Guild Wars 2

A ToS/EULA doesn’t always hold up to legal scrutiny, and can be found unenforceable. Perhaps more so when its terms are intended to absolve a company of responsibilities and circumvent consumer protections or other laws. They exist more as discouragement and a legal hurdle that potential plaintiffs can’t afford to get by in order to file suit for the actual issue.

Another issue with TOS/EULAs is that typically they aren’t shown to the customer till after purchase, and in many cases that is too late to get a refund. This is more applicable to boxed copies, but is still a potential issue with digital goods.

Giving a ‘Mea Culpa,’(though they take pains not to openly admit wrongdoing or to apologise) or a ‘what=we’re=going=to=do-to-right-the-ship=now’ list doesn’t absolve one from the responsibility for potentially committing(as I hope they still might make this right rather than leaving the mess they’ve done in the original posting)fraud.

What I personally feel is the disconnect here -and what in turn has inspired such vitriol on the part of the community in the majority of postings here- is the circumstance and the timing of this announcement – a time when it seems they know how deep in the hole they were going to be in with this issue whether they spoke up or not. It speaks volumes.

I couldn’t care less for legendary weapons, but as others have said principle counts for something. It doesn’t score any points that one of the only times Anet has chosen to set down and talk to us is when they knew they were going to be caught out and clearly in the wrong by not making good on a bill of goods they sold.

Transparency, trust, and good communication aren’t things mentioned in passing in order to make them so. They’re something developed and then maintained over a long period of time with others.

Turning their back on this community, going over to Reddit where they’ve known- or at least have known til now -that for the longest time they’d be in a safe space, surrounded by willing sockpuppets- isn’t proper or professional communication.

They -You, Anet/Mo- didn’t want to be bothered/pestered by the unwashed masses that play your game. Now, it seems you’re having to for form’s sake. And it isn’t pleasant. It literally comes off in waves how distasteful it is for them to be posting here- even if that wasn’t necessarily the intent of their post. That’s trouble.

It’s what so many are having trouble with here. The original post doesn’t come off as an attempt at transparency. It comes off as a hackneyed attempt at CYA/damage control for a situation that was going to explode no matter what.

It’s an insult to the intelligence of everyone here- one heaped on top of injury. If just feels slimy.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

BrotherBelial.3094:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

BrotherBelial.3094:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

BrotherBelial.3094:

What makes me laugh is everyone is surprised by the silence from ANet. Remember the whole HoT price and no character slot for people who already had HoT? ANet said nothing for a week before they made things “right”. Give it a week and maybe they’ll have something for us.

My other advice, is never buy anything on the strength of something that is not, finished/ready to go/started work on. We knew when we got HoT that legendary weapons where not ready or all finished.

It’s been 5 months and they still aren’t finished. They’re still hardly more than what was promised on the box. How long do you recommend that people wait before buying the expansion? A year? Not until all the Legendaries are done?

If you are buying is for a feature that is not added/finished you wait till its there.

That’s easy to suggest. However that is also suggesting that all people who might one day want one of the new Legendaries not buy this expansion for however months, or years, until it’s in game. That means they will be left in vanilla until that time and missing all the new content and living story that comes with it. That also assumes that people would have a reason to believe back then that something advertised for that expansion would be put on hold.

While some people might be expecting that advertised content will be withheld or be willing to sit in Vanilla for however many years it takes, most people did not have that expectation. Therefore a suggestion that this expansion should not have been bought is not a reasonable one.

As I said if you are buying something on the strength of something that is not there you wait. If there are many things you want then get it now. But when people say “I got the expansion only for the legendary weapons” I have no sympathy. I don’t think what ANet has done is right. But people have no one to blame but them self’s why the paid for something that wasn’t there to start with.

Maybe it’s different where you live, but where I’m from I can buy a package of items in which some are not quite available and expect them to be delivered when done. If there is a reason that the company can’t deliver the items, I get a refund of the money that paid for it. It’s not a usual practice in most companies that they’ll take your money, not deliver the goods and then also not give a refund of money paid.

I’m sorry you live in a society with such weak consumer protections and therefore this is common place to you, but it’s not the type of treatment by a company that I’m used to and therefore I didn’t anticipate needing to not buy ahead of time.

You are talking about a whole product, not a digital one. As I said I don’t agree with what ANet did,

Actually, no. A product can be a package of goods sold that are of different parts and not all of those parts may be immediately available for various reasons. As long as you’ve paid for it, you should have the expectation that all parts of your purchase get to you, or you are refunded for the parts that don’t.

“not a digital one”
Are you saying here that digital purchases are outside all consumer protection laws? I know some are by the way they’re phrased and set up. However if a company sells a digital product, such as an expansion, with items in it that are advertised parts of that expansion then they should be regulated by consumer protection laws and required either to provide all parts of the advertised expansion or if they can’t they should offer a reasonable, partial refund to all purchasers.

There’s no reason for a company that takes your money and doesn’t provide what was advertised and purchased to be above consumer protection laws, digital or not.

Heibi.4251:

Darkddmaster.4695:

OK I would like MO or another dev to please explain to me and others what they actually mean by ‘indefinitely suspended’. I know a lot of people take this to mean CANCELLED, but when I read the post I took it as literally the ‘indefinitely suspended’, as in, work is on hold and we don’t have a time frame in mind to resume. .

Indefinitely Suspended means = on hold until we can get back to it, but we don’t have a date or time frame to give you as to when it will be.

Canceled means it isn’t going to be done and there’s no intent on returning to do it in the future.

Wording is everything. If they were going to cancel them outright they would have said so.

Oh man, You don’t really believe that do you?

And said wise man ended up on a funeral pyre only to have it’s burnt head worshipped by his emo grandson. But that’s another story.

The Infinite Continue Coin has been useless since 2013, with no refunds or apologies. Placating customers they disappoint doesn’t seem to be part of ANet’s business model.

I love Amazon. I accidentally bought Prime for an account I didn’t intend to, and they refunded me the full $99 even though I didn’t catch my mistake until a month later.

I appreciate customer service like that.

Donari.5237:

I am pleased with my norn Engineer Altdragg Splitstack, though.

That was you! I remember reading ages ago that someone called a character that so they’d remember how to split stacks of items and I think of it every time I’m trying to remember which button to push (and apologising for spamming chat because I tried shift first).

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I’m one of the crowd that doesn’t make meaningful, lore appropriate names for my chars. Since I’m not a role player at all I find them boring, at least for my own chars. I chose names that are a pun (usually bad) or amuse me in some way. That doesn’t mean I don’t take a long time to find the “right name.” Just that my criteria for choosing a name is different from yours. For example, when the Revenant was announced I debated names for a couple of months before I settled on one. (I named her Smallmedium Atlarge).

Oh I do that too sometimes. I have an old, heavily scared Imperial Dragonknight in Elder Scrolls Online called Sagittam Ad Genu, which means Arrow to the Knee. (I thought a tied old joke was an appropriate fit for a tired old knight.)

My personal favourite in GW2 was Necrodent the asuran necromancer.

I think Smallmedium Atlarge is brilliant though. Genuinely made me laugh out loud.

I think after 3 years it is pretty safe to say that Anet has no idea how to read their metrics if they have them at all.

There are a few of us ticked they threw the legendaries that were supposed to come out in 2013 behind HoT’s paywall and now those aren’t even coming.

The core issue here is they continue time and again to not deliver on what they say is coming. Not only do they fail to deliver, they put it behind a new paywall and then fail to deliver again.

That’s unacceptable as a business practice. It goes beyond the thing they aren’t delivering on. That’s the actual issue for me. They are in the habit of practicing bad business.

King Cephalopod.7942:

Rauderi.8706:

Ayup.

ANet seems to have this thing of “we have numbers, therefore decisions” without actually determining why those numbers exist. And few things chuff me as hard as bad science.

I’m tempted to believe the main reason the HoT maps are the way they are (long meta-event chains, map-based “keys” taking inventory slots, boxes you open on a cast time that’s interrupted on hit) is because they looked at metrics showing that a majority of players spent a disproportionate amount of time in the Silverwastes.

/blink
Interesting thought.

Not quite what I was going for. More directly related, there’s probably metrics on how many legendaries are actually in game and how many people are completing legendary collections. They might see low player adoption of these items as a reason not to continue.

But they’re not asking why there is low player adoption, and the reason is easily smeared all over the forums: It’s too expensive/grindy. It’s recognized as a fat material sink and it’s obvious. So, fewer players than anticipated are going to participate because ANet felt the need to “preserve the value of precursors”.

Beldin.5498:

Vayne.8563:

Kastiel.1947:

swansea.2453:

Very poor video, he total misses the points why people are upset, and he is pulling numbers out of his kitten , he even says that he doesn’t have figures.

Agreed. Actually wanted to dislike the video, but apparently he hid behind a safe wall.

Actually I think he made a valid point. Anet knows how many players by percentage have even 1 legendary. They know how many have 2.

If they create 16 legendary journeys, what they’re doing is creating content that most people will never do. It’s not really like a dynamic event or even a dungeon or fractal. It’s a long term goal that many people either can’t reach or can’t be bothered going for.

Saying that he doesn’t have numbers is quite irrelevant because Anet does have those numbers and they made the decision.

Maybe they should have made the journey more of a journey and less of a
material / gold grind .. since that was what a lot people expected i think.
So yeah .. they wanted to do quests instead of pay 1000g or whatever, but
what they got is do the quests and pay still 999g .. lol

Ayup.

ANet seems to have this thing of “we have numbers, therefore decisions” without actually determining why those numbers exist. And few things chuff me as hard as bad science.

Silverstone.4539:

if that is the case. Why would they promise something they can’t deliver on.

What better way is there to make money than by selling something that doesnt exist and not only getting away with it but have consumers defend you?

Ophidia Moonstone.2587:

This went through my mind today

First they came for the dungeons, but I didn’t say anything because I don’t play dungeons

Then they came for world v world and still I said nothing because I didn’t play world v world

Then they came for player v player and still I said nothing because I didn’t play player v player

and then they came for legendaries and I said nothing because I don’t want a legendary

And when they came for my content, there was no one left to stand up for me.

As much as I disagree with the development direction GW2’s taken in the recent past, I’d hardly compare it to the Holocaust.

If your aim is to improve core gameplay and allow faster and better quality releases of short term content, why in gods name would you not move staff that is working on long term projects, aka. “next expansion” to the core team, seeing how they seem to have plently people as is?
Its just mind boggling to me why you wouldnt pick the most logical path, and instead get rid of the legendary weapons team, to somehow duct tape them onto the core team.
Much rather, add more people to said team, and actually follow through with your promises for once instead of backing out of them.

But what do i know. I am just a mere player. I have only invested 7000+ hours into this game.

How much time have you actually spent in the game, Mike?

No mockery or anything intended, but being a developer myself, I am well aware of the fact that we often lose sight of what actually needs to be fixed in a product, or project environment, because we spend too much time looking at it from the wrong perspective.

An issue that could be well prevented by communicating with your customers on a regular basis, and not only when something is ready to release, or in other terms, “its too late to fix it by the time we make you aware of it”.

That is pretty much the whole idea of agile development to prevent from releasing something that doesnt live up to its expectations.

It hasn’t escaped my attention either that the only red posts are from Gaile when she started this thread. They can definitely do better on a communications thread started by an ANet staff person. It feels like they sent everyone here to talk about communication, then they got up and left the conversation and never came back. Leaving us all sitting here wondering if there’s going to be this communication they started.

Back before I started that Dev post in Reddit thread that this thread is a spin off of, I kept seeing these posts on the forum where people were begging for help on precursor crafting. There were a number of events that required failure and this was setting up deliberate griefing as well as innocent event completion that stopped people who had been trying for days to get their needed item. People were coming to the forum and making thread after thread trying to get a red post about this situation. If there was even one red post answering them, I never saw it.

Then one day, I found the reddit dev tracker and browsing through that I found a red post talking about this situation to someone over there. It was over a month old at that time. That irritated me. They posted an important piece of information there and couldn’t take the time to post that on just one of the many posts here? That’s when and why I decided to make that thread.

From comments on the forum I know that some people think I’m doing ANet’s job for them as a favor to ANet and to suck up to ANet (I was outright told that in a thread on this forum). I’m not. I’m doing it as a favor to the other posters on this forum and I’m doing it because ANet’s not doing their own job by making relevant information centralized and easily accessible. Whether ANet likes me doing it is irrelevant to me and personally I hope it embarrasses them a little. Who knows, maybe it will embarrass them enough that one day they’ll do their own job and make sure that posts on non official sites get cross posted on their official form.

I’m sure the release rate of gem shop skins will also be cut back as more resources are put into the Living World.

Everyone try to keep a straight face now.

You don’t build sustainability for the game by misleading your customers. If your focus is truly sustainability, you need to build a bond of trust between you and your customers. You are ditching legendary weapons because you are “spread too thin” yet you have 70 employees working on a new expansion. ARE YOU SERIOUS????

Deliver on your hype. Quit misleading your customers.

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

And, from someone else they got all the dollaz from them. If enough people are willing to give up all the dollaz as opposed to none of the dollaz like you did, then they make more. Likely more than if both groups of people only gave up some of the dollaz. That’s where pricing analysis and market research come into play… like any successful business does.

I agree. Intellectually. But if I let myself do a coldly rational analysis of this all I’m left with is HATING MY FELLOW PLAYERS AND THEIR STUPID LACK OF CREATIVITY.

…and I’d rather not do that.

1. Mega server system with HoT participation reward system fix.

Band Aid fix would make the participation system cross server ip compatible for all HoT maps. Auric is a complete nightmare, because the priority of doing Pylon events is becoming cumbersome. People either do the octo-meta then leave the map for dead or just go around doing hero points. A more complex fix would bring back the bloody district system from GW1.

2. Daily system needs more variety for each game mode.

I loved the old system, before we got the mobile game equivalent of log-in/out to get rewards. However can we perhaps have 2 to 3 more types of dailies pulled from the old system. Jumping puzzles and Dungeon for PvE would be at the top of my list for those.

Everything else I believe people have touched on here or was talk to some degree with the developers over the last AMA.

EDIT:

3. Make the GW2 official forums more user friendly for the developers.

Honestly I want this stop being the excuse of: “we don’t really want to use the official forums because the format is awful.” I mean a couple of my favorite indie game developers have changed and updated their own forum format multiple times. Yet a company that has 300-plus people with a budget quadruple that of those small development companies can’t prioritize it, and higher someone permanently to fix the “broken system.” Even when those indie companies utilize a bunch of other social/media outlets. They still strive to use their official tools (including their official forums) first to get their main message across.

On a side note I still find it depressing the people with so much tech background can’t adapt. Compared with those with little to no tech background that can post on these official forums just fine. So hats off to you good people who at least try to post on these forums; even with the so called “awful format” we have here.

That’s not confirmation. Unless a dev has said somewhere that you roll chance for “bonus guild hall loot” in addition to the normal loot roll, I don’t know for sure whether it’s really a bonus or not.

I don’t particularly care, because I’ll keep doing Tequatl either way, but I’d rather not assume anything, and I’m interested in how it actually works.

I would love a glider or two to be obtainable without the gemstore, through a drop or through tokens.

I also think it would be neat if these butterfly style back pieces could be used a gliders too or even make it so that the old molten backpack has a glider animation.

Meh. It is just the same general lack of communications everywhere. Saying General discussion is PvE is your own projection.

While I don’t want to say I agree with the first post, I do think it’s actually close to a good point. ANet doesn’t seem to get much “bang” out of its development work.

Yes, I realize that a lot of LS seasons 1&2 was trying new things, and a lot of HoT was supposed to be creating systems that will allow for growth later, but… It’s been 3 1/2 years, now. If they can’t start to really deliver on the content, then they’re never going to. At least, now as they are now.

insanemaniac.2456:

Beast Sos.1457:

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

Your post is predicated on conjecture, straw-man arguments, anecdotal evidence, and other logical fallacies.

~EW

W.e you say man…lmao

he pretty much right bro lmao

No he’s really not.

Conjecture is the formation of a conclusion while excluding evidence. Unless somebody round here has ears inside ANets office, he’s used all the evidence he, and we, have, being largely personal experience. He’s seen similar support given to ANet that has been given other games, and those games seem to have greater output from that support. No conjecture whatsoever.

Straw man fallacy… doesn’t even make sense in this context. It’s attacking an argument that your opponent didn’t make. Who was his opponent prior to this persons post and what argument did they make? Especially seeing as he was the very first poster after the OP.

Anecdotal evidence, is just evidence based on personal experience, again, this is a forum made for player to share their opinion based on their experience playing the game. And unless somebody here is a developer, it’s the only evidence anybody has.

Not saying the OPs right, but the first poster is just some jerk getting off on making other people feel inferior using buzzwords he doesn’t even know the meaning of, and he doesn’t make any point at all, let alone a correct one.

Neural.1824:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Curo.2483:

I feel like so many people have been trained to just spit out the same answers that they take as fact, and don’t consider the fact that perhaps the drop system is flawed. Why can’t you even consider that? Do you really think ANet is so incapable of making a flawed system, that you ignore the evidence in front of you?

I’m perfectly willing to consider the possibility that there’s an issue, just as soon as someone meets my impossible standards

Fixed that for you.

Those are not impossible standards. You cannot prove anything without collecting enough data.

Personally I have 5 excel spreadsheets with tons of data. I would create a “kitten rng” thread if there was something wrong.

Seera.5916:

Manasa Devi.7958:

Of course there are lucky accounts. That’s a consequence of randomness.

With randomness comes unequal distribution. Looking at cumulative results over time, you will have outliers for whom the dice either fell really, really well or really, really terribly.

That’s not a problem of “marked” accounts though, but just the consequence of having randomness.

Also, when people bring up the people who seem to get good drops all the time, I tend to wonder if these lucky people don’t just play a lot more and generate far more rolls of the dice.

Well, there are two sides to a bell curve for outliers. The really good side and the really bad side. You can’t say there can exist people who get bad drops only and then deny there are people who get good drops only.

It’s like rolling Heads or Tails. If you say getting Heads is like getting a good drop and Tails is like getting a bad drop, then it’s easy to see how both sides can exist. If 100 people flip a coin 100 times, most will be relatively near to 50/50. But a few will likely have mostly Tails. And a few will likely have mostly Heads.

Just due to RNG coin flipping.

Except it’s not a coin flip. Good is defined by rarity coupled with desire for an item, whether it’s a precursor or something else for which players will pay a lot. Rarity does not have two opposite diminishing possibilities. Only the stones very close to the top of the pyramid are good; all the other stones are bad. Outliers are determined only by presence or absence of good drops, not presence/absence of bad ones. Bad drops occur for everyone, in abundance. No one gets good drops only.