Showing Posts For kodacommander.5219:
3,197 hours played over the past 605 days – that’s how much time I’ve played Guild Wars 2. So that comes out to about an average of 5 hours per day since game launch. During this time I’ve never felt it necessary to express my concerns on the forums until now.
My complaints about the implementation of the megaserver pretty much mirrors everyone else’s in this thread. I wanted to add a couple more things to this discussion:
1. Deindividuation. In a 1976 study by Univ. of Illinois professor Edward Diener, Diener studied the connection between antisocial behavior and anonymity. For his experiment Diener and his team set-up an experiment at several homes during Halloween. Each house had two bowls, one containing candy, the other containing money. The experimenter greeted each trick or treater at the doorway, then said they had to attend to something and left the children at the doorway while going to a hidden room to see if a child would steal money. In order to test the impact of anonymity, some children were asked their names and addresses, while other times the researcher did not. The results: children who arrived at the door alone and were asked their identity stole the least, 7.5% of them stole. When children arrived in a group and were not asked their identity, 57.7% of them stole. While this relates to onine behavior in general (Penny Arcade famously stated, normal person + anonymity + audience = total jerk), but the Megaserver further exacerbates anonymity because players no longer have to worry about alienating their own server community – they are now just one name in the large and flucuating pool of players on a megaserver map. This is why we’re seeing an uptick in complaints of griefing and bigotry.
2. Change and listening to your players. At the 1995 Austin Game Conference there was a panel discussion entitled “MMO Rant”. The panel was moderated by former Sony Online VP Gordon Walton, and the panelists were Jessica Mulligan (former executive producer of Asheron’s Call), Brian Green (creator of Meridian 59), and Jeff Hickman (former executive producer for Dark Age of Camelot). On the topic of change, Hickman stated “As a player, it’s effecting me in the game I play right now. As a developer, I’ve done this and made core changes and probably didn’t achieve the goals I wanted to achieve. As I make these games, we attract a certain type of player. It’s because of the things we put in – the gameplay – for whatever reason, we see another game that’s cool, doing something better, or we want to change the billing process. For whatever reason, we make a change and it alienates people. The people playing right now. We go out and want those 3.5 million (players) from the people over there. Instead of sticking to what we love, we change it.”
Mulligan continued, “Jeff touched another one, changing after Launch. I’m guilty of this too, and have nerfed and wasted millions of player hours and have learned since then and haven’t done it in a long while. How many people had it done to them in WoW? I almost feel ashamed to say this, but you can’t ignore the community. The forums are an indicator (a vocal one) of where your game is going. But we’re scared to death of players. Who can blame us? We’ve seen you at conferences. We don’t meet the majority though, anywhere, and those are the people playing and having a great time, You can’t ignore the community and you have to find ways to communicate because they can be resources.”
This last quote is something that ArenaNet should really keep in mind. Hickman: “You should really communicate with your players. Take polls. Tell them what you want to do. If they say it sucks. Don’t do it.”