Guild Wars 2

There should be a name for the syndrome that Arenanet seem to be suffering (like Stockholm Syndrome for example) where a business dealing with the public begins to suffer resentment and anger towards its (paying) customer base. This syndrome is much more common in the gaming industry.

The relationship starts “all smiles” during the development process, begins to deteriorate at beta, further deteriorates at launch (mainly because some paying customers do not appreciate what was delivered, which is probably no-ones fault).

Then you have a major change in a largely settled game, e.g. ascended items, bloodlust buff, leagues or whatever which inflames a large section of the customer base. The customer has invested time and money in to the game (albeit less than the dev team has, but the customers time is their own and their money can be spent on whatever they like). During the initial period the customer develops a great deal of passion for the game and this change, well it feels like a betrayal.

The dev team, like the customers, are not perfect. They make mistakes, they pay too much attention to what the metrics tell them and largely ignore even the constructive posts on the forum. They fall back on the fact that the forum, reddit or whatever else is really just a small part of the community out there and most of that is full of jerks. Entirely missing the point that, by and large, happy gamers spend more time in game and unhappy gamers take to the forums to complain.

So when you see anger and disrespect it should tell you that you inflamed a great passion in these players but you let them down somehow. Those with the greatest investment (time, money, past games with Anet) will shout the loudest.

I’m a good example. I’m SO angry at the continuing WvWvW changes (siegewars, bloodlust, ill thought out leagues, ignoring GvG, giving PvE players everything on a plate, how long till we got ascended and when, if ever, can we get all ascended there etc). This is because I spent 3 – 4 hours playing WvWvW every day, bought three accounts and spent upwards of $1500 in the gem store.

I have no personal animosity to anyone at ArenaNet, even Devon Carver (I’m sure he is a reallly nice guy, I probably have more animosity to whoever decided he should be appointed to that job as it speaks volumes relating to the impotance Anet gives WvWvW in the grand scheme of things). But I reserve the right to speak my mind and get angry when so many of us have been beating our heads bloody against the Anet wall making constructive posts for over a year that are almost always ignored. Often there are good reasons, most of the time it comes across as it doesn’t suit “your vision” of WvWvW or you just don’t care enough.

So to all ArenaNet developers and staff – you really shouldn’t take it personally. Listen MUCH more to your paying customers, take metrics with a pinch of salt (hey check out Warhammer for how metrics went down for them?) and start putting real decision makers in the firing line instead of PR bots.

This community interaction thing is, after all, a two way street.

All I got from this is:

“If you’re passionate enough about something to get angry about it, you don’t deserve to have an opinion about it.”

@Chris Whiteside – if ArenaNet wants the best collaboration from the community, there is one simple thing that they are missing:

Communication.

We don’t know why many of your decisions were made, or what your goals are, or why certain issues appear to be being ignored (I say appear, because I doubt that they are), but without communication, there’s absolutely no way to tell. Explaining why you think the current Teq design is a good thing, for example, would be interesting (particularly the 1hr spawn window and effectively forcing all serious players into organised overflows), or why, in PvE, zerker gear is still so much more optimal than other gearing.

Zumy.6318:

How do you back up these words? Please be so kind to answer as I dont understand what damage could be done.
And yes I support you on the topic of who was being rude and also I dont GvG.

There are various how I think GvG the way its being practiced in that video damages WvW. Its essentially a chain of events

1. its taking spots of players who want to do proper WvW.
2. killing each other doesnt contribute to the score of WvW taking objectives does hence you’re reducing your world ranking over all
3. because your world loosing ranking people interested in WvW are likely to transfer to other servers thus making a bad situation worst
4. new players who might join WvW on that server will try their best to fight for their world only to run into a bunch of people not taking part that alone is demoralizing imagine what effect it has if like it happened in the video your world that suppose to back you up conspire with the enemy to get you killed never mind them not lifting a finger when you run to them for help. Such players will understandable feel WvW efforts are pointless
5. The attitude itself, people in that video were too entitled, they are clearly abusive to people who are not part of their gang which in itself will drive people away from WvW.
6. if your server is doing bad and atmosphere is generally abusive new players might not even get to the point of even bother with trying WvW in the first place.

Thats how I think it can be damaging.

Again not saying they’re doing anything wrong or that they shouldnt be allowed, they’re free to enjoy the game just as you and I but they should at least adjust their attitude a little bit. The least they can do is be respectful of the players playing WvW as intended.

What these people are doing is akin to someone joining a dungeon party and not participate in the dungeon rather do his own thing whatever that would be.

ANet,

Since you’re reading posts, and looking to involve yourself more in community feedback, here are a few posts I’ve written in the last year that have addressed this.

Feel free to take a few moments and give them a look.

In-Game voting suggestion

Link: Here

Posted: Sept 9th, 2012

Vocal Minority

Link: Here

Posted: Nov 25th, 2012

Treating us like friends instead of gem purchasers

Link: Here

Posted: March 15th, 2013

These are just my posts. There have been countless others that have provided very constructive feedback as to how to engage with us. It seems very strange that you keep saying that you want to work on this game ‘together’, be more black and white, and engage the community more….yet you reprimand devs that dedicate their own time to do just this, remain silent for days, never address threads with a huge amount of feedback, and release things into the game no one asked for, or cares about.

Hi Chris, gonna say a few words here even though I don’t do much posting on the forums. I am a fairly casual player who’s pretty much lost faith in Guild Wars 2, even though not completely. I think a couple of things can still be saved and, in hoping this, I keep playing and enjoying the good parts of the game.

I realize it must be very difficult for ANet not to read all the posts, but to take action where the community is split and there’s a lot of debate. Also – and some people might call me naive for this – I don’t doubt you guys actually read our messages and hear our pleas. However, there is a tendency to offer vague responses from what I’ve seen.

Admittedly, not all matters can be solved immediately or get an answer straight away, but there are some critical points where I would really like for Arena Net to make a stand. Let me give you an example: gear tiers. From what I’ve seen (I might be wrong so if a fellow poster can correct me, the better) the response to this matter is something in the lines of " hopefully this will be the last tier we’re introducing".
Now, this is a critical part to Guild Wars 2, and from my point of view a mistake has already been made with the Ascended Gear. And I am going to be honest here, the last thing I want to hear as an answer to this problem is something starting with “hopefully”. This should be a clear yes or no, being one of the pillars of the game. I realize a clear answer can result in a loss of players, but vague answers won’t do much good either in the long term.

Also, I think it would be great if you find a way to gather more feedback from the players. I haven’t read all this thread, so it’s possible someone suggested this before; if that’s the case, I second his/her opinion. Take into account that there are a lot of players who aren’t posting on the forums but still play the game. Thousands upon thousands of silent people who play the game, maybe read the forums, but never post a reply. With a few exceptions, I am one of them. If these people were to be asked directly to participate in a survey, I think a lot of them would gladly do it.

So why not have more surveys? They’re easy to make and they don’t even have to be long. Two or three questions related to a specific subject and that’s it. Advertise these surveys on the website – not only in the forums section – so you get people’s attention, maybe build some hype around them, give the respondents a chance to win an in-game prize (pets, consumables, little things) and do whatever it takes to gather as many answers as possible.

I am not sure if the technology permits it, but if possible, have these surveys in-game, sent by email or something. You can then organize the answers and make them public with graphic pies and stuff like that, show transparency with the statistics. Ask people about living story, about gear tiers, about expansions and whatever is important.

Again, if these things have been said before in this thread, then add me to the numbers :p

I just want that Guild Wars 2 would be more like the original Guild Wars.
Sadly it feels that they have nothing in common anymore.

nethykins.7986:

than communicating with the community and relay information back and forth.

then they don’t have those people that we need!

i don’t care about facebook posters or twitter posters

i care about people saying “Hey, your absolutely right and we are in the works to fix this soon!” or “I’ll pass this along to <insert dev here> who is responsible for that” and then coming back and telling us his or the collective dev communities response

half the time in the rare chance they say they will pass this along….we get zero response to it afterwards never knowing if it got lost in the ether somewhere down the line

you guys have got to communicate back!

this is the worst game forum for having devs interacting with the players…..i think the best is marvel heroes albeit a different game but i think they have 3 informed people posting daily around 25-30 times each

but seriously, it is a two way street…..we give you feedback and we don’t know if your hearing it because you don’t make a simple post saying if you’ve heard it or not…so we get countless threads about the same kitten problem to make sure you hear it

i know you devs are busy making content for the game to hit your every 2 week deadline…but with the gem shop raking in tons of dough(apparently) hire 2-3 people who sit in on meetings and their only job is to reply on the forums

I think is is disrespectful and antagonistic to refuse to acknowledge customer input. Sit in a room with another person and never directly respond to them when they talk to you, and you will very quickly alienate the other person and turn them hostile to you.

Another way to distance yourself from any other social entity is to hide your identity and responsibilities. Decisions come down and customers have no idea what person or persons at your company is responsible for them. The contributes to stacking the deck against yourselves in terms of building a trusting relationship with customers.

The lenghts some of your company proclamations go to obfuscate who the decision makers are related to specific issues that are controversial with players is astounding. Almost everything is attributed to a global “We” as if every employee there was involved in reaching a consensus based decision.

You have built a very closed and insulated social unit that purposefully avoids communication based on facts, and specializes in one way communication based on spin.

I’m genuinely curious what posted ideas were actually actioned on.

At any rate, I don’t see anything really changing because a CM posted something on the forums. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to take away from this. That you’re listening?… I don’t see it. That you’re going to start listening more in future? Well, some real discussion would actually go a long way to that.

We’re apparently giving you ideas, but we really have no way of identifying which of our contributions are beneficial and which ones are wasted time on our part. Do we have a real impact on the development of the game, or not?

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

nethykins.7986:

If Chris finds the forums quite contradictory/not helpful for a lot of elements in relation to feedback, perhaps a post those very forums was a bit of a backwards move?

-snip-

I couldn’t agree more. In fact I suggested the exact same thing over a year ago, and it was largely ignored.

I know a few will take issue with the “mandatory” part, and I am torn. On one hand, it makes sense to “persuade” players to give feedback, but on the other I’m not sure if that would result in the best feedback if someone is forced to do it before they can play.

I think the best solution is to include a survey on the character select screen that allows users the option to fill it out.

I have to say, I can not take credit for what I posted, because, even without searching the forums, out of the thousands of players that play, and those that frequent the forum, I’m quite sure this would have popped up more than once over the lifetime of the game.

The mandatory part is what I see as a kind of safety net for ANet. Players can’t say that people were never given the opportunity to fill in the form, or that they accidentally closed it and couldn’t get it back, or that anyone was able to opt out and thus leaving their opinion as unaccounted. As well as the whole ethos of “no player’s opinion is unaccounted for, or unworthy of reading”. It’s definitely a positive way of looking at things, even if the mandatory thing is a little heavy handed.

The problem I have with things like having it in the player select screen, if it’s hidden away, is that No-one will see it.
Case in point: ANet seemed to kick up a fuss about new/revamped DE’s not getting any feedback, though this happened while they were giving a large fanfare to the LS. Because no-one even knew these were improved, revamped or changed, no-one knew where to look or what feedback to give, and that in turn got some dev talking about this being how we don’t give feedback on stuff actually changed in game.

If it’s not mandatory, it’d need to have to be in bight lights, highly visible, and visible to even the newest player what it is, and what the questionnaire means in the long run.

DanH.5879:

i think what the community needs are some “representatives”
and those to talk with the anet devs

maybe this will improve the communication ?

Those representatives exist. They’re called Community managers/Community Coordinators etc.

If they’re not actively keeping in contact with the community – and I mean outside of the silly Facebook and twitter statuses that are very one sided (they post, we read) – then they’re not fulfilling their role completely. They’re no longer being the line of communication between player and devs, and instead being a mouthpiece/megaphone for GW2 advertisement where ‘Retweets’ and ‘Follows’ are their main goal.

Hello Chris,

Thank you for taking the time to post.

Since you mentioned that you read many of the posts on the forums, especially the ones that are polite and respectful, please allow me to express my thoughts.

In the last year or so, I have noticed a lot of ANet devs popping on the forums to remind everyone that our posts are being read and considered. I’ve also noticed that it often includes a plea for players to be patient, and understand that “big things” are coming.

The problem however is that there seems to e a disconnect between what is being said, and what is being done.

Since day one, many forum users have been asking for more clear communication in regards to the game. This means that not only listening to our ideas and feedback, but engaging us on ideas that are, and aren’t working. Most of us feel that communication and respect are a two way street, and when we take our time to support your game, write posts, create art, etc, only to be faced with coldly calculated public relations responses (or worse silence), it can be a bit frustrating when someone finally shows up and asks us all to be respectful and have patience.

Secondly, there have been times when certain ANet employees have taken a very active role on the forums (which you’ve stated you would like to do), much to the delight of the community, only to be slapped on the wrist and silenced.

I feel that if you’re going to ask for our continued patience and support, that you start being much more transparent (or black and white as you’ve put it). We need to know what you’re planning, and what we can expect, so we’re not sitting here six months from now even more frustrated and concerned.

As well, I think you guys need to consider a more directed approach to gaining player feedback. The forums are great, but too many ideas, too many opinions, and too many conflicting opinions, make trying to gather any sort of meaningful feedback a very difficult task. Many have suggested creating an honest feedback system (I suggested an in-game system almost a year ago) that would give ANet some of that “Feeling” feedback that login data clearly lacks.

I think you’ll find that most of your community will show you the respect and patience you desire, if we get the feeling that you’re after our hearts and minds, as much, if not more than our wallets. We love your game, and we want to support it, but most of us don’t have the time to wait around as your Guinea Pigs, while you experiment.

Find a way to get clear and honest feedback, and then be transparent with what you say, and what you plan to do. I think you’ll find that when your community feels like we’re “friends” instead of “gem store potentials” we’ll be putty in your hands.

Here’s the deal with “Constructive Feedback”, because the term is a bit deceiving.

Demanding feedback to be constructive is often times nothing but a ruse. If the feedback you receive is unfavorable, you can always claim that it’s not constructive enough and wash your hands of any and all responsibility to react to it. It’s true that a lot of people around these parts like to post angry rants but ultimately feedback is feedback. It is not up to the community to fix the problems with the game; we only need to voice our opinion.

Basically, if I dislike the Living Story I’m not ALSO responsible for coming up with a better story myself for my opinion to become “constructive feedback”. Unless I’m mistaken, the wording in the OP seems to indicate that ANet does exactly what I described above however. “Bad”/Angry feedback is ignored because it obviously can’t be very good feedback, right? Call me callous bit it sounds like this thread is a demand for more positive, not more constructive posts from the community.

Well thanks for reaching out to the community, but over the past year I have seen ArenaNet heading exactly opposite the direction that I (I’ll just speak for myself) would like the game to evolve in.

The reason I bought the game is for two reasons:

• The Manifesto
• Because I loved Guild Wars 1

Because of the above, I expected certain things from Guild Wars 2:

• Extreme horizontal progression where item stats do not matter and progression is aesthetics only, and you can get max stat items in less than an hour – NO GRIND, NO GEAR THREADMILL
• Extremely deep character customization, making me think what skills to bring and what gear to equip on my character
• Extremely fast to max level and max gear a character to max to make it easy to have alts (takes me 3 hours to get a GW1 char to 20 and have him kitted out)
• An enviornment permanently shaped by players, not devs
• Exciting, carefully balanced PVP

Thus in my eyes, the devs have done a few things wrong and are continuing to do things wrong:

• High level cap that takes ages to reach (in my opinion, having levels in the first place is a mistake)
• Restricting players to a single class and having very very few skills and traits per class – thus very few options to make interesting builds
• The boring stat system (power, vitality, etc) and the item system that came out of it that only offer simple +stats, instead of ‘cool’ situational bonusses such as +20% enchantment length or +10 armor when in a stance. In my opinion, stats can and should be completely removed from GW2 and such bonusses on items should be replaced by a whole boatloat of diverse situational bonusses that are a direct part of the characterbuilding/planning process.
• The legendary and ascended items. Exotics were just about right, maybe even a bit too hard to obtain in the first place. I don’t want a gear grind; this game shouldn’t be about obtaining items with stupid stats in my opinion. Again, items should be diverse in what they do and not have bigger numbers.
• PVP and WVW just isn’t interesting at the moment, but I think that is largely because of the above points, with the inability to make interesting and diverse character builds and the game focussing highly on the base stats.
• The dynamic events don’t care that I’m there, because next hour they just replay and reset themselves. Thus they lack meaning and epicness.

I personally don’t think that temporary content is the biggest issue, I have much more problems with the fundamental game mechanics (stats, skills, items, progression).

What I personally want to play this game for:

• Discovering new character builds that noone else found before (not possible)
• Equipping my character with fancy clothing, armor and weapons in combinations that almost noone else has (already possible)
• Influence the way the server evolves and make it different from other servers (not possible, outside the elections we had, which were not per-server unfortunately)
• Build a nice place for myself, such as a nice house, and haul loot and decorations in there (not possible, home instance is terrible because other players cannot easily see it, and it is not customizable)
• Compete with others based on creativity and skill (not really possible)
• Challenge myself playing multiple accounts and doing all of the above with them (not possible unless using outlawed programs. In GW1 it was possible because game had much easier controls. GW2 is the only MMO that I have only one account in, normally I have 3 accounts…)

dear Chris, I think that having prompt feedback from A.Net saying why they didn’t implement what we players requested or “yes we will add this because it’s a great idea” ecc would immediately solve 90% of the buzz in the community.
Every player is playing through a class, yet the class forums are the rarest to be seen with devs tag actively talking: this is counterproductive for both parts.
When you see people in anger, ask yourself why they are in anger: probably, those people used to be your number one supporters.
Customers are all alike, people aren’t: no great challenge can be accomplished through customers only, if you are looking for greater things you have to deal with people.
And people want communication above anything else, something that is lacking in the way we need it.

It’s the little things that tick players off. For example, the harpies in the Cliffside fractal. I’ve been dillegently reporting their invulnerability/knock-down spam/stuck in combat at insane range-bugs for months now. When, after 3 months, I still get heaps of repair bills because of the same bug (which to me is gamebreaking), even the meek players get raging.

It could be that it’s not a priority because most people melee-rush through fractals these days, but when you hit them even once with a ranged attack while not on their platform, they go invulnerable while their friends start knocking you down like crazy.

Which would be bad enough on its own, except there’s a second bug that causes you to sometimes get defeated instantly when knocked off (even at full health and no downs yet).

Clearly you can see that at some point, people need to vent steam when this keeps happening to them?

If Chris finds the forums quite contradictory/not helpful for a lot of elements in relation to feedback, perhaps a post those very forums was a bit of a backwards move?

Perhaps this could have been better focused as a blog post, stating that, due to the result of not getting enough “constructive feedback” from forums, and it being a select number of players that visit the forums, that they’ll put an in-game survey up.

I think you’d get a lot better/refined results from the playerbase as a whole (and not just forum posters) if you put a questionnaire up In Game(I can not emphasise those words more), with the questions that you specifically want feedback on, or you find are the hot-topics currently being discussed. One questionnaire per account, that would pop up once for everyone, and is mandatory before continuing to play.

There you go. Two birds. One stone….well more like multiple birds, and one stone
– It’s the wider response of players instead of just a select number in the forums.
– You get to pinpoint the topics of discussion that hold the most weight instead of trawling through feedback that isn’t helpful and pinpoint the area with the most disapproval.
– You completely avoid the unhelpful criticism, for hard data about what’s good/bad. (and if you give people a small text box to comment issues when they disagree then you funnel ideas into that. It keeps it cleaner)

“groundbreaking content”

You mean world bosses with increased hitpoints? The complete LACK of raiding instances. No GvG (in a game called GuildWars?) RNG still running the game. Lack of precursor fixes. Lack of dungeon revamps and bug-fixes

And most of all, still no Chainsaw kit for engies. (this one makes me the saddest)

1. Reason to defend. If I had a nickel for everytime I heard “let them have it” insyead of defending….
2. Longer sieges…goes hand in hand with #1. Stop the flipping back and forth.
3. Make borderlands matter. Make a server WANT to defend their borderlands before all else. If someone is invading your realm you should WANT to kick them out. Make borderlands unique for each server. Make it ours and unlike no one elses, something we can relate to. Make us want to defend it.

The top three:

1. Commander Tag / Party functionality
2. How WvW population is handled. Stacking VS deserted servers.
3. WvW rewards no where near PvE rewards. Ascended, legendary, Achievements etc.

1) Stealth.
2) Dolyak die too quickly,carry too little supply and move too slow.
3) Swiftness is a must.

1. No more of this blob cr*p that creates skill lag. We have skill lag because some servers only run 70+ people (whole map zerg) to specifically lag everybody so that nobody can use any other skills than 1, no heals, no downed stake skills, nothing. Unless these blobs face another blob its 90% in favor of the blob

2. Instead of 3 exact same maps and EB make 4 different maps so people have actual incentive and fun instead of all same maps. Why not map 1 fire theme, map 2 forest theme, map 3 mountain snow theme and map 4 the current EB. I only do EB because it has the fun of SM…the other 3 maps are boring as hell and exactly the same. Redesign them. Make a mechanic that forces to rotate to another map after a certain time ie you gain extra server points for moving to map 2,3,4 for 45 minutes. If you stay more than 1 hour on the same map you get less server points.

3. Queues are a joke. There should be zero queue time to fight for your server. I see you are introducing a new queue map. That s great but that map needs to also contribute to the score I hope.

4. We need better report tools for griefers and people who waste supplies and blatantly spy. Introduce bounties. Any player can put a bounty on a player. It costs a skill point. Once you get 5 people putting the same bounty then the other servers see the bounties in the name color of the player and can go after that player. You kill the player, your server gains points. A player can only have 5 bounties on self per day. Or something similar to avoid griefing

1) The scoring system: rewards coverage over fun/balanced fights.
2) Lack of a proper alliance infrastructure, lack of incentives for guild to transfer (for example: retain the upgrades, buy discounts for player transfer fees with influence/merits) and poor commander options (lack of a proper commander interface and maybe a command chain with sub-commanders and such) make very hard to organize a server over the 24/7 coverage
3) Rewards and gear availability: we’re still waiting for ascended back pieces in WvW, only a few armor and weapon stat combination available

Chat suppression needs looking at, it can be frustrating having to whisper someone to use map chat for you.

1) More Maps/More Life to Current Maps
We have 4 maps for WvW and 3 of them use the same one. I would love to see at least 2 more maps, preferably radical to the two current ones.
Here are two suggestions:
i) GW1 type Charr Homeland map where you cant use siege but have to ally with some Charr warband to use a Siege Devourer (as a trebuchet) and Armored Saurus (as a flame ram), etc.
ii) Maps with different themes like Molten etc.
Also, more events should be added to existing maps, similar to PvE maps to add more flavor. For example, maybe if one server holds Stonemist for too long, maybe a dragon boss like Shatterer comes and breaks some walls. Using siege weapons to take down a dragon could be an epic battle.

2) Skill Lag
Basically, improve lag. In huge battles, I can barely move or do anything other than auto-attack.

3) Rewards
Improve rewards, less randomness to chest. Perhaps every even chest gives a guaranteed rare.

1. Ironing out the WvW achievements. Are jumping puzzles and merc camp achievements really needed when queues are so huge? Keep the actual achievements that encourage to play WvW correctly.
2. Commander functions. Some fast commands that will be displayed for everybody atleast. Like Buff Up! Heal Up! Push!. Get rid of text suppression for commanders.
3. Own map for jumping puzzles. Just like EB jumping puzzle.
4. Skill lag.
5. Some ideas to break up the blob (50+ people) meta.
6. Should fully dead player ressing be even slower while in combat?

1. rewards for playing defensively instead of constant flipping
2. alt friendliness (badges, laurels, wxp, etc.)
3. wvw vs pve rewards (including achievement point opportunities)
(also the currently unnecessary gold sink included in upgrading things with no incentive to defend)

1. No ressurecting People that are completly dead in combat.
2. Removel of Waypoints, Maps are tiny enough.
3. New Map ala Praag from Warhammer.