue a year from now, after the initial box purchase effects of GW2-China and Wildstar release have passed.

4. I’d much rather have paid a sub for GW2 at release, and kept the people who originally developed the game in charge, doing expansions in the expected style of MMOs. In that sense the B2P financial model choice for GW2 has been a failure, not just for ArenaNet, but for its customers.

Perhaps the problem is that there is little or no server loyalty (ie it’s too easy to move a WvWvW toon between servers).

It’s predictable that a bunch of people will try to pile onto the winning servers given the current system.

DAoC, for all its imperfections, at least forced you to reroll if you were switching realms (the effect of switching servers here), and back when I played took months to get a toon to endgame, and years to get to a decent RR. That was the disincentive to reroll.

The problem with persistent world games is that once the game is handed to customers, those who don’t like how the game is will leave. If the devs then change the world, the people who don’t like the new way will join those who didn’t like the old way as ex customers. I saw RIFT thrash to the point where it seemed like nearly everyone left, for this reason. So I think these games, at least in the hands of sane business people, are a case of “the hand once having writ, moves on…” (meaning past decisions like this one are not revisited by developers who wish to retain any customers at all).

Hence, despite the weaknesses of the current system, I do not concur with OP.

Colin, Chris,

I think part of the problem here is that the playerbase is not a monolithic whole, it’s a collection of 10 or more different factions of people who play the game in different ways and have different needs.

Without a clear segmentation of the playerbase (a very complex task which will never be entirely correct), player input will collectively be self contradictory and a one-size-fits-all analysis will seem like it’s all useless loud noise.

Oh, and some players are part of more than one segment.

I would really encourage you to do your best at segmenting the player base, and then align the topic points (and therefore the topic point stickies) with the player segments. This will give you both qualitative (I want more PvE zones) and quantitiative (gee, 10 people were interested in PvE for every person interested in WvWvW) feedback about the segments.

What you are doing is more like running a political campaign than like the technical work of designing a game. If you don’t get enough votes (in this case $ spent), a lot of really good people will lose their jobs. That inherently means you need to build a coalition of different segments, because no one segment will generate enough votes to get you re elected (enough $ to keep ArenaNet at current staffing level).

Reality is that you will have to let some segments go, and despite the short term pain I would encourage you to be up front about those decisions. Focus on building sub communities (starting with real, constructive discussion within each segment) so that the surviving sub communities will feel vibrant to the players, even if GW2 itself has a shrinking player base. Perception is reality.

Remember that. Perception is reality.

Paradox.1380:

How you choose to use your time is up to YOU. You cannot tell me that I have to feel how you do (as the OP clearly did telling me I should open my eyes and see what all is wrong when I actually don’t agree with what they think is wrong).

Fact is this is a pick up and put down game. You don’t have to put thousands of hours in if you don’t want to. See the point here is that you WANT to do something, and if you want it you have to do it the way its implemented in the game, or you don’t get it. Why is that a bad concept?

In Wow I want the best gear, not gonna get it if you don’t do Raiding….. even if you HATE raiding. (just using it as an example, I don’t play WoW so I don’t know exactly how it works that’s just how I heard)

In GW2 I actually HATE the way precursors are handled. As such its the reason I don’t have a legendary in the game. It’s never hurt me to not have a legendary. I simply didn’t do it yet. When and if ANet changes how it is gotten I may get my legendary. But I’m not about to come on here and yell, scream, throw things and tell people they HAVE to agree with me simply because I dislike how something was handled. I might make a thread about how to make it better, or reply to a CDI about said subject… but in a suggestive and constructive manner. Not a whiny one.

We are in different player segments. That’s OK. Nothing I have said invalidates you, your playstyle, or the segment of players you are part of. By the way, we agree on precursors and legendaries: I have neither.

Please do me the same courtesy. In order to outfit the three professions I primarily play in Ascended gear, I have played a lot of content I love, but some content I truly detest. As you say about WoW raiding, that was what it took to get that BIS gear, which I needed in order to attack content I did want to play.

Anet needs to make difficult choices between player segments, because the financial model of GW2 (buy to play plus gem store) is not providing enough income to evolve the game in support of all playstyles. This is reality. Within that reality, it’s OK for you to advocate that resources be spent on content you enjoy, and for me to advocate that resources be spent on content I enjoy. That I would advocate something different than you do invalidates neither of us, and I hope both of us have the maturity to accept such differences.

Paradox.1380:

How about you just leave and let me stay where I want to stay? I play multiple games so I don’t have to worry about what this game does or doesn’t do. I don’t understand why people are always “this is MY game is it has to be EVERYTHING i could ever want in a game or its just not good enough and I am taking my toys and leaving the playground so NEENER!” That is honestly what this thread sounds like. Maybe play some different games at the same time? Its not like this game requires significant time sinks to get places. If you don’t like one thing about this game find another game that offers that, but don’t begrudge someone else’s feelings if they don’t share your own. I happen to adore GW2 and all that if offers. If it doesn’t give me something I need from a game, I find one that does, but the fact is GW2 offers a lot more than you give it credit for. Also as a side note: ANet adds A LOT to their games as far as QoL and Story goes, just because you didn’t like the way it was delivered doesn’t mean you get to say it never happened at all.

As a customer, I need to invest about a thousand hours in a game before I have learned the world, found the right class/profession for my main, and become proficient at playing that main.

This isn’t about neener-neener, it’s about I made that investment based not just on the game at release but also based on expectations which were set at release as to how it would evolve.

Those expectations are, in the words of a certain historical U.S. presidential administration, “no longer operative.”

So the question is, do I cut my losses and go invest the thousand hours over again somewhere else.

Glad the current direction of GW2 meets your needs and the expectations you have of the game.

Veltoss.9135:

Agreed. All of their focuses and big selling points at launch have been abandoned for the living story. Sad part is, it’s not even the cool living world they originally advertised it as, it’s just a personal story expansion in season 2. Everything people loved and bought the game for has been abandoned by arenanet, and it makes no sense at all.

What we are discussing here are the symptoms of:

Incomplete (or nonexistent) measurements of what players care about, and as a result an incomplete market segmentation against which proposed features, feature packs, or development directions can be measured. By contrast (as a U.S. example), my Congressman’s staff knows to a tenth of a percent how his constituents view, and say they view, and how strongly they feel about probably the top 50 issues of the day. Oh, and that same data, dollar weighted, on their campaign contributors. On a tiny fraction of Anet’s annual budget.

Limited resources (money, people, time) resulting in extraordinarily difficult management decisions about which segments to delight, which to satisfy, and which to let go. The lack of a monthly subscription fee, which I would gladly have paid at release, causes Anet’s choices not to be aligned with my gameplay priorities.

Developer comfort zone seems to be aligned with an amalgamation of one time game releases (no sense of stewardship of that which is already in customer hands), campaign games rather than self directed play (the hallmark of MMO’s), and Nintendo (I haven’t seen this year’s living story because the start of it was behind a platforming wall).

This is the capitalist system, the developers have the sole authority to choose how to spend their game development resources, and the customers have the sole authority over their spending choices. The sad thing about the capitalist system is how easy it is for the choices made by the execs at a company to waste its accumulated assets (in this case the existing game, the very capable team put together over many years, and the collected player base which is the result of past successes).

Virtute.8251:

bewhatever.2390:

However, I think WvWvW does not in itself provide an ongoing revenue stream to NCsoft/ArenaNet, only ongoing expenses for servers, tuning, bug fixing, and the like.

No, because:

Virtute.8251:

The goal of WvW should be to deliver a compelling service that keeps people logging in. That goal would be benefited by shipping the commander pin product that the WvW community asked for, and not the one that is currently scheduled to ship.

You’ve erected a strawman and wasted energy.

It is never a waste of time to understand the rules and reward mechanisms governing those one wishes to influence.

Virtute.8251:

bewhatever.2390:

Observation: I think we aren’t paying ArenaNet enough for it to attract the necessary talent to sit in that meeting room.

Fastest selling in the west: http://techland.time.com/2013/08/16/guild-wars-2-nabs-fastest-selling-western-mmo-crown-looks-east-for-more-records/

3.8 Million sales to China in 2 months: http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/07/10/guild-wars-2-sales-more-than-double-thanks-to-chinese-launch

Yet, neither side of this argument is going to change the fact that they are foolish to believe (as they appear to) that WvW is needing an indirect monetization like this one. The real fact is that WvW players are also PvE and PvP players, and the entire ecosystem of people is susceptible to vanity and convenience purchases in the gem store.

The goal of WvW should be to deliver a compelling service that keeps people logging in. That goal would be benefited by shipping the commander pin product that the WvW community asked for, and not the one that is currently scheduled to ship.

Yes, the GW2 team as it handled the initial US/Europe release did an extraordinary job, understanding and initially selling the game to multiple player segments.

Yes, the GW2-China team, led out of necessity by the local partner, has done the same.

However, I think WvWvW does not in itself provide an ongoing revenue stream to NCsoft/ArenaNet, only ongoing expenses for servers, tuning, bug fixing, and the like. This fundamental misalignment of incentives between the players and NCsoft/Anet is at the root of what we’re seeing here. If Anet monetizes by pay-to-win, the player base will walk. I think the alignment of objectives needs can only be achieved with a monthly subscription, so that Anet is primarily incented to retain players, and is not incented to institute pay-to-win or to attach large gem price tags to basic features like commander tags.

If objectives were aligned, the commander tag implementation would clearly cause player dissatisfaction and attrition, so the consequences of the non player aligned choice would be clear and those who made the choice could be held accountable for the resulting loss of revenue.

But then, in that case, whoever in Anet “owns” WvWvW would be expected to understand the WvWvW player experience in depth, be in constant contact with at least some subset of players, and have their job performance measured directly on revenue from WvWvW players. Both the capitalist system and the reward mechanism would naturally (but over time) correct the current skills and understanding gap. (Did you watch the preview video from some internal Anet development server showing the golem breaking through a tower door? Ignoring the golem itself which was primarily doing a demo, I did not see the usual intensity and skill of real WvW combat from the defenders or the golem’s fellow attackers.)

Kraag Deadsoul.2789:

goldenwing.8473:

I believe we just plain and simple have a design decision made in a meeting room without someone present who has a clear understanding of the entirety of the WvW experience from a customer perspective.

And that right there summarizes the crux of the problem:

Decisions regarding an entertainment medium are being made by a committee of “suits” motivated purely by profit who don’t play the game and/or fail to understand what makes the game “fun”.

In short, they totally fail at that which they pretend to be: business men and women. If they were competent at business, they would understand the fundamental principle of exchanging a business’ product or service for a customer’s currency (but only so long as the customer values the product or service). They are failing to deliver a valued product/service – entertainment or “fun” – and thus we will refuse to exchange our currency (real cash converted to gems converted to gold).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law_of_business_balance

“There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person’s lawful prey. It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money – that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot – it can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”

Observation: I think we aren’t paying ArenaNet enough for it to attract the necessary talent to sit in that meeting room. Every one of the senior execs where I work — the people who take home in a good year what I make in 10 — is not only involved in sales calls, but also has adopted a few individual customers to understand in detail (and be there to help discover and get us to fix our mistakes when we screw up, which we do sometimes). That means when they sit in those meetings, measured by profit, they do so with a deep understanding of how both the sales process and the customer experience will be affected by the decisions they are making.

I don’t think the pay scale at ArenaNet, even at the top, can attract the talent necessary to objectively balance short and long term customer experience with financial and development reality.

I bounce between 2 and about 100 gold, across my 10 80’s. About two and a half of my max level characters are geared, so the cash sink will keep me broke for a long time to come.

I don’t lead in WvW, so not being able to afford a commander tag is no big deal. 1500 gold? That’s the kind of money someone spends to buy a legendary. (Which I won’t ever own either.)

Galen Grey.4709:

bewhatever.2390

(snip)

I don’t see a liability on NCsoft’s balance sheet for its commitment to continue operating GW2 (indefinitely?) for people who’ve bought the game.

(snip)

This means the only money available to keep the servers up (much less provide new content) is from ongoing gem sales.

Under these circumstances, customers who don’t buy gems are a liability (they consume server resources but provide no revenue) and neglecting the issue of deserted worlds driving away potential new customers, ArenaNet is more profitable if people who don’t buy gems all leave the game.

Anyone think I’ve missed something here?

ohh yeah you missed quite a few things really…

1. China release.. Box sales dried up? nope box sale surge as Gw2 is released in the biggest MMO market more likely.

2. you make it sound as if gem sales are a pittance. Its still making over 100m a year thats just US and Euro, with the Asian release thats likely to at least double. 200m a year will more then pay for any expensive they have. 100m payed expense and left enough left for them to expand their team. There is a reason why most mmo shrink their team after release while arenanet kept expanding it and thats certainly not because it was a financial failure.

3. Sure Lineage 1 is definitely NCSoft’s golden goose. Then comes Gw2 and before they start cutting it out they got Lineage 2, Aeon, Blade and Soul as well as the original guild wars. Since release quarter after quarter Gw2 has been the 2nd best earner for NCsoft. We still have to see if Wildstar changed that but so far gw2 hasnt been a burden for NCsoft.. which is why if you check out ever quarter financial report you’ll see them mention both lineage and gw2 strong performances as the reason for the successful quarter.

Now as for your statement of recognizing box sales over a number of years thats called differed income. You do that when you’re selling something thats prepaid. The only thing Gw2 has that may be differed income is actually gem sales not box sales. When you’re buying the box you’re given the product there and then so from a financial perspective that income was earned and should show during that financial quarter. When you’re buying gems however so long as you dont use those gems what the company has given you is credit so to speak so they might have to wait for you to use those gems before they record it as income. This is a bit of a grey area though. Something more clear would be if you buy say a 1 year subscription. In that case even though you gave the publisher $150 on day 1. they have to record it as $15 income month after month for the whole year because you essentially prepaid for a service that will not be fully delivered to you until a year from the day of purchase.

Concur that China market is really important, given I just said GW2 makes money off the initial game sale, and after that only to the extent players buy gems.

If you look at the most recent quarter’s financials for NCsoft
http://global.ncsoft.com/global/ir/quarterly.aspx
and translate the revenue numbers on slide 5 from Korean Won to US Dollars, the total revenue for GW2 last quarter was about US$22M, down from $25M the quarter before that and $28M the quarter before that. That’s a bit higher than I thought. And yes, Wildstar surpassed GW2 in revenue.

In a big company hiring technical people in the U.S., you get about a person per $20K/month (remember the total cost of having a person on the payroll is usually double their salary). ArenaNet tends to hire entry level people and pay under the prevailing wage, even in the gaming industry, so maybe they can stretch further. But that $80M/year or so run rate, after they take out the cost of running servers and paying their ISP bill, would barely pay for the people they have.

Perhaps the accounting rules have changed since I studied it in college almost 40 years ago. Back then there was a basic principle called “matching”, which said the revenue should be recognized when the expense occurred. There was also a principle that the revenue wasn’t recognized before the product or service was shipped (product) or delivered (service). I stand by my assertion that when I buy a copy of GW2, I am buying a license to a software product (recognize revenue immediately) and a service which is the servers being available over a period of years (defer revenue to be recognized over a period of years, at the judgment of the accountants). So, regardless of what actually happened both in reality and in the accounting of both ArenaNet and NCsoft, I stand by my assertion that money to run servers should have been set aside from the initial product sale, and I don’t see that liability on NCsoft’s balance sheet.

SkylightMoon.1980:

Today, gw2 was featured on the gamescon twitch and thousands were watching. This was an excellent chance for the devs to present exactly what guild wars 2 is and what they are doing with it, and how its different/better than other MMO’s. This should have been the plan. They absolutely slaughtered it for god knows why. The presentation was probably the worst ive ever seen. It was worth of r/cringe. It bascially looked like Anet made up a gameplan for what theyd do 30 seconds before they went out.

What followed was not a successful demonstration of gw2 but 75% loading times, extremely poor commentary, and a disorganized presentation of the game.

http://www.twitch.tv/twitch/b/557643505 5:28:15

That will seriously kill the games potential playerbase, because 7000 people watched that, thought wait what?!?! and now their impression of the game will affect all of their friends so thats 10’s of thousands.

I feel very bad for whoever it was who had to go out there unprepared for whatever reason and try to present the game.

In the end, that twitch.tv daylong series of presentations will get thousands of views. It was a good opportunity for a presenter and driver, neither of whom knew each other well, to rehearse together in front of a live audience. The amazing and polished one — which you only get to by doing this a hundred times — would be the one to put in front of a million people. Guild Wars 2 is past the stage where a million people will be interested enough to look at anything. Only get that pre release (or by blowing a year’s ad budget for 30 seconds at the Super Bowl).

Agreed, the technical discussion looking at maps and loading screens meant a lot less than getting in and playing. And the pitch was the detached one you’d give another gaming developer, not the personal one which pulls a player in.

But this isn’t a disaster, just two more harried and tired guys doing a trade show on 4 hours sleep…

Vayne.8563:

Let’s be logical for one second. You called it. Guild Wars 2 is one of NCsofts most popular games. It’s still making money as of last quarter. No company just abandons their most popular product. We already see signs that Wildstar is slowing down and it’s only out a couple of months. It’s taken a big hit already.

So what is NcSoft going do to, really? Abandon Guild Wars 2.

Take a look at NCsoft’s financials. Yes, it’s a Korean company, the accounting rules are different, but their investor relations people do publish quarterly in English.

NCsoft is still Lineage. The original Lineage. They have a number of other games, but none of them have made it big. GW2 was a big chunk of revenue for boxes back two years ago, but that dried up after a couple of quarters. It’s a few million dollars a quarter now, I assume mostly from gem sales but a few boxes are still being sold.

I don’t see a liability on NCsoft’s balance sheet for its commitment to continue operating GW2 (indefinitely?) for people who’ve bought the game. Under U.S. accounting rules my assumption (I’m an engineer, not an accountant) is that they would be required to reserve part of the revenue from box sales, recognizing it over a period of years, matched to the cost of running servers, paying their ISP, keeping a few employees around, etc. I can’t find anything like this on NCsoft’s balance sheet so speculate that under Korean accounting standards they were allowed to recognize all of the revenue from box sales when the boxes were sold. This means the only money available to keep the servers up (much less provide new content) is from ongoing gem sales.

Under these circumstances, customers who don’t buy gems are a liability (they consume server resources but provide no revenue) and neglecting the issue of deserted worlds driving away potential new customers, ArenaNet is more profitable if people who don’t buy gems all leave the game.

Anyone think I’ve missed something here?

There’s an LS going on?

Oh, there was something a month or two back where it expected me to do platforming in order to access the content. I ported back to LA. Was there content behind that platforming?

zen.6091:

General rules of thumb.

1. You can never go wrong with more CPU in multiplayer games, most of all the really “big” ones like WvW, Battlefield, etc that can have a ton of players and player created action. On a very basic level, think about why you get FPS drop near a zerg, even before you system has a to render a single player or effect caused by the zerg battle.

2. More GPU is for the eye candy. Better texture quality, better shading, filtering, and higher levels of filtering. All this improves perceived image quality.

So to your answer question, you need a better GPU if you want to run higher graphic settings with acceptable performance. Your FPS on low settings is already not that bad (30+ in a 30v30v30 is pretty good for most players). The 750 is right at the bottom end of what would be considered a gaming card. If you want those things like better shading, good texture quality, anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, etc…a 770 or 280x is kinda the sweet spot now for performance and value for money.

I think you’re also leaving a little on the table with your CPU overclock. 4.5-4.6 should be fine with a decent heatsink and an adequate case setup. That little extra will make a difference in minimum FPS in blob battles. As for upgrading that too, it’s hard to say. I still use a 2500k @ 4.8 GHz and see no compelling reason to upgrade yet, at least from a value for money perspective.

Won’t the CPU be memory limited at that point rather than cycle time limited? (Meaning, isn’t the memory DIMM cycle count at the overclocked speed — a nontrivial thing to talk about — more important than how fast it can add two numbers?) Or do I not understand…

A 25% CPU utilization means 100% of one of four cores in the i7. GW2 is not particularly good at using all four cores…so I don’t know what 35% means.

My own belief is GW2 can get into texture cache thrashing on a 1GB card, particularly at high settings, but I have no way to make a measurement to prove that.

Wish the client was instrumented so we could see…

GavNation.4307:

bewhatever.2390:

GavNation.4307:

Now I am being honest when I ask this. I am on my first character (level 50) and I was wondering…Whats the point of WvW? I mean it seems entertaining and I was having fun while playing it but I don’t see myself playing for long periods of hours without some actual goals besides “capture this just because you can say your the best server”.

And I am pretty sure that I am missing something or the actual point.

Some games are about the process: take (American) football or basketball, for example. Same court, same ball, game looks the same as it did 50 years ago, what it’s about is figuring out how to outdo your opponents. Makes for a constantly escalating battle of individual skill, teamwork, strategy, etc.

Some games are about getting through a series of obstacles to finish. Campaign games, the traditional Nintendo/playstation/xbox games, and so on. Finish the game, move on to the next one. Kind of like reading a book.

WvW is process.

PvE leveling to endgame has a finish. You can even think of GW2’s PvE endgame as having a finish (all achievements checked off, multiple Legendaries, all ascended armor and trinkets, etc.)

There are people who like each. Some like both. What do you prefer?

I like having achievements (which I do know that those already exist) but the main thing is a definitive victory that would count towards something for my character.

Progression in WvW isn’t measured in tokens dropped and WvW levels earned — which are very real — but rather in skill progression.

The new player steps into WvW the first time, wanders around like it’s PvE, and is ganked repeatedly.

The intermediate player has read the boards, understands roughly what to do, brings a roughly suitable class and spec, and finds and follows a commander. Generally dies in a zerg on zerg fight.

A mature player has chosen a role (roamer, havoc group, scout, wants to run in a larger group which does group on group fights and takes objectives), has developed skill in not just defensive movement but also in staying stacked, using field/finishers effectively in the heat of battle, etc and somehow doesn’t just die in larger scale combat. Well, not as often, anyhow

Then there are the advanced players, who can push against twice their number successfully, take defended objectives, use siege strategically (of course having the appropriate WvW skill points), and the like.

This is not advancement which is measured in levels, in achievements, or in any other way by the game. It’s measured in the real test of combat not against AI you can game, but other players. If that kind of “soft” advancement — which is an arms race against the advancement of your opponents — isn’t for you, then don’t WvW.

GavNation.4307:

Now I am being honest when I ask this. I am on my first character (level 50) and I was wondering…Whats the point of WvW? I mean it seems entertaining and I was having fun while playing it but I don’t see myself playing for long periods of hours without some actual goals besides “capture this just because you can say your the best server”.

And I am pretty sure that I am missing something or the actual point.

Some games are about the process: take (American) football or basketball, for example. Same court, same ball, game looks the same as it did 50 years ago, what it’s about is figuring out how to outdo your opponents. Makes for a constantly escalating battle of individual skill, teamwork, strategy, etc.

Some games are about getting through a series of obstacles to finish. Campaign games, the traditional Nintendo/playstation/xbox games, and so on. Finish the game, move on to the next one. Kind of like reading a book.

WvW is process.

PvE leveling to endgame has a finish. You can even think of GW2’s PvE endgame as having a finish (all achievements checked off, multiple Legendaries, all ascended armor and trinkets, etc.)

There are people who like each. Some like both. What do you prefer?

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Letting players exchange Ascended mats is a bad idea. Anet set it up so that certain content provided certain drops. Players who want to make their Ascended gear, need to go out and seek all the various content that provides the mats they need. By having an exchange, you create an Easy Mode button. It let’s you bypass the intended mechanics, and cheapens the process.

If you want Dragonite, go farm World Bosses.
If you want Empyreals, go farm Dungeons.
If you want Bloodstone, go farm Champ bags.

Think I see a problem here. I myself have two characters fully geared in Ascended, and a third under way. I understand that the basic design was:

in order to have ascended weapons or armor, you must participate in all three of open world raid content (dragonite), group content (empyreals), and champ farming (bloodstone).

In the beginning, the bloodstone drop rate was quite high. The rush to completion people crafted their ascendeds, and then Bloodstone ore started piling up in their vaults. The drop rate was nerfed (radically) and some bloodstone sinks (crafting recipes) were put into the game. At that point, running the champ loop in Frostgorge Sound became the most efficient way to get bloodstone. Last I heard, that had been nerfed as well, as was the Queensdale champ loop.

Then people who followed world bosses on the website (or HUD) and rushed to every encounter (mostly for a long-shot, lottery-ticket style chance at a precursor) accumulated a lot of dragonite. The rate at which dragonite could be farmed dropped radically in the Megaserver patch, with scheduled bosses rather than respawn timers. And access to the temple bosses in Orr dropped radically (at least for those of us on servers who knew how to do the encounters) because the zones are full of people who either do (or fail) the encounters quickly when they come up, and for all intents and purposes guesting to get access to other spawns is no longer available.

For a while, empyreals were the hardest to get, because they only dropped once per day per explorable dungeon or magnificent-box jump puzzle at 80. The drop rate in WvW is very low.

But here’s my point:

It was straightforward for an individual to focus on and farm whatever the limiting material was for them to craft Ascended gear. Any of dragonite, empyreals, or bloodstone could be that limiter, depending on the individual’s preferred playstyle.

The leading edge players, and even a few casuals, got their main outfitted in Ascended, and didn’t need those materials any more. Bank space being at a premium, these players became annoyed at mats piling up, couldn’t bring themselves to destroy them, and asked for the drop rate to be nerfed.

The ability to farm dragonite was nerfed by switching from respawn timers to a fixed schedule (which caused at least an order of magnitude fewer boss spawns across the collective set of worlds in the game, in part due to Megaserver). My dragonite farm rate per hour (focused on world bosses) dropped by about 5×.

The ability to farm empyreals dropped because, CoFp1 speed runs having been made uneconomic and the player base being bored with the remaining dungeons, the number of groups and PUGs going through explorables tapered off. (Yes, some of us have mastered certain jump puzzles and run multiple 80s through them daily as an efficient source of empyreals.)

The ability to farm bloodstone dropped because the champ trains were nerfed out of existence. Also dropped due to far fewer people running the explorables, but that’s secondary.

In short:

Most players got their Ascendeds
The ability to get mats for Ascendeds was nerfed after most players had theirs
New players will have a much harder time, as will folks gearing new alts
And now people whining about the mats building up in your vault, and want to make it even harder for new players and those with alts?

Talk about rolling up the welcome mat! I think that’s bad for business.

Rather than red, blue, green across a continent for the alliance, perhaps we could just combine what happens on a gold, silver, and bronze matchup, and allow guesting between the respective servers for WvW during that matchup.

Would certainly shake things up, while keeping server identity, and the UI wouldn’t have to change, just a little bit of code around WvW and guesting

Lag after patches? Yes. Horrendous like you’re experiencing? No.

Appears to me that there’s some aspect of the server which has to get tuned into correctness after each patch, rather than being correct by construction as it is in most other games.

As a technologist, I’d speculate that the network is imposing traffic shaping and policing on the traffic coming out of each zone instance (each Virtual Machine on each server), and that under load the shaper is holding back packets from server to client (causing rubber banding and catch-up) and the policer is dropping packets (which is the likely cause of the horrendous lag).

Meaning you likely can’t fix it. Good luck.

goldenwing.8473:

Karizee.8076:

Relics of Orr interview with Chris Whiteside posted yesterday ~~

http://www.relicsoforr.com/p=3256

Thank you for the link.

The interview explains a very great deal. More than I think Chris intended. Oh, nothing at all regarding content, I agree, but it certainly reinforces some unfavorable perceptions. Will leave it at that.

-

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathycaprino/2014/05/19/are-you-dealing-with-a-real-expert-or-a-fake-7-ways-to-tell/

Chris brings a lot of strengths and experiences to his role in GW2; I think the interview helps us understand the focus on certain segments of the customer base (hence why other customer segments are treated in a more opportunistic way).

Wizzey.7845:

I still stand by that any sportsmanlike conduct only applies to games with equal sides, which is untrue in WvW.

Then we need to agree to disagree on the meaning of sportsmanlike conduct. Perhaps in the end it doesn’t matter whether we agree or not. Only what ArenaNet thinks matters.

Wizzey.7845:

Pretty sure that you are here to defend a specific server and punish two other particular servers in spite of what your last comment says, otherwise what would be the point of creating this thread in the first place. That aside, your example is a pretty bad one since the whole point of that exploit is to throw away your rating and lose on purpose in order to obtain pvp rewards with as little effort as possible. If anything, that could be likened to the typical behavior in EotM these days but I’m not going to open that can of worms.

I do find it amusing that you and everyone else from the particular server that your are “not” defending have such a double standard. According to you guys it’s ok to 2v1 when it doesn’t actually make the matchup deviate from your expectations BUT when it is done to a degree to actually effect a result you don’t expect it’s unsportsmanlike and cheating. Where is the line that is crossed, is it cross-world communication? We all know that anyone can join party and message anyone from other servers anyways and that anything 3rd party can’t be considered cheating by Anet. Is it using politics as an additional means to win the season instead of just population and coverage? From what I’ve heard, the same was done in season 1, but apparently a particular server won that “fair and square.” Is it because the numbers aren’t in your favor? In sPvP and normal sports for that matter, there is an even number on each side and all other things being equal, each side has an even chance of winning. However, in WvW, the numbers are NEVER equal, that is why we have 3-way instead 2-way matches because we all know which server would win if you remove skill and politics from the equation. As such, values and moral standards from those formats don’t apply here.

The way I see it, All’s Fair in Love and WvW. Any strategy that results in the greatest chance of winning overall is allowed and should be encouraged. Otherwise you end up in the situation that every other league except NA gold is in where a single server has blown out every other server every single week of the season with the only variation being servers 2-9 duking it out for the remaining positions in the last few weeks. Where’s the fun in that?

I concur that the ability to stack people, which occurred both in Season 1 and Season 2 on all of the Tier 1 servers, is a detriment to WvW as a whole, and to both Seasons, and just plain to people’s ability to have fun. Given that ArenaNet’s sole source of revenue from WvW appears to be the fees for server transfers, I see this problem as intractable and can not see a viable solution (meaning perhaps there should not be further Seasons).

I draw a line when people effectively can’t play. There was a 2v1 a couple of weeks back when the 1 was being spawn camped and the 2 were severely ostracizing any members who attacked players or objectives of the other. That resulted in the entire WvW population of 3 servers effectively unable to play for an entire week. Where is the fun in that?

I also draw a line at win trading, also known as match fixing. That has been seen as unsportsmanlike conduct since long before I was born.

However, and this is important, my opinion on this topic is irrelevant to the competition. I don’t get to draw lines. ArenaNet makes the rules, and ArenaNet is the sole enforcer of the rules, and all of us must abide by their choices. To date, I observe ArenaNet appearing to act as if their choice is exactly as you describe in your final paragraph above.

Two observations:

Unsportsmanlike conduct has always been punished by removing the offending player(s) from the game or league for a suitable period of time. The consequence to the team is the absence of said player(s).

The only people allowed to define unsportsmanlike conduct are the referees, and their determination is final. In particular, other players, coaches, etc do not have a say.

…and new to the gem store, “Race Change”, only (same price as a server transfer today)…

I think in retrospect it was the delete-and-reroll-which-took-months aspect of DAoC faction change which stabilized the populations for RvR.

Phadde.7362:

bewhatever.2390:

Phadde.7362:

>>>Edit: THIS IS NOT A Gw2 vs Wildstar Thread.<<<
>>>Read this post before replying to the thread!!<<<

…. This is not supposed to be a praise to WS, it’s supposed to draw attention to what probably a lot of people miss in Gw2: Actual actively challenging content…

…(please keep on topic and be reasonable)

…Phadde, my point was describing the kind of challenge I think GW2 could and should include, exactly in line with your original post. Understanding the customer experience is essential to doing this right; a dry discussion of game mechanics is insufficient guidance for the people calling the shots at Anet.

In Wildstar closed beta, was sailing through the lowbie zone doing quests (humorous artwork, some humor in the quests themselves bringing back memories of WoW at first release) when I found myself in combat with a mob with 20x the hp of those around it. Did not adapt quickly and it wiped the floor with me.

Assumed this was like the elites which wander a few of the lowbie zones in WoW classic, an intelligence test for awareness of what’s around you and avoiding elites.

Then, as I became more accustomed to Wildstar combat, I was able to solo one of those mobs. That’s when it hit me: Wildstar, like GW2, is very much about individual skill, evasive movement, knowing one’s toolbox and using it creatively. And that Wildstar has outdone GW2 in this space.

GW2, in turn, is trying to bring in these annoying large drill-team encounters, reminiscent of WoW and RIFT raiding, but using the (surprisingly limited) capacity of a zone rather than an instanced-raid-size cap. I think this is a fundamental blunder on Anet’s part, because it’s trying to bring in a playstyle that fits the gear-centric WoW/RIFT game fundamentals, rather than the player-skill-centric GW2 fundamentals. At least Anet didn’t import the guild/social-fabric shredding aspects of WoW and RIFT raiding, although Tournament is doing exactly that between GW2’s worlds.

Back to the point at hand: GW2 has an awesomely better world, and far more beautiful artwork, than Wildstar will ever have. If GW2 evolved bringing more solo or small scale player skill challenges, and evolved making spec and gear choices richer rather than “simplifying them for the Asian market” as RIFT did, it would play to GW2’s strengths and provide content for the higher skill players… particularly if the rewards were commensurate.

Once upon a time (about 15 years ago) in the huge company I work in, it was realized that a business was no longer attracting new customers and would have to do its best with the customers it had.

After much consideration, the product development team of this business was halved in size, and a number of people I had worked with found themselves in (or looking for) new jobs. Like the people at ArenaNet, these were good people, and all found worthy endeavours in short order.

But that’s not the point of this story. The point is, that the remaining people in this business were told that their jobs depended on making the customers the business had happy, which would be measured by whether those customers stuck around and the size of the checks they continued to write.

Funny thing: customer satisfaction went way up. The developers stopped doing anything which would drive a customer away, and focused on doing what their customers wanted.

Should have happened years before.

Enough said.

JaredKincade.9761:

I hope I’m not off topic here:

There is something my guild and I have linked. We used to experience the most skill lag when fighting guilds with heavy necro’s. Old school War Machine was some of the first laggers because they were some of the first heavy necro well users.

These days, there is something my guild does (other guilds do it too) that I don’t really want to say that causes skill lag even in smaller fights. Suffice it to say, that using this thing causes tons and tons of conditions. (If someone cares I’ll respond to a PM).

I think somehow that the larger amount of conditions and perhaps the ticking nature of wells should also be suspect.

Hmmm…interesting…not going to ask for your gameplay trade secrets but this is interesting.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that when a condition is aoe’ed onto 5 players that the server must send information to each of those players every tick about every condition. I’m assuming you all have min/maxed this technique so condition duration is very, very long. If somehow when n players are in a zerg on zerg battle, each player ends up with tens of conditions, then the amount of updating between server and one client could become tens of updates per second instead of the normal out-of-combat one update every few seconds. Multiply this by 50 players from each of 3 factions in close proximity, each of whom is being told about each of the effects on the other players, and this is O(n^2) updates.

For you non computer science types, I’m speculating that the algorithm used will cause 10 times as many people to have 100 times as much network traffic at the server, which means there’s probably a number of people at which the server’s internet connection just can’t send that fast. Given that many zones share one server, there may be a fail safe preventing one zone from monopolizing the network connection causing performance in other zones hosted by the same server to collapse.

The fix for this is of course to design out the O(n^2) growth in traffic, or if that is not possible to mark the traffic in some way (in networks we use green, yellow, red, but generally don’t trust servers not to lie) so that if there’s an overload the yellow packets are dropped first. The level of skill, and time, it would take to cleanly identify multiple classes of traffic in the server, and re engineer the server to network connection, so the network would know what to drop in an overload is likely beyond ArenaNet’s skill and resources.

Maybe a display option “show spell effects only up to this many friendly players” and “show spell effects only up up to this many mobs and enemy players” where I could say 1, or 10, or 100 in the box, might be the fix…or better yet cap it at 10. Just a thought, and remember I’m speculating here.

JaredKincade.9761:

I am on Blackgate

I experience two separate problems related to skill lag.

The first is when very large groups are fighting, usually over a keep. The skills are delayed and most times never even fire. After the fight ends, the server seems to “catch up” and all our skills fire super fast.

The only way this would happen is if the server had already acted on those button pushes, but the packets sent by the server are being held. The server enforces the global cooldown.

I can think of only two ways packets could be held like that:

1. TCP drop/retry storm between the server egress and internet backbone
(Possibly the result of a policer configured to drop packets the server sends when its allowed send rate has been exceeded)

2. Traffic shaping at the server (before the TCP timer kicks in), in which case the packets are being held in the server’s queue before sending (or possibly in a server acting as a gateway, but once packets hit the network the TCP timeout is rather absolute…unless GW2 uses some ad-hoc replacement for TCP)

:)

Comment on one of the skills mentioned above:

Player, in the chaos of combat, needs to “read” the boss mob for the signal that an ability is about to be cast, and act to interrupt or mitigate what that attack does. this is both the generic skill and remembering the detail specific to each boss

I’ve been playing GW2 since release and am still not very good at this

I have found that a 1920×1080 monitor and relatively new graphics card are needed to see the boss actions through a haze of particle effects if many players are in combat with the boss. This impeded my learning significantly for the first year the game was out.

My guildmates explained the skill to me when it was clear to them I didn’t “get it” after we fought together. It took some time to realize my equipment was inferior and that was an inhibitor.

56 years old, gaming for probably 40 years (though would point out that back then we had to go to the computer, it didn’t come to us)

Lich King.1524:

I think this assumption is not correct, because if i was alone and far away from SM, (for example in QL) I did no see any battle / or particle effects and still has huge skill lag if somebody fight in SM. Client should not use any calls in this case.
IMHO this is a problem on server-side. Because 20-40 sec is not s TCP-level delay. Simply too much SQL-requests or CPU-calculation at same time. Because if no battle = no lag. And If battle starts somewhere, then skill-lag starts too everywhere.
Also unfortunately it can means that this problem is impossible to fix easily, need to rework a huge part of the engine, may be change game mechanics too. I hope I’am wrong.

Good point. We may be looking at multiple problems.

However, when we get to 20-40 sec, I would argue the server would know if it was that far behind processing its input queue. But if there were a TCP packet drop / retry storm (the TCP timeout is only about 2 seconds, but the retry delay is ~ exponential) it could easily take 10s of seconds for data to move across the network in either direction. And remember once you’re using TCP the packets have to be delivered in order, so Windows (the driver) has to hold whatever packets arrived after the lost one until the lost one has been successfully retransmitted. Anyone know whether GW2 in fact uses TCP to send keystrokes (commands) from client to server?

I don’t understand how GW2 selects what data is sent to the client. Your client will have data on players you can’t see (the other side of a keep or tower wall, for example). I agree that if you’re on the other side of the map from the zerg it’s unlikely the server will have told your computer about them, but if they’re within the rendering distance, even through a mountain, it will.

If something at a low level in the server (the NIC, the low level driver) isn’t keeping up, the storm of packets from a zerg on zerg battle could overflow some buffer resource and result in packet drop. We had a product with a NIC (network interface) that did that back about 20 years ago…bad scene, embarrassing to explain to customers that the fix for the problem they were seeing was to stop using the motherboard LAN port.

What kind of issue are you specifically having that could be related to lag?
Skill lag, rubber-banding, etc

Skill lag (no rubber banding for me yet)

What server are you on?

Blackgate

Has there ever been a time when you or a friend are experiencing lag, while others in your party are not?

Yes, and interestingly we were all playing from the same house on the same DSL connection behind the same router. We were grouped together, and playing together in a Borderland.

The one person with a hard disk experienced skill lag while the three of us with solid state disks did not.

Has there ever been a time where one party in a map is experiencing lag, while other parties in that same map are not?

We always play together, so don’t know.

Do you experience the lag at very specific times?

The more players (or more particle effects) the more likely. Just as in DAoC 10 years ago and Rift 2 years ago, 100 players can be standing (or slowly moving) waiting to start an encounter, without lag, but when combat begins performance collapses.

• For example, when 1 zerg is facing another zerg.
• If so, can you estimate how many players are in each zerg?

Note to the programmers: as a 35 year veteran of the tech industry who used to write and debug low level code in real time systems, and who as a customer/user tried to chase a similar problem in DAoC a decade ago (before the rules that customers couldn’t look at things like this), it appears to me that this issue is happening client side, because the client is prioritizing something (I would guess loading and unloading spell effect objects) (or possibly loading and unloading textures related to spell effects from the graphics card’s texture cache) ahead of simply draining the queue of location updates coming from the server. While this could be TCP packet drops happening near the server (ie some sort of policing by the router to the internet where the servers are hosted) I think it’s happening client side.

Can we please get some client side counters/instrumentation of events such as fetches of textures from disk, loads of textures to the graphics card, loads and unloads of objects to the client engine, per second? This would go a long ways toward tuning.

If there is a low level action in the client engine which is spin waiting while it goes to disk to get textures to load, that would explain the drastic performance improvement I saw going to solid state disk…and means that the game should perhaps load the entire library of particle effect and player armor textures to memory, so this low level action doesn’t ever block the main client thread waiting on disk

In the case of DAoC a decade ago, my conclusion was that each time a spell was cast, the game called a heavy weight call in the client engine to instantiate the spell effect as a separate object, executed the spell effect, and then called a heavy weight call to remove the spell effect object. This is in my opinion an architectural blunder, because it results in O(n^2) heavy weight calls to instantiate spell effects…on every client. Even if GW2’s limit of 5 affected players or mobs, not counting boss-casted spell effects which land on everyone, makes this O(n), it’s O(n) with a very large coefficient. Sorry for use of programmer jargon.

Kraag Deadsoul.2789:

Except that with the way PPT is designed, it doesn’t work this way in practice. With a 15 minute delay between point tallies, everything a small team captures away from the enemy zerg can just be re-steamrolled over by that zerg before the expiration of the current 15 minute count-down timer. This completely invalidates the contribution of the small team to their server.

This is factually inconsistent with my play experience. If the small team I play on is going to PvD an undefended keep, we’ll probably start 5 minutes before the tick, not just after the tick.

We can also do this defensively. Let’s say the enemy zerg is attacking a keep our side holds. We attack their undefended keep. They can break off their own attack to defend, or let us succeed. In either event the productivity of their entire zerg is impacted by just a few of us. Until they’re willing to split up, or leave defenders (which I agree is about as fun as watching grass grow), the four of us can make 40 people unproductive.

I also do not find that a zerg could take back an entire zone of objectives in the last 5 minutes before the tick. Two objectives, yes. Three objectives, maybe. But a whole map of keeps and towers? Can’t move a zerg that fast. So if my side has 4 teams each capable of taking an undefended keep or tower in 5 minutes, and the other side is a single zerg which can take one objective every 2 to 3 minutes, I have the ability to take 12 undefended objectives per 15 minute tick and the zerg has the ability to take maybe 6. In this thought experiment we win ppt every time with 16 people to their 40 or 50.

Obviously my point is that there is a counter strategy for zerg. I assume you’re smart enough to see at least one counter strategy to what I describe here.

I’m not talking about casuals here. I’m talking about people who know where and how to place siege to take walls and doors down at the maximum rate and have the dps to down lords. Camps are things you solo while waiting for friends to log on, or take just to get supply.

Kraag Deadsoul.2789:

What’s more is the zerg accomplishes this with little effort on their part while the small teams are working their butts off coordinating effort and timing and working hard to secure their caps. When the next point tally comes up, the zerg wins (with regard to PPT) and the small teams lose; despite having been the players who arguably demonstrated more skill and put in more effort than the zerg.

Contrast this with a system wherein one’s actions are rewarded at the time at which they are executed. The World Score points the small team earns from capturing those multiple camps are immediately deposited into their server’s total; not X minutes from now if the server manages to keep them out of the hands of the map-circling karma train.

Increasing the score at cap, while decreasing the score at tick, incents people to flip even more often than today, and to defend even less.

I think whatever the scoring system is, needs to (1) feel like it enhances fun rather than forcing people to drudgery, (2) disincent collusion, for example karma trains, and (3) incent teams to work hard to get and hold important objectives, with combat incidental to this goal.