Guild Wars 2

We appreciate your understanding and support. We want to make the game the best it can be. Hearing constructive feedback (and being notified of potential errors or bugs) allows us to improve the game.

I’d like to address the continuity issue in the Newly Awakened story instance of episode 7. In it, players have a conversation with Malomedies where he says, “We went so long without losing one of our own, but three of our newly awakened have been killed already. This is unacceptable.” He then goes on to say about Riannoc, “I worry about Riannoc. He’s going so far from home. What if he never returns?”

As some have helpfully pointed out, this is at odds with Caithe’s dialog in the Personal Story, where she mentions, “Riannoc was the first sylvari to meet death. We never knew what happened…” This is an error (a.k.a. text bug) that was introduced during the development of episode 7 and was not caught by anyone on the team or in our playtest groups. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. We’re going to fix the conversation text in episode 7 in an upcoming patch so that it is in line with the Personal Story.

On a related note, I should clarify this bit of dialog from the Personal Story, where Caithe says, “…We all felt it when he [Riannoc] died. It was like a part of the Dream was torn away—but we never knew why. Or how.” The sylvari did not feel Riannoc’s death as it happened, but reacted emotionally once they found out about it (such as when a loved one is lost). Caithe is speaking figuratively, not literally, here.

As always, thanks for playing and for sharing your feedback.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug that occasionally caused the Lotus Harvesting Node unlock item to disappear without unlocking the harvesting node in players’ home instances.
• Text was updated for the World Tournament Series special event for all regions.

If your installation is stuck at 0% or you are receiving a download failed message, we have found this to usually be attributed to your firewall or security applications, which may be blocking your ability to connect to the ArenaNet servers. We recommend disabling your firewall first and seeing if this fixes the issue. To quickly eliminate whether or not background applications might be interfering with the client, you may want to try disabling background processes which is outlined in the KB article below:

https://help.guildwars2.com/entries/27698133-Connectivity

You may also want to check to make sure that you are running the installation as the administrator.

Beyond this, please submit a support ticket to our Technical Support Team so that we may gather some more information from you in order to locate the cause of this issue.

Jaken.6801:

@Bobby: Thanks for popping in.

You’re welcome. I try to stop by when I can. As you can imagine, our schedules are very packed these days, so I’m not able to interact with the community as much as I’d like. But I appreciate the sentiment.

Jaken.6801:

I got a question though. Would it be possible in the future to appeal to some of the bigger critism, if it is reasonable?

There are hundreds of opinions being posted on our forums alone, with thousands of others on different message boards (reddit, gaming sites, etc.). Which ones do you mean?

Jaken.6801:

I feel like we are only able to bash you with not much defense from your side(though we can argue that every critism is usefull).

I made a deal with myself long ago not to get mired in forum debates. If I see something I can comment on, I usually do. Otherwise I merely observe. I’d rather let the release speak for itself, since that’s what we’re ultimately judged on. As long as the criticism is constructive and respectful (and doesn’t attack the people who worked tirelessly on the release) we can always learn from it.

Jaken.6801:

It sometimes feels like we just have to wait and see if there will be change. Not that you have to be overly defensive, since I bet that you have your reasons most of the time (the whole team of course), but simple explanation like time constrains for example would be helpfull to keep us from being sour and would actually allow some insight into the developing process which is always nice.

This is a potentially huge topic, and not one that is suited for the forums. About all I can say about game development is that there are always reasons why things are done a certain way. Time constraints play a role in that, as do available resources, quality control, and scope.

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

Back on topic. It seems that people liked the lore books. How would you like to see them improve or evolve? Examples help.

Thanks.

Hey folks,

Wanted to pop by and give another update on where we stand, as well as to help provide some information on some of the more common misconceptions we’ve seen floating around as well:

- There are bugs! We’ve seen the content direction system (the little arrow) pointing people at super high level maps when it shouldn’t, some systems/features not unlocking as intended for all characters on your account once your first learns them, some systems level gated that aren’t intended to be, balance issues where certain levels appear to be very out of whack, etc. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, our team is working to figure out what happened here and fix these as quickly as possible.

- There is misinformation: Numerous systems that show up in the level up guide that teaches you about things in the game when you gain levels are not locked out, the system simply tells you they exist in the game to help give you a better list of things you can do. Just because it’s included in the level up guide, doesn’t mean it’s actually locked out. You can dodge from level one, jumping puzzle from level one, etc. There also appear to be a lot of folks chiming in who haven’t actually played with any of the system, and are making claims that aren’t remotely true.

- There are some things happening at the wrong levels. Things like utility skills and elites are intended to come at approx. the same time they used to in actual game time, we sped up leveling for levels 1-15 and had them slide back in levels a bit to offset that pacing, they are not currently where we want them to be in the level up system. This was an oversight, and will absolutely be fixed.

- Not all of these changes were made as ways to teach the game, some of them are to provide a better sense of pacing, reward and progression. Early on we want to give a sense that you’re rapidly gaining new abilities, rewards, and learning new things as you level up. We added the level up reward messages, and the actual rewards themselves, and took abilities you’d usually use around that point in total game hours and presented them as unlocks (or things we teach that are already unlocked) to help give a better sense of pacing and progression.

With the addition of the new rewards, messaging, and level up screen to make leveling more exciting: we also wanted to make sure you had that feeling of excitement more often early on in the game, and presented new learning on a more regular cadence. So we greatly sped up leveling from levels 1-15. Many of the things unlocked at later levels are earned at about the same time period you used to start using them in the old system in actual real game time, we just staggered them out across the levels since we sped up leveling to make the game feel more rewarding early on.

- In general, this system is intended to be not only better for new players, but our hope is by the time it’s all in place you’ll find via the better rewards from levels 1-80 via the level up guide, the better rewards from personal story, the faster leveling from 1-15, and the ability to toggle the content direction system to help you with map complete will make this a better for experienced players as well.

- Over a years worth of testing with new players found we were absolutely able to keep them both more engaged, and more likely to return to keep playing Gw2 as a result of the intended system. That is at the end of the day, a win for all of us since all of you need more people to play with! However: if we find in the live environment that isn’t true and we’re not retaining new users better, we’ll absolutely both share that information with you, and continue to iterate to make it better. We keep very real time metrics of player retention for new users, and we’ll know very quickly how effective the work we’ve done is. I want to make it clear: what we used to have absolutely wasn’t good enough for our standards of retaining new users. Before we do some of the other things we want to do with Gw2, we had to fix this, period.

- Finally, I want to add that a few things (hello traits!) are things that can be improved for players who make multiple alts, we’re aware of this, and though company policy prevents us from discussing what’s in development: I can say we know Gw2 can be an even better game for people who love making alts in the long run, more info: when it’s ready™.