Guild Wars 2

Give it a few weeks. Amaimon. Remember when ANet first added white wings or black wings or, well, any sort of wings? The cities were clouded for asura, with the high density of feathers obscuring the view from 3’ and change (or 1m+ for those no longer living in the 19th century).

Then, a few weeks after, the novelty wore off and people were back to hiding backpacks.

Even huge fans of SAB will tired of Super gliders. They won’t be absent, but I suspect they will be tolerable, even for those of us who don’t enjoy the sound of a cat regurgitating a hairball.

I don’t mind Save Yourselves.

I can’t remember the last time Retreat! was used to actually “retreat,” though.
If we name it for what it’s actually used for, it’d be “Swiftness that doesn’t require a lootstick!” but that’s a long thing to shout.

I’m glad you two understand what the OP is saying. I’ve read it twice and I still don’t know what the point is.

1. People regularly complain that Anet staff never talk to them.
2. Anet staff leave posts asking people to be cool to each other.
3. People respond by giving Anet staff plenty of reasons to not talk to them, because, reasons
4. gg

kitten Chaba. You have fiendishly combined reasonable advice in a post that is sarcastic. What am I going to do with myself now?

-logs in, completes dailies like a boss-

Half the problem here is we have those threads that Gaile mentioned on a weekly basis, and players really need to stop with them. The my server is dying, why is my server locked, when are we getting unlocked, we need new tournament, why does our one server have to face 6 servers!, delete this map for this other map, look who ran away, look who tanked, look who bought out guilds.

All it would take is some research and frankly some common sense for these people to figure out stuff, instead of coming in here every week asking the same ridiculous thing over and over and get the same answers over and over, to the point where it turned into a running joke.

Now to the other part of Anet’s communications, they feel they are doing enough on that end, there’s nothing we can do to change that. I will point out something though, a year ago we got two devs in here who posted on quite a lot of issues, and it promoted quite a lot of positive discussions. One of them got shipped off to living story without a word, the other has cut back on posts in the last few months. A lot of us feel like things have just gone back to the way it was before the expansion.

The forums are here for us to discuss problems with the game, hopefully in a productive manner. Positive communication can only be maintained by having both sides involved, you cannot expect players to come in here to pure their hearts out on issues, hear nothing back and expect them to stay positive about the entire situation when they see their game mode continue to die in front of them for 4 years.

Finally, yes WvW is dying, when you take 24 servers and fold them into 12 to get the same population you had a year before, that’s dying. Deny that and hide your head in the sand if you want, but that’s not going to help fix anything, just lose more players.

Gaile is asking players to follow posting rules, to be more civil, use some maturity and to use constructive posting habits… no more.

Y’all can discuss a range of issues, that I’m sure the devs want to solve as well, but the toxicity in this section needs to stop. Nobody here will gain any favor, or speed up development, by being jerks to each other or the devs.

Edit- And stop giving Gaile a hard time, she doesn’t deserve it.

The OP point is……how people talk to each other and often, we all should know that many times it degrade to personal attacks or scurrilous attempts. Some comments that seems innocent at the beginning can easily become hostile the next moment base on how they choose to view it or the way to reply.

To start with, everyone has alter ego and often the common kind of personality shown over the net but some are just a bit too over. Honestly speaking, I encounter this kind of thing way more often in gw2 which supposedly a casual mmorpg than compared to hardcore pvp mmorpgs where we drop items or golds on death.

Hevoskuuri.3891:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Aury.1367:

Maybe thats because people feel like anet has canceled the whole WvW-support. I saw I got aggressive and salty the last months. No reason to act like this in PvE. But WvW is just depressing.

I am sorry if players feel that way. I see it in posts, sure. But I believe we’ve made it clear that the game mode has not been abandoned. That was confirmed quite recently when a dev made some comments about upcoming changes. Unfortunately, the thread devolved into dev bashing, and the OP asked that we remove it.

I feel that while things may not be perfect, they are not as dire as some forum members paint them. Continuously dwelling on the negative isn’t necessary or productive and it doesn’t represent the true nature of the game mode.

Thank you Gaile for this wonderful post.

All this ranting about the state of WvW on the forums is complete nonsense. The game mode is most definitely not dead, it’s been running stable for the entire time GW2 has been alive. Many players have quit the game, sure, and that shows, but the population is still generally huge, which means people are having fun with the gamemode.

Mechanics-wise, nothing has really changed. WvW today is not any worse than WvW 4 years ago, quite the opposite. All the improvements have made it only better. The mode hasn’t changed for the worse, but the community has. Everyone is so salty these days. I never hear or see complaints in-game or anywhere else, just here on the forums. My guess is, the people who rant here don’t actually even bother to play the gamemode, they just like to be loud and demand more things.

Sure, with GW2’s old engine and balancing difficulties, WvW is not perfect, and will always need polishing. But take a second and think about this: despite the lag, balancing issues, poor rewards and salty complainers, literally hundreds and hundreds of players still log in every single day and form queues in WvW on almost every server. Dozens of WvW guilds raid every single night. The gamemode is far from dead and abandoned, and people are loving it. Personally, I’ve never had more fun as I am having now.

Post like these trigger me so hard in wanting to correct you, but whatever.

GrahamW.5397:

DeceiverX.8361:

It really just boils down to the fact that the game mode’s PvP is less fun than the forum PvP these days.

The WvW team isn’t really at fault here – at least for the past year. They’ve done a fair amount to at least try to help things move along better with what’s within their authority.

What doesn’t help is that we know there is deliberate negligence coming to the format from upper management. We as a community know that previous WvW devs were pulled from their development tasks here to go help improve the flow of other content areas, notably PvE.

It doesn’t help that there’s the blatant and obvious disconnect between the management that controls these decisions and the community itself – MO’s infamous “WvW players enjoy PvE” quote.

It doesn’t help that the entire contents of a featured expansion only did damage and nothing more to the format out of this disconnect, and how testers were not from the WvW community.

It doesn’t help that the gameplay is anti-fun in the PvP scene, both in WvW and sPvP, because of the elite specs’ design failing to reach standards of players involved in competitive play in favor of “fun” for PvE with a lack of design towards PvP environments. The fact that pro league and ESL players in the PvP forums make non-insulting feedback threads condemning the state of the game to try and get ANet to realize what they’ve done, and then for us to watch those posts get deleted and their accounts banned for defacing and insulting the company says a tremendous amount about what actually gets communicated. These posts still exist on Google’s archives. People still reference these things because of how kitten ing they are.

It doesn’t help that historically more damage has been done to this format every patch than good.

There comes a point in time where people who enjoy this community and what the game had to offer no longer find the game worth their time. And yet they’re still very passionate about either the matchup or the format or whatever it is. So in their frustrated boredom they’d rather be part of the community and talk a little smack than sit wasting hours in a game that is simply not fun to play.

Because frankly, that’s what it comes down to. The game is just no longer fun. It’s rampant with a compounding set of poor design and implementation decisions. The disconnect is real and quite obvious. WvW isn’t being taken seriously game-wide, and I think that’s one of the biggest problems. People have played uneven matchups for years. Things didn’t really start going south until after HoT. We’ve consolidated servers and there are still less people active per matchup than before. Most of it has nothing to do with matchmaking and population.

Most people, myself included, have just given up hope entirely. There’s more joy in cat-posting here and just not caring than there is in playing the game itself. That’s a problem. And one which has been totally ignored.

The game is still plenty fun, but lack of communication and slow, inconsistent and sometimes seemingly abandoned/non existent updates make it stagnate and will drive people away. Whenever we ask about it the threads just end up locked and we never get any real answers. Ofc people are going to dissipate in an environment like that.

A lot of the recent mass-quitting has little to do with communication and more to do with the game just not being fun.

If ANet never spoke nor interacted with us but landed every patch flawlelessly in terms of improving WvW and/or the PvP experience, I don’t think people would be complaining much because there wouldn’t be much to complain about The no-communication policy wouldn’t be a big deal because obviously the players’ interests were making it to the game, anyways.

The lack of communication is nothing new, and nobody should be expecting that to improve, or base their decision on leaving or staying because of it.

It may reduce morale and may make people feel more of a reason to stop bothering, but at the end of the day, what makes people leave is the game just no longer being fun for them.

And what makes them not come back (as many haven’t done) is the game just not being fun in general even after taking time off.

In Baruch Bay we call this Salseo, like Drama but better.

WvW comunnity should learn to not hit the hand that feeds them.

A Dev makes a post about the Flute in WvW, the people become salty and start talking about the condition damage and dead game, the Dev stop asking…

Is a Dev a human being? I mean, with feelings and all that…

If i was one of them, i will not write in the forum either…

But do whatever you want.

Sarika.3756:

The sad part is that there is a specific set of forum posters who are most likely to derail a thread from something constructive into match-up. They often add jabs at whichever server they don’t particularly like, and that stirs the pot. Maybe it’s not just the threads that need a time out, but some of the posters most likely to derail things down the match-up rabbit hole?

Admittedly I’m one of those trolls. Although my post tend to post facts with side jabs. Frankly I’m tired of seeing the same threads about certain servers show up here, or the weekly thread on tournaments which every single time ends up with like 20 replies of why not. The ones who need a break are the ones posting exactly what Gaile came here to post about, we see it every week, enough already.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Namer.9750:

I believe that a lot of these threads and posts are an outburst against what the majority see as an utter neglect of the game mode. Whether this statement is objectively true or not doesn’t matter, perceptions do.

I understand. I do appreciate that while we know we’re working on things, and know what we’re working on, the players do not. Our policy is not to give a future-looking accounting of works in progress but to analzye, gather input from players (through a variety of means including frequent reading of the forums), develop, and release.

Most players have been around long enough, or know the company well enough, to understand how we work, but it’s undoubtedly true that the desire for more info can drive people to posting unwisely. Nobody likes to have their post removed, and we all benefit from a better forum climate. So I’m hoping a few comments in aid of “prudent posting practices” will not go amiss.

Here lies the biggest problem that anet keeps skirting around the issue of developer participation, anet always states the excuse of talking about future content, when there are many issues and topics that players would appreciate a word on. Stuff like bugs, balance, or even mechanics. Tyler Bearse seemed to be on track with that in his limited time with us, even got the long standing issue of building siege in citadel area fixed. Spvp forums seems to have more of that than the wvw section.

Future content news is not the only developer input we ask for. I can understand not talking about future content, but not saying little to nothing at all for long periods of time on everything.

If we as a community want more interaction, we need to do our part. That means treating devs who post here with respect, not jumping all over them. I know that we’re starved for communication – I am too. I know how easy it is to unload on someone with a red tag because they showed up and we’re just wanting to be heard.

We’re capable of communication that isn’t rude or insulting – those styles are choices people make. And we’ve seen that style of communication not work… and ruin it for the whole forum.

We get to own our behavior as a community. Let’s do so, and change it.

Because a beloved game mode is at stake. It’s worth it.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Vermillion.4061:

Most of the players in WvW are just upset that nothing has really happened in months and we feel like we’ve been ignored.

We just want to see what is actually going on behind the scenes with WvW, maybe given some DevBlog update style stuff since you’ve been mostly silent on what is changing and being worked on.

Different companies communicate in different ways and sometimes the process evolves over the years. Mike O’Brien explained how we choose to communicate in this forum post a few years ago. What he said was, “We’ve set a clear policy in the past year: we don’t talk speculatively about future development. We don’t want to string you along. Creating fun is an uncertain business: sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t; sometimes we go back to the drawing board over and over before we get something right. If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers. So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.”

I understand that some players would prefer a different manner of communication. I wanted to share the comments above to show that silence does not point to inaction or neglect or indifference.

I think people understand what decision was made about not talking about future software development until you have already worked on it. The problem is this is counter-intuitive to software design and industry standards.

I am the head of IT at my company and I could most definitely not ignore serious feedback about our services or product and then go radio silent until we were halfway done. This is a serious issue especially since the direction of development over the years has geared towards continuous integration, constant innovation and being proactive about communication with the product owners and/or client and getting constant feedback so that problems can be corrected early and often. Everything about the choice here is counter intuitive to actually addressing the problem. Precisely because you do not engage in enough back and forth feedback and make small iterative changes where you can quickly gain feedback and adjust what you’ve done to match the needs of the customer, you go long periods of time building what you guys think is the issue, then deploy it and half of it works and half of it does not. Then we get some minor input and then you go radio silent for another 6 months. Seems to just be an incredibly broken process and one IMO that should be re-evaluated.

The sad part is that there is a specific set of forum posters who are most likely to derail a thread from something constructive into match-up. They often add jabs at whichever server they don’t particularly like, and that stirs the pot. Maybe it’s not just the threads that need a time out, but some of the posters most likely to derail things down the match-up rabbit hole?

I believe that a lot of these threads and posts are an outburst against what the majority see as an utter neglect of the game mode. Whether this statement is objectively true or not doesn’t matter, perceptions do.

If there was more developer/moderator activity in here, where they actually participated in threads or discussions, even a few posts a week, then there would be a constant ‘presence’ of ANet on these subforums, which would lead to both better overall behaviour and overall discussion and contribution. As it is, the analogy that can be used is a teenaged kid being neglected by their parents and only having other faceless adults slap them back into line whenever they act out of turn (i.e. the moderators who delete every thread that may turn into a Matchup Thread, sometimes a little too heavy-handedly).

This isn’t any sort of jab at the moderation, simply an observation from someone who finds these forums useless in terms of actual communication and only gets on to make snarky comments. The lack of overall communication here, while understandable considering workloads and developer times, is leading to this particular subforum becoming irrelevant when it comes to fulfilling it’s actual purpose.

That was a bit of a write, but if you read this far, Thanks.

Redfeather.6401:

Just so people know…

My second post was because for the past few years I have taken breaks, and during the breaks come back to the forums and made suggestions. The responses were always 1. GW2 does it already, 2. GW2 doesn’t need it. 3. GW2 would need to be completely overhaualed to change. Always the same outcome to my topics, but I honestly forget that over time and need to be reminded.

So in one response to my topic I was quickly reminded that the game just isn’t going to change, and I am looking for change. It’s all good everyone. good luck and have fun!

It’s perfectly human to like what we like; we all have our preferences and we needn’t justify them. There’s only an issue when we try to impose our preferences on the rest of the game’s community, forgetting that we don’t necessarily share our preferences with others.

It seems to me, from reading your initial post and especially your response here, that you just really want to see features/mechanics from other games. You don’t seem to be worried at all about the consequences of doing so, which is what other people are pointing out.

If I could select which finishers were in my random finisher list, I would use the option.

If I could select which finishers were in my random finisher list, I would buy more finishers

Yes, I’d prefer to be able to select the finishers that are part of the random rotation. (As it stands now, I never use the feature.)

It would be nice if we could get a way to limit which finishers came up with the random option checked. I seem to be on a streak of Whump the giant or the Halloween finishers even though I have most unlocked.

Advice noted. =)

~ Kovu

Do you enjoy getting into WvW to do dailies and are finding them harder to accomplish because no one else on your team is doing anything?

Do you find your favored WvW activity getting more difficult to do because your server has very few other people roaming and the only tag around is on a queued map?

Do you log in to WvW and find a lot more people standing around idle inside EBG keep waiting for another server to attack than actually playing WvW?

If the answer to any of those questions is yes, you and your servermates could be suffering from a “ded gaem” malaise where the casual players outnumber your server’s smaller number of leadership-providing guilds after years of over-stacking through “login blackouts”.

Consider these steps towards revitalizing your WvW experience:

- Transfer to a lower tier server where there is a larger variety of guilds. Many guilds run a lot smaller than in the past and enjoy the lower tiers more where blob frequency is not as high. They are always recruiting.

- Transfer to a lower tier server where there are more people out roaming around. Again, since blob frequency is lower, roamers find more roaming fights.

- Transfer to a lower tier server where players aren’t standing around waiting for someone else to do something. Guild rallies are the lifeblood of WvW. Unorganized militia do not usually take risks.

Vayne.8563:

Fiddlestyx.9714:

Just because it doesn’t say “kill 10 rats”, hearts still have you killing 10 rats. It’s just disguised.

Not quite true. Events scale. It’s not a fixed number of rats. Obviously there are going to be killing quests in ANY MMO. Not having a fixed number is the difference.

In most MMOs if you kill ten rats, there are still 40 rats still here. In Guild Wars 2, you drive off the enemy. It makes a huge difference…to me anyway.

I think this is the idea. Events aren’t supposed to totally revolutionise PvE gameplay, just to avoid some of the weirder elements of MMOs – when you kill a boss it’s dead, it doesn’t immediately respawn for the next person to kill (and the next person will have been fighting alongside you, not waiting in a queue for their turn). When you’re told to save 10 people it’s because there are 10 in total, not because 10 is enough and the rest can sort themselves out. If you’re told centaurs are attacking a town they are literally attacking it and killing all the people right now – not standing nearby waiting for you to come and find them.

The system the OP wants is there, just in a limited way. There are numerous locations around the game world which might be full of enemies (even a boss) or might be a friendly outpost with unique items you can buy, merchants and repair stations and other facilities.

But they’re trying to balance it with keeping the game functional and accessible to new and casual players. You’re never going to see Queensdale completely taken over and destroyed and players fighting to take it back and rebuild, because then a new player who starts while that’s happening will be dropped straight into a very dangerous map with essential NPCs and locations locked behind complicated event chains – something that might be totally unknown to them. It’s highly likely to be overwhelming and put them off playing.

But they can and will do that on high level maps. All of the HoT maps for example have big meta-event chains which totally change the status of the map. It’s actually impossible to do map completion until the meta event chain has been successfully completed because key areas are under enemy control and impossible to enter.

The other problem is most changes can’t be permanent. You can save a town and help the NPCs build it up, but sooner or later it is going to be destroyed again, because otherwise no one else would get to play that map. This is frustrating for individual players but overall I think it’s better than the alternative. Really big changes will have to be kept to single-player games.

Give you something to do when you have to faces BG in wvw. They need to let you do guild wvw mission in eotm.