Guild Wars 2

Vayne.8563:

The implication is in the phrasing. Saying “people want something” implies most people, because if only a minority of people want it, there’s no much point bringing it up that way.

The entire post implies that there’s this huge group of people who want this. I submit that people don’t really know what the majority wants.

Please stop trying to pick apart other posts, your just embarrassing yourself and derailing the topic given “people don’t really know what the majority wants.” you dont know if the majority do or do not want this. (a good reason for well designed polling) the number of people on the forums has nothing to do with whether or not it is an accurate representation of the player base, as an example political exit polls on a fraction of a percent of the voting public can be incredibly accurate.

the implication you claim is non existent, the usage is as a plural of person not as a collective usage this is obvious from reading the text. further i would submit that 100,000 is a huge amount of people but that is less than 3.33% of the population hardly a majority, so even if the implication were there you would still be incorrect.

back on topic:

feedback for Chris/ whoever cares to read the wall of text

i believe responses “from the hip” are generally more favored as you don’t have to pick through three paragraphs of text the essence of which can be summarized in three sentences, with the remainder being ambiguous verbose dross that doesn’t really tell you anything, but which will be picked over and bickered about as its all that we have from you, there is also have the benefit of being able to respond and clarify things more rapidly ie 2-3 to the point blunt responses compared to one long one that is carefully ambiguous

on polls
you will need to track how accounts have voted if you have polls in multiple locations ie forums and launcher and in game, to ensure people don’t game it and decide if you want to allow people to change their votes before voting closes ie players may initially love content then run into problems or the reverse and want to vote another way.

having a comment field or the forum polling thread open to comments would allow people to elaborate on why they have voted as they have, this is very important as binary data from polls doesn’t give you insight into why people respond or act a certain way ie are people logging in because they enjoy content or because they don’t want to be left behind?

+1 to

Simple enough, let the pigeons do the dirty work.
You can advertise a new function via an e-mail and dedicate it a separate section.
The new icon may change color once a new survey is available.
No one will be forced to respond, and invasiveness will be minimal.

i was picturing something like that which leads to feedback tabs etc for the in game implementation, perhaps with a recent history tracker so you can leave feedback about events you have recently participated in. if you put it in game defiantly do it like that as opposed to a popup, im hesitant about including rewards for completing surveys as that may lead to people just checking YES/ 5* for everything without reading it to get the reward, the reward should be the interaction and the knowledge that the feedback is hopefully going to better the game

on forums
in regards to duration of forum posts, i think it really needs to longer than 2-3 days, im picturing something like a week, you could add additional topics every few days but if you don’t come to the forums that often you’d miss out on being able to give feedback for that point you’d also have less time to consider the feedback you are giving, as a result i think a longer forum life is needed to catch the most players. you should also announce what the next topic is and when it will be available, it would be terrible to have to travel for real life commitments and miss the opportunity to participate

in terms of topics have a separate thread for upcoming discussions where players can suggest topics to be focused on, you can then include a poll of the most favorable/ suggested ones to decide which is next, this would probably be best implemented in the suggestions forums with a moderated sticky.

I was absolutely obsessed with GW2 and eagerly awaited it to come out taking tons of time off to play the BWE’s. After it was released I think I no lifed until the karka event which discouraged me a little bit (part of just jealousy at other loot or w/e it was). I absolutely loved fractals but was weary it may start attracting elitism attitudes and I feared the community would take a turn for the worst.

I played on and off again throughout the rest of the year but nothing nearly as major as I was. Partly because I would enter the living story and I would be bombarded with too many things to do/achievements to get/things I didn’t understand that was new to the game. I would come back to the forumns regularly but sometimes they can get pretty…toxic. I was guilty myself of doing a few rage posts a long time ago haha.

Anyways the past month I have started playing regularly again and I find myself enjoying the game immensely! I’ve been just immersing myself in the world and doing things that seem like fun to me instead of “Omg run arah exp all day and show off my leet gear” like I was the first month or two the game came out.

I think I enjoy the game more now because I am starting to shed a lot more of my elitism and vertical progression habits that have been instilled in me from playing other mmos for so long before gw2. Now I take the good and the bad and just enjoy it! Wiped a few times in the new twilight arbor dungeon? No sweat! Finished it? Great! The community is still great and abnormally friendly! Everyone is respectful and helpful except of course those rare few but of course no bigge!

tl:dr

Looking forward to collaborating in the development of this game. It’s come pretty far it’s first year and I look forward to seeing the improvements and changes made in the future!

Hi Cris,

It would be great to have some place on forum where we could discuss things with team directly.
I already have some things on mind that would love talk about. Last 3 updates changed game so drastically and if you want to continue this way it surely need lot of debate with us.
Now it seems to me like you have some vision of the game and you want to fulfill no matter consequences it can have. Don’t take it wrong please :-)
I am just worried about games future, becouse i enjoyed it much, especialy content like Bazaar, Politics, Dragon Bash, Jubilee and other. And i would love to continue to enjoy the game.
There are a lot of angry people now, but even if they are behaving how they should not, something angered them. I am not defending bad behavior just saing that opnion or problem of that person can be same valid or important as opinions and problems of others. They just have to learn how to behave.
Thanks for reading and possible response.
And sorry if my english is too bad :-)

Martin Kerstein.3071:

This thread is about discussing the post from Chris Whiteside, not the moderation on this forum. Please focus on the topic at hand. Any further posts discussing things not related to the original post will be removed.

One of the things Chris discusses is keeping a civil tongue when discussing things about the game in the forums. I agree that everyone’s feedback should be heard and opposing views can be disagreed with as long as it’s respectful. However, I see a lot of dismissive posts from some people coming to the ’aid" of ArenaNet that stay on the forums.

I don’t want to discuss what ArenaNet moderators should and should not do regarding posts, I’d just like to say civility should be on BOTH sides of a topic. Dismissive posts like “if you don’t like it, don’t play the game.” are just as counterproductive as “this game sucks, I quit.” and neither should be tolerated.

Provide argument on the topic and not the person and we all can help move Guild Wars 2 forward. Even with the changes made to the game that I disagree with, I still believe in ArenaNet and it’s people. You have made the only two MMOs I continuously come back to for the last decade!

P.S. I’d LOVE to see the in-game polls come back to GW2. I think they were helpful in the beta, and I think they can be at least as effective now.

Hi Chris, thanks for posting in this thread, its a refreshing change to see the developers talk so candidly to us players.

However…

There has been heaps of discussion on how both the developers and players can communicate better, and that’s fantastic, however over the last year we have been providing feedback on these forums with almost no action taken on serious most talked about/requested issues.

For example, the scavenger hunt and precursor farming, perhaps the most request feature since the launch of the game. You acknowledge in multiple threads in the past that precursors are a problem, you listened to our feedback and responded in the forums (just like you’re doing now) but you did not take any action. none. zero. nada. nothing.

One year later no scavenger hunt, and now precursor farming might be pushed to next year.

Whats the point in providing feedback that you listen to, make promises to fix the problem, then refuse to follow through on that promise?

There is no point asking for feedback if your just going to ignore said feedback.

That is why i remain highly sceptical of this thread, because we have heard promises of collaboration before and nothing came from it.

I hope that this time is different.

Galen Grey.4709:

Astralporing.1957:

Galen Grey.4709:

Astralporing.1957:

There was a number of general “no endgame” complains, that’s true, but among those, the people that asked specifically for new geart tier were a tiny minority. Even most of other complainers didn’t want gear grind. They wanted new content – dungeons, new maps, new cool skins. Some wanted raids. Af all those things, Anet picked one that was the least wanted.

You’re right they asked for a variety of things but did arenanet really just give us ascended gear? Because actually they release a new map on their 2nd update and that is the same update that had the ascended gear and associated fractals. In addition that updated included new dynamic events, new jumping puzzles, new crafting.

Which of those did the majority of the players concentrate on? The new map with the added difficulty that people asked for?

The map was boring. It was (and likely still is, even after revamps) the most boring and uninteresting map we have so far. As far as dynamic events went, it was practically empty – it felt dead. And the difficulty was more hps and stronger damage on mobs. Compared to it, FotM was exactly what lot of the players asked – a hard content with a variety of interesting mechanics. It was just fun.
The choice was very simple. And it didn’t have much to do with ascended gear at all.

yeah like most other zones are? cause its not like Southsun is the only zone that has a small population compared to more profitable zones like Orr or Queensdale! Its not that southsun is boring, it isnt if taken in a single month context, it has really nice visuals in fact I’d go so far as to say its one of the most beautiful zones in game with its running waters, rock formations and quite a bit of verticality in some places. It has challenge, its the only zone thats actually a bit hard to solo and it was new. Sure it didnt have the content to support itself for a whole year as it didnt have that many dynamic events but it had enough for a single month worth of play. Yet it was only popular while the one time event when on. How could arenanet justify spending resources on it or in creating a new map like it when players made it clear they didnt care about that kind of content?

Galen, SouthSun is a bad example of a new map- it is pretty I agree and it is a nice difficulty but it is also dead and boring because there is nothing going on.

If you take it and compare it to any of the other maps in the world you can see this.
It lacks the vibrancy and the little details, nevermind the events poi, vistas, hearts etc.
It doesn’t mean that we should now have hearts but they do serve a purpose in making you feel that people actually live there.
If nothing else it needs many ,many more DE’s

After the Southsun Cove story the map changed a little but it needs to change more for it to actually feel like a place

It has a lot of potential but it is not a finished zone by a long shot.

It also has no lore- sure it has an interesting story that we saw happening before our eyes but that needs to be built on- it is just sort of in limbo now as a space for Karka queen to go on a rampage- why I am not sure since I thought we cleaned up the Canach mess

Players care very much about new areas don’t mistake implementation and the response to it for lack of interest

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Also note that the main intention of the initial forum post is to build a bridge with you all and develop some processes together for Collaborative Development through the forums. we can build up some ideas for what will work best and go from there.

That’s what many people have been saying from the get go. More interaction. Sometimes we don’t even need a bug fixed right away. Very often a small post like “In fact we’re working on it” or “Not included, we are coming up with a better idea”. etc.

Especially on very long threads, with 30+ pages, we just need a lifesign from you guys

On the subject of immersion for the poll…

Do you think it really matters? We’ve already ran over the line and then some on breaking immersion. I mean, every time we complete a daily, monthly, Personal Story, or an Achievement milestone, we have a giant picture of a chest with boxes in the middle of our screen. Not to mention whenever we get “special” mail, we get a giant letter in front of our screen as well.

And then there is the gem store items. Baseball hats with the GW2 logo on them, RayBan Sunglasses, Fuzzy Animal Backpacks, 8bit Weapons and Backpacks, T-Shirts with the GW2 logo on them, a “legendary” bow that shoots unicorns with the Arenanet logo on it, Modern Hoodies, etc etc the list goes on.

I think we are way past breaking immersion with a small poll in the corner of the screen. Honestly, it seriously feels like you guys don’t even care about immersion with half the stuff you release, so I don’t think an in game poll is going to matter.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

nethykins.7986:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

minbariguy.7504:

I want to echo the people who have recently been requesting in-game polls. Since currently there has been no real acknowledgement or response to player dissatisfaction with the pace of Living Story releases, I have chosen to simply not log in at all to avoid being counted as a “satisfied customer” in your concurrency metrics.

An in-game poll where I would have the chance to have my opinions actually be counted would be something worth logging in for.

I think this is an idea worth discussion for sure. But i have a question:

Would in game polls affect the immersion for the player?

Chris

But what constitutes as “Immersion”?

…you guys had said you didn’t want to do things like fight with town clothes because it “broke immersion”, but, like…can we say that the LFG tool breaks immersion? Not too sure we can if you were keen to add it

Good point. So for me immersion breaking would be a pop up appearing after an event completes or following beating a dungeon. But you raise an interesting point with LFG. Perhaps (and i am just brainstorming here) it could be a tab that you can open up to give feedback.

I will think about it some more. Keep the ideas coming.

Chris

Send a mail after a player has completed something that is under evaluation. The mail system is immersive itself, and the questions can even be phrased in an immersive way.

Example: Tequatl battle- You can either fail, or succeed during the event. Upon failure the player receives a mail, and upon success the player recieves a different mail.

Failure mail- Hello! This is the Asuran Statistics Task Force! Word of Tequotl’s success has reached us and we would like to ask you a few questions concerning it. Are you going to come back and try fighting him again? Do you feel that he is worth your time to fight? Do you hate teq because he’s an evil dragon, or because you know you’ll never beat him? Answers to these questions will help us build our task force, as well as give us more statistics. We always want more statistics here at the Statistics Task Force! With enough information, we will be able to do the complex math involved in deciding whether or not we might help you with future encounters.

Success Mail- Congratulations from the Asuran Statistics Task Force! News of your victory has already reached far and wide. We have a few questions concerning your encounter with Tequatl that will help us decide whether we want to help the community with more encounters in the future, or leave you to your own devices. Do you feel that Tequatl was worth your time? Will you fight him again? If you had to change one thing about the encounter, what would it be? Your answers will go into our complex algorithms, and that will help us decide if we will assist with future encounters, or leave you to your own devices. Thank you for your participation.

Granted I’m guessing ANet could come up with better names/questions/and style of writing, I just wanted to show that it is possible to ask for feedback without breaking immersion.

Vayne.8563:

I think polls are important and a good idea. However, I worry about limiting polls to just the forum population. I think that might produce skewed results, due to the type of people that enjoy forums and the type of things those people enjoy.

I know from experience most people who read forums lurk and I know from experience most players never post on forums anyway.

The question is how do we get the most feedback from everyone, not just forum dwellers?

I said this earlier, but in long threads it’s easy for short posts to be overlooked. Any surveys by ANet should be sent to the login email of all accounts. This gives people who ignore the forums, even people who are gone but are potential returnees, the chance to offer their two cents.

I’m shocked, but impressed and glad to come back and see all the responses from you Chris.

I think in-game polls could be good, but I think they would need more sophisticated choices than what you had in beta. I seem to remember answering how much I liked an event on a scale of 1-5, or something to that effect, which isn’t going to give you the depth of feedback that I think you need in most cases. I also don’t think they can replace actual interaction.

It’s really important for you to understand why players do or don’t like something. Plus, I think it’s important for us to be able to tell you “why” and feel that we’ve been heard. Your idea to have focused threads in appropriate forums is great. It bothers me when you (dev) start a feedback thread, only to lock or delete it without giving substantive feedback. You get pages and pages of responses and then, poof, it’s gone. Any response that shows you’re engaged, like asking questions or sharing your thought process is so much better. So, I’m really glad to see that you’re on board with more back-and-forth conversations.

Also, when you started “shooting from the hip,” I began to feel a lot better about what you have to say. The carefully-worded market-ese just sets off alarms. And, maybe it’s just me, but it seems that the cross-talk between players calmed down a lot when you started responding, which I think is really good. Your very presence seems to help the tone of the forums.

If you’re looking for suggestions for what to talk about, I’d like to see vertical/horizontal progression covered. The reason that I’m interested in that topic is because I liked playing alternate characters and the changes around progression really impacted that play style for me. I’ll explain more if that ever gets covered, but regardless of what happens, I’m looking forward to this new initiative and am hopeful it will work out. So, thanks!

Actually, the first (and easiest) thing to be done should be splitting the suggestions forum up. It’s really hard trying to make suggestions there when most of the good ones get instantly swept away by the millions of “Why don’t we have Mounts”, “Why can’t I use pajamas as town clothes”, “I want this weapon in red instead of blue”, “Change asura camera angles”, and all the other fluff/delusional suggestions.

Kosmo.5187:

Be careful with polls. They may seem like a good solution to many people, but they can also be incredibly deceiving. Different people often answer from various contexts based their own interpretation of the question, but the results are still piled together in specific predetermined groups.

This comment actually made me rethink my opinion on adding in-game pools. This guy hit the nail in the head. So let me add in with my perspective:

I’m a strict PvP/WvW player. I have over 1.5k hours played, and my highest world completion on a character is around 50%. I don’t know what happens on the living story, never been to SAB, and don’t know where Tequatl is.
I also understand that the majority of GW2 population is composed of PvE players, that casually/never play WvW.
So imagine you add a pool: “Do you think there should be gold/item rewards for the winning server of a WvW match?”
For someone that doesn’t really play WvW, this might seem like a very good and reasonable idea, this player might be thinking he’s helping the WvW players to get some rewards. Since these guys constitute a huge ammount of the player base, the result to this pool would probably be “yes, add gold rewards to winning WvW”
But then you have the people that play WvW everyday, for the fun and the fights, and know that adding something of the sort would end up causing a major exodus to the top servers, due to people looking for rewards (that would imbalance the population situation even further and break the experience for some servers). But these people’s point will never come across because they will be drowned in a simple yes/no question.

It also works the other way around, if I never do the Living Story, why should vote on whether the next hero will be the kitten Charr or the cute Asura?
So I think the form of feedback has to be more elaborate than simple pools, (read the suggestion I made a couple posts above)

Kosmo.5187:

Be careful with polls. They may seem like a good solution to many people, but they can also be incredibly deceiving. Different people often answer from various contexts based their own interpretation of the question, but the results are still piled together in specific predetermined groups. Polls are inherently limited as well. Forums may take longer to sift through, but they allow thoughts to be expressed (in both directions). The game is also a very mutable experience and everyone is different; letting the majority decide is not necessarily a good thing, as there are many aspects of the game that appeal to different people. As someone touched upon above, having someone who doesn’t play an area much affect it to the same degree as someone who plays it a lot could be odd.

I don’t think you’ll ever reach an equilibrium where people enjoy everything, and at some point, as much as we players want to have influence and give feedback, some of us also want to be surprised and see new features that we didn’t expect. Influencing a game with feedback is a very good thing, but stifling the creativity of the development team is not in anyone’s best interest. I guess it really depends on what kind of feedback you collect. “Was that fun?” is way too nebulous a question to have meaning in such a complex machine.

If you ask questions certain ways you can almost be guaranteed certain answers, but they will not always be the correct answers that you can use to guide yourself to better ground.

I’m speaking as someone who’s shared several ideas and tried to start several discussions with other players. I like the prospect of better dialogue, but apart from the disruption of immersion, polls are just not useful to the extent that some people make them seem. Some of forum ideas expressed in the posts above me are better, such as covering certain topics over a period of time.

I agree with you, ingame surveys should be ONE of the way to collect informations about what people think about the game.
However I think we really need them, because statistics of what people are doing today are not a good rapresentation as well, indeed I think they simply depict the present situation, on the contrary, surveys can be a way to forecast (clearly within certain limits) players’ behaviours/expectations.
The forum would complete the triad.
I hope this way we will able to craft together the Triforge of Communication.

p.s. even if Chris said that he will be not able to maintain today post frequency, I hope that all of them can find a way to distribute better their time and divide this task, because (imo) this type of communication is what is needed to build a more loyal and relaxed community.

You know what really struck me that I like so far that was mentioned? The dev’s posting a question on the forums for the community to answer.

That sounds amazing. It was sorta done for the Oct 15th patch with that thread, and it surprised me. Its something that I don’t think Dev’s in many games are taking advantage of. While yes, Dev’s get the final say and can keep many things secret, asking for ideas from the community can’t hurt. Really. Dev’s technically have a massive pot of ideas sitting here that can get both them and the community thinking to better the game. Why would anyone want to bypass that?

Another suggestion on how to organize player input:

What about having guild representatives discuss specific topics with devs?

The way I imagine it working would be, someone from ANet starts a thread with the following: “Feedback/Discussion session regarding XXXX (e.g: Gear progression, SPvP game modes, ways to implement GvG, ways to balance WvW population, etc)”

Then you allow signups for of guilds related to the topic to bring out a leader/officer that would like to debate the subject, and bring his guild’s opinion on the subject. (No more than 1 player per guild, and you’d probably need some filtering system depending on how many signups you have).

So after getting the names of the people, you have an actual discussion that could be done either via a separate forum, a voice com session, or a chat (again, the way of communication would depend on how many representatives are in this. You could do a “progression”, first invite these guys to the separate forums, then those people that offer valuable feedback, call them for a voice chat session, where a better discussion can happen).

It would basically work like the alpha test team, but you can get a broader range of opinions, without having to worry about leaks and all that, and you will be able to get some valuable feedback without having to pick out the one good post in the middle of 10 that are just trying to troll it.

No need to implement anything, no immersion breaking, work is reduced to allocating time of devs willing to participate in these, and filtering out a bit on who’d be called to the discussions. (but that is something that with time will become a lot easier, since you’ll already have a list of the guys that provided useful feedback and the ones that just joined this for kittens and giggles, so you already know who to call for the next one)

Grimthagen.6019:

Erick Alastor.3917:

No one will be forced to respond, and invasiveness will be minimal.

My main concern with this would be the fact that if no one is forced to respond, then you will get self-selection bias incorporated into the poll and the whole thing becomes questionable.

For a poll to be of value, it has to take a relatively unbiased cross-section of a population. In this case, MMO developers have the opportunity to actually capture the opinion of every single one of their active players. There are marketing agencies and departments that would give body parts to have that kind of access to their target markets.

I’ve never really understood why MMO developers past and present haven’t taken greater advantage of this unique capability they’ve been given.

Follow my reasoning.
If people are really interested in the game, they will want to express their opinion about it and everyone will have the opportunity to do so.
It’s a bit ‘like voting in democratic countries, you can also abstain, but then you can’t complain about the decisions taken by the winning party.
By the way if you see that things do not go your way then the next time, perhaps, you will spend those five minutes to complete the survey.

Be careful with polls. They may seem like a good solution to many people, but they can also be incredibly deceiving. Different people often answer from various contexts based their own interpretation of the question, but the results are still piled together in specific predetermined groups. Polls are inherently limited as well. Forums may take longer to sift through, but they allow thoughts to be expressed (in both directions). The game is also a very mutable experience and everyone is different; letting the majority decide is not necessarily a good thing, as there are many aspects of the game that appeal to different people. As someone touched upon above, having someone who doesn’t play an area much affect it to the same degree as someone who plays it a lot could be odd.

I don’t think you’ll ever reach an equilibrium where people enjoy everything, and at some point, as much as we players want to have influence and give feedback, some of us also want to be surprised and see new features that we didn’t expect. Influencing a game with feedback is a very good thing, but stifling the creativity of the development team is not in anyone’s best interest. I guess it really depends on what kind of feedback you collect. “Was that fun?” is way too nebulous a question to have meaning in such a complex machine.

If you ask questions certain ways you can almost be guaranteed certain answers, but they will not always be the correct answers that you can use to guide yourself to better ground.

I’m speaking as someone who’s shared several ideas and tried to start several discussions with other players. I like the prospect of better dialogue, but apart from the disruption of immersion, polls are just not useful to the extent that some people make them seem. Some of forum ideas expressed in the posts above me are better, such as covering certain topics over a period of time.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

So by the way we have two main topics of conversation now:

1: Polls: Every seems to like them but where do they go?
2: Game Feedback Collaboration: How do we want to do this?

Chris

In answer to above:
Polls could be sent via mail to each account concerning a myriad of items from development direction, to suggestions, to what we liked in the past, what we dont like in the current, and what we want in the future. So much could be accomplished.

It would also be really good to see a developer post these statistics online. Does the community support living story or not? Ascended items or not? The recent zerg updates or not? All of the themed updates or not? The cadence of updates or not?

I for one would be very interested in this. I personally would love less frequent, but larger and more substantial updates.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

minbariguy.7504:

I want to echo the people who have recently been requesting in-game polls. Since currently there has been no real acknowledgement or response to player dissatisfaction with the pace of Living Story releases, I have chosen to simply not log in at all to avoid being counted as a “satisfied customer” in your concurrency metrics.

An in-game poll where I would have the chance to have my opinions actually be counted would be something worth logging in for.

I think this is an idea worth discussion for sure. But i have a question:

Would in game polls affect the immersion for the player?

Chris

Simple enough, let the pigeons do the dirty work.
You can advertise a new function via an e-mail and dedicate it a separate section.
The new icon may change color once a new survey is available.
No one will be forced to respond, and invasiveness will be minimal.

Regarding poll location – I’d put it in the launcher. It’s the one part of the game that every active player sees and interacts with on a regular basis. If it’s in the UI somewhere people will miss it, or they’ll get in game and get occupied with everything and forget to fill it out.

If the poll is put on the launcher, it should override the Launch function but give the player the option of declining to answer (which is a stat that should also be reported) or putting off answering until next time they launch. Leave it run for a week or so and you should have a pretty powerful sample of the population.

I’d also suggest publishing the results to the playerbase rather than keeping it hidden.

I’d finally suggest not being too overconfident in your in-house ability to design polls properly, it’s actually tougher than it appears if it is to be done correctly.

Evening Chris,

Regarding surveys and immersion etc, I really don’t think that’s really a factor here when you have notification mechanisms that already break it. Current example is the Scarlet Invasion notifications, which are using the system you originally designed to give Patch and Restart notices. So, why not leverage that? “We have a new survey about the current patch, it can be accessed from [insert method here].”

And keep that mixed in with an in-game mail at much lower frequencies (say once a month) – or, have a more ‘static’ MOTD on your login program (though that really needs to be larger to accommodate what I have in mind).

As for access, a /survey command sounds like the easiest way to do it, and would re-direct to the actual survey in a relatively ‘safe’ manner. Accessing it from the same screen as Bug Reports (again, just kicking off your browser) would work very well too.

Now, one point not mentioned yet: Please make sure to publish results – no matter how bad that may end up for either your group or us players – and your planned response/changes in light of that. This continues the give-take of communication and encourages more and more players to participate (they’ll see there is an impact).

Shorah b’shemtee (peace be with you) and good luck,
—S_A

On the topic of 2:Game Feedback Collaboration, one of the things I’m seeing throughout this thread is the request from players for a sense that they are being heard. It might be worth taking a cue from some of the “bug compilation” and similar threads that players take it upon themselves to start and maintain. The original poster watches the thread, and updates the OP to reflect and summarize the discussion that follows.

Imagine a developer in charge of a specific area creating a feedback request thread. The developer posts a targeted question. Perhaps they set a particular time frame, such as three days later. People who would like to reply know they have three days to do so, and don’t expect the developer to get back on the thread until the end of that period, so no “why aren’t you responding?” posts are necessary.

Then, when the times up, the dev takes some time to read through the responses, then updates the OP with a list of bullet points summarizing what they’ve gleaned from the responses. They could also ask further, very targeted questions for clarifications or to float ideas at that point for additional feedback if needed (with another deadline for compiling and response).

With something like this, there’s defined expectations about everyone’s part in the conversation. The developer isn’t expected to be sitting on the forums having a conversation all day, but the players can expect a specific “I hear you saying A, B, and C” and maybe a “what about D?” before “thanks for the feedback, I’ll get with my team”.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

minbariguy.7504:

I want to echo the people who have recently been requesting in-game polls. Since currently there has been no real acknowledgement or response to player dissatisfaction with the pace of Living Story releases, I have chosen to simply not log in at all to avoid being counted as a “satisfied customer” in your concurrency metrics.

An in-game poll where I would have the chance to have my opinions actually be counted would be something worth logging in for.

I think this is an idea worth discussion for sure. But i have a question:

Would in game polls affect the immersion for the player?

Chris

I have a question for you.

Do you think it would affect it any more or less than?

- The constant bugs that remain and are introduced each month.
- The artificial time-gated content
- Living World stories that come and go without much change
- Living World remnants that never get removed, solved, or changed
- Purple player models, invisible enemies.
- Fuzzy animal hats
- Zerg farming
- etc

At this point, we can pretty much agree that the level of immersion in is game isn’t exactly super high. The Living World feels more like a scripted episode of “Full House” more than it does a dynamic, living, growing exciting, unpredictable world.

At this point, I would rather you provide an in-game feedback system and use it to effectively improve the game, than continue to “experiment” and hope it works. Neither of us has unlimited time, resources and patience. We meet to optimize all of those thing the best way we can, so we can get this game straitened out before it’s too late.

You’re asking for our patience, but honestly, you’re asking a lot. You’ve not done enough as a company to gain the trust an loyalty of many players to be asking for such things. I feel that you need to put your egos aside, and understand that in the short term, listening, and tpgathering feedback from the players you still have, will to only help solidify our relationship, but hopefully improve the game to the point where this isn’t an issue.

I am sorry you feel this way, personally i feel the team has worked really hard in an extremely challenging and important endeavour. I can also guarantee you that whilst the team is human and makes mistakes they certainly don’t have an inflated ego (-:

But i digress and disagree and look forward to getting back to the productive side of this forum discussion.

Chris

I never said you weren’t working hard, or that you didn’t care. When I talk about ego, I mean that it can be hard to admit when something just isn’t working as intended.

I’m a graphic designer (formally a makeup artist) so I know that feeling when the client doesn’t jump for joy, or understand your vision. It is very hard to get past that, “pffft, what does that jerk know, I’m the pro here!” mentality.

Approaching your community with clear, honest tones (like you’re attempting here), is a much better approach than telling us were nothing more than a vocal minority, and that “we are listening” only to not listen.

I posted this on another thread. But since Anet is actively reading this thread, I will include this here. It is very important for Anet to realize that:

1) World Event > Dungeons.

2) WvW > sPvP

I had talk to many people over the past few months, both in game and in the forums. And that’s the general conclusion most people agrees to. I cannot prove it. But just take my word for it.

1) Dungeons. When you talk to people about them, most of them talk about “rewards” and “armor&weapon skins”. Yup, that’s all they care about when they do dungeons. They don’t repeat dungeons because its fun. They do them for rewards and skins. And as soon as they finished farming that skin, or gold to trade gems, they never repeat that dungeon again.

Most player I know only did the new dungeons once, and never went back. There were a few that continue to farm the new TA dungeon for that mini. But most people don’t care.

I am almost certain that dungeons takes more development time (a lot more) than world events.

Everyone knows how frustrating it is to look for a group if you are not a warrior, guardian and mesmer. And everyone know how PUGs can fail in dungeons.

World events needs no introduction. Just read up the number of comments on Teq, compared that to the # of comments on TA Assault, and you can clearly tell that the player base cares a lot more about world events. And guess what, most of those comments isn’t about rewards for these world events. They talk about “slow spawn rates”. They talk about “Teq is too hard”. Why? Because people want to get it done! People want to play the content because its fun!

For the record, I don’t hate dungeons. I actually love the MA and TA dungeon. But I only did each of them once. I just don’t think its worth the development time Anet spent on it.

Many players appears to “hate” World Events. This is a common misunderstanding. The players hates Teq because they don’t think its well designed. They think its too hard. They think they are always stuck in overflows. They think the wait time between retry for Teq is too long. They do not, I repeat do not, hate World Events. They hate “the problems” that they face when they try World Events.

TBH, there is not a single well designed World Event in GW2 yet. Not even one. So it should be obvious that most players have no idea what a good World Event looks like. Teq is already the best World Event of what we have, but even that is pretty mediocre I got to say. There is tons of room for improvement and potential for World Events.

2) sPvP, where should I begin. I guess I will start by saying that their maps are ridiculous detailed and beautiful. Yes, go into a sPvP match right now, and check out the maps. They are some of the most beautifully made areas in the whole game, putting many PvE areas to shame. That shows how much time and effort Anet put into sPvP. Yet, almost no one plays sPvP.

I had met and talk to many people over the past few months. I only know a small handful of players that players sPvP regularly. Most just use it as a training ground for WvW.

If Anet would now totally abandon any update on sPvP, and put all their effort on WvW, very few will complain. Not one person in my guild even cares about it. sPvP already got more than enough updates for their super tiny player base.

So Anet listen to this. You are wasting a lot of resources on dungeons and sPvP, which draws very few players relatively. Look at your player’s gaming hour statistics. Compare Teq against TA dungeon. I am confident that I am right.

Please focus on World Events, and ignore dungeons for now. Do not work on a new dungeon until you guys get the World Events (like Teq) settled down. Trust me you will need to do a lot of trials, errors and player feedback to get World Events right. There is no time to lose. I mean the only “mob invasion” event we got so far was the Karka invasion of Lion’s Arch, and that event was poorly done and filled with bugs. The players already waited over one year for something like Teq. Get these World Events out there asap.

Focus on WvW, and ignore sPvP. This should explain itself.

World Events and WvW is what set this game apart. Dungeons are nothing new. Many other MMOs have dungeons. Many other MMOs have sPvP. It is World Events and WvW that will raise GW2 to new heights. So please pull more resources into developing these two areas of the game.

Also check out my other thread for Living Story recommendations.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/lwd/How-would-you-make-LS-better