Guild Wars 2

those games were scrapped to make gw2, gw2 was scrapped to make super adventure box, sab was scrapped to make gw1.9, which will be scrapped to make gw2.1
hooray progress.. stay tuned for gw3: inviso charr monks vs teleporting sniper quaggans

I dunno about you guys, but I see idle female characters in Lion’s Arch, far more than I see them in the background of an exciting dragon sequence. Strikes me as an odd reason to allocate resources to removing the animations than requiring them to be reinstated in the first place.

let’s take away all instances of where the animation fits, in exchange for removing it where it doesn’t… err…

phoenix.3465:

kolompi.1287:

If men are displayed as strong, muscular and powerful is that not the same kind of sexualization?

Strong, muscular men are a male power fantasy and not a female sexual fantasy. The problem here is that appearantly female characters are allowed to be anything, IF they are also “beautiful”, “feminine” and “sexy”, while male characters are not expected to be anything like that. They can just be powerful, strong, etc.
Already most of the female armor in the game is vastly dfferent from the same male armor in that it fulfills certain male fantasies, but even if I put on other armor, my characters are still animated to fulfill the forementioned requirement for females.
It’s not that everyone is asexual that’s the issue, the issue is if females can be anything but sexual. We are actual persons and don’t exist to serve male fantasies and needs. And so should my character.

So now ugly women don’t stretch?
If female characters can’t stretch because men might like it (and anything that appeals to them is apparently unacceptable), than Charr can’t rawr cos it turns me on.

Djinn.9245:

Neko Dudley.2495:

Sexuality is part of being human, and our human female characters are supposed to be simulated humans. Attempts to de-sexualise them are misogynistic.

What some people seem to be missing is the simple fact that a woman stretching is not a sex act. Its not even suggestive of sex.

“Sexuality” does not mean “behaving in a sexy manner”. Do you think a female police person should be stretching and sticking her boobs out while she’s talking to a perp? That’s the equivalent of what is going on in the game with NPCs and, in my POV, with my adventuring characters. Taking away a sexualized stretch is not misogynistic.

But if people really want those animations back, give me a choice to have non-sexy animations for my warriors and adventurers.

That attitude is misogynistic because you are assuming it is sexualized when it is not. You are obsessing about boobs, so you see it as something that is not there. Taking away a natural gesture dehumanizes the female character. That is as misogynistic as it gets. Women stretch, they have breasts which can’t go away just because they offend people who want to suppress female sexuality. And in regards to your silly straw man, a female cop who is standing around doing nothing should be able to stretch if she feels like it, without fear of punishment.

Stop with the a-priori conclusions that female sexuality is a bad thing or that sex is a bad thing for women. Gender dimorphism is not bad, it is a natural phenomenon. It is the natural state of being, and inescapable. Learn to accept it. Or, rage pointlessly against nature and be angry for the rest of your life.

khani.4786:

I honestly have never seen the difference between the “old” and “new” running animations, but I admittedly don’t like playing human characters despite having two of them. The idle animations would be nice to have back.

Eyes on the two-handed weapons, please. ^.^

animation „new“: front
animation „new“: hammer
animation „new“: greatsword

animation „old“: front
animation „old“: hammer
animation „old“: greatsword

laokoko.7403:

KarlaGrey.5903:

The game most likely felt dead to them based on the changes in numerous channels of interaction (guilds, fl, preferred game mode). However once the game feels subjectively dead to large enough a number of people, it normally means it is also “statistically dead” (in terms of revenue generation), unless said people are able to keep the game in the black through their purchases alone.

A few month ago, some guy was bashing GW2 on mmorpg forum, and I ask him a really simple question. Name me 3 mmorpg that he think is doing better than GW2, and he can’t…

Quite honestly, after playing mmorpg for 10 years. I would say Anet have done a fantastic jobs. Because for a game that is 2 years old, it is doing much better than many other studios.

If you think, many people are complaining about GW2, you probably never visits the forum of other mmorpg. I’m not here to tell you GW2 is the greatest mmorpg in the world. I’m saying there is only a few mmorpg out there, that is still doing good. And GW2 is one of it.

you are comparing it to the worst competitors. Keep in mind GW2 had a 5 year development time on a pre existing franchise which sold in the millions. Cant really compare gw2 to a stary up mmo developed by a small studio in a couple years.

gw2 is doing ok, its running with some big guys, but that really was the lowest expectation of the game. Anything else would be considered a failure.

Vayne.8563:

If the game is doing so badly, why did NcSoft sack a bunch of people from NCsoft west but leave Anet untouched by the layoffs?

Simple – people leave Anet on their own, as attested by several dev goodbye threads in the recent months/weeks.
And before you start with the ‘but they’re hiring’ – they’re hiring for different jobs than those that were vacated.
Anet might actually be quite understaffed in some sections (the pvp and wvw teams come to mind, and the guy over at QA is looking pretty lonesome), while being too high on manpower in others (especially the economy – gemstore – market crew and the LS brigade).

Why does the quarterly report still show a profitable game?

Because consumership and rationality don’t mix very well.

Vayne.8563:

People who don’t enjoy playing this game can’t understand that people out there do enjoy playing this game.

Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean there’s not a decent core of people who do.

I’m not sure why that’s so hard for you to accept.

Exactly.

People who enjoy playing this game can’t understand that people out there don’t enjoy playing this game.

Just because you like it doesn’t mean there’s not a decent core of people who don’t.

I’m not sure why that’s impossible for you to accept.

Lomopop.7028:

Most women don’t stretch the way the female human toons did in this game. The animation used in this game is a totally cheesy boobs thrust out stretch created purely as fan service to tween boys. Since I’m not a tween boy, yeah, it’s immersion breaking. Especially in an LS scene where something serious is happening.

You’ve never seen someone do a chest-thrusting stretch before? :S

Go try it right now. It’s just a natural way of stretching parts of your body.

Honestly, I have to wonder whether you aren’t a bit boob-focused yourself if you’ve noticed it enough to care.

insanemaniac.2456:

Malediktus.9250:

DeWolfe.2174:

This game needs exclusivity like it needs a server cluster made up of 286 IBM’s.

Stop feeling entitled to it. Events are boring if you cant earn exclusive items.

i, and many others, embrace every tear you shed upon learning something has lost its exclusivity

Good for them, and I embrace any complaint about people who feel entitled to having access to everything in an MMO. Maybe they should play single player games instead.

Remember happy people rarely visit the forums. So it likely the people who are happy with exclusive items is much larger than the few who keep crying for inclusiveness here.

Rangelost.4857:

People pay $40 for a console game, then consider it descent if they get 40 hours of gameplay out of it.

People pay $40 for Guild Wars 2, and after spending thousands of hours in the game, they complain about lack of content.

I don’t even.

Yes, more content would be nice. Yes, not removing content would be nice. Yes, other MMOs love to recolor older content, change some numbers and pretend it’s new content. No, Guild Wars 2 doesn’t need any of that.

Players ask for a new continent, players get a new continent, players complain about having to explore a new continent. Let’s take this moderately, shall we?

Oh geeze….

I’d gladly pay $60 for more content out of GW2. What people complain about is having to “experience” the same old content over and over and over and over again. People asking for an expansion do so because they want the game to grow (races, weapons, new content, new maps, etc) and are more than happy to pay for it.

Take it moderately? No. I don’t know about you but I’ve enjoyed this game enough to know I want a LOT more content.

Vayne.8563:

dace.8019:

There’s plenty of conflicting indicators but none of them are wholly reliable. Overlays like those mentioned in the OP are worth factoring into a wider estimation but on their own they are one of the worst examples of popularity or population, or any other state of the game you’re trying to estimate.

Why? The popularity of those overlays per game is the data supplied and trying to crowbar that into a rough estimate of population trends in those games is a fallacy.

In terms of surveyed customer revenues, GW2 scores highly in those particular league tables (when compared to F2P games such as Planetside 2, DOTA 2, etc., in which GW2 brings in about as much as those) which indicates a healthy state of game and is more representative of the games population than any data supplied by overlay popularity per game.

Edit: An example http://www.superdataresearch.com/blog/mmo-arpu/

It’s, as I’ve said many times, useful for detecting trends…and relative strengths. Nothing more. It’s unlikely a game is going to be massively popular on those three programs I listed (as well as google trends and reddit) and not be a popular/successful program.

The link you gave backs up what I’ve said.

The difference is these sites track progress monthly and over time you can actually see less popular games fall of those charts. In other words, but observations of those sites seem to be an indicator of trends over the long term.

actually based on most of your info, its most likely FFXIV is doing a lot better than it seems.
FFXIV includes ps3, which is not likely to hit many of the things you are tracking. They also have a large japanese population, who likely dont use, or use different programs.
Neither JP nor PS3 users are likely to be as active in reddit as well. Just to be clear for ffxiv, JP and ps3 users are part of the same service and can interact with each other, and get the same content at the same time.

anyhow gw2 isnt dead, but it is not flourishing, and it is not living up to the potential of its game sales numbers. Retention is not high. FFXIV is competing with it, and i think their game sales are like 1/3rd of what gw2 has. Archage has no box sales, but the retention at this early stage is competing, i think their high number during opening week was 2 million accounts? (which is generally less actual people in F2p games)

point is not that gw2 is murdered, its that it isnt growing, its slowly declining, which is actually not normal for successful mmos at this stage of development.
FFXIV is expanding its audience, WoW expanded their audience at this time, and gained about 600k users in preparation for the next expansion.

Is gw2 on the chopping block? hardly. Is gw2 thriving? nope

Vayne.8563:

KarlaGrey.5903:

Vayne.8563:

kins.3294:

Do people still use those BS things?

Obviously some people do. There are over 7 million people registered with Overwolf.

Registered =/= active, or using it on a relatively regular basis.

Vayne.8563:

KarlaGrey.5903:

^Inorite.
I guess both vayne and his employer (winkwink) must be testing new grounds over at the comedy show scene.

Also, the whole business plan of GW2 he mentioned must indeed be quite a success overall, especially in its most recent manifestation which, having united the typically divided communty and allow it to act in unison against a largely unethical business decision, hands down successfully achieved something that no one else could even dream of so far.

In that sense it is indeed a pretty good company, a splendid one even, so I’m giving it a sound thumbs-up and a strong kiu!

Totally off topic of course, but since you lost the argument, you might as well try to obfuscate.

Oh right, those Google metrics you provided absolutely shattered my ‘doom and gloom’, kinda like Anet’s sound business decisions so far strongly improved retention and boosted them new-player figures, rite.

Nice comedy-fantasy thread, nevertheless!

But reasonable people who don’t have an agenda will see it for what it is. No one is trying to convince you of anything. Anyone can see from your post history (as they can see from mine) exactly what you’re about.

Easy enough to make up their own minds. A reasonable person will see the mass amount of evidence, circumstantial though it is, as opposed to the non-evidence provided by people who want the game to fail because they don’t like it.

Let me know when layoffs start then we’ll talk. Until then, you really have nothing to support your arguments.

Vayne, You saying “people wanting the game because they don’t like it is” is pretty anecdotal in itself. How do you know how posters feel? It’s conjecture on your part at best.

Frankly, I am more apt to believe that most people that feel the game is empty or unpopular are greatly displeased by that. I know, that is conjecture on my part.

To your point on people making up their own minds: I think their experience will dictate that more than your highly skewed calculation method.

Vayne.8563:

Fernling.1729:

The google trends does show that ff14 is searched more often than gw2. Over the last year, gw2 hasn’t surpassed ff14 a single time. We are also forgetting about runescape, which is trending much higher than gw2. We will have to see how archeage will hold up, since release it’s been higher, which is to be expected. I have a feeling it will hold up though. Gw2 one month after launch had a 38 and archeage one month after has a 37.

From those mmorpgs and WoW, that puts gw2 at #4, with a potential #5 depending on what happens with archeage.
I’m pretty sure I’ve said this exact same thing before. Lol

Well even if it’s #4 (keeping mind no one is near WoW at all), what’s the difference. Archeage won’t affect Guild Wars 2 numbers long term, of that I’m sure. It’s a completely different type of game. The kind of players attracted to this game, many of them anyway, would never even look at Archeage.

However, #4 or 5 is still a long long way off from being dead, or doing badly…and it’s #4 by a tiny tiny margin, not a great big huge one. It’s a very very small discrepancy any way you look at it.

Even in the other forms of polls, Guild Wars 2 isn’t far off Final Fantasy. It’s just a statement that the game is doing far better than people are giving it credit for. That’s the point.

Relatively speaking, it’s healthy…or no MMORPG is healthy except WoW. Those are really the options.

Either the entire industry is dead (and with no layoffs and profits every quarter I don’t see how this game is dead), or it’s not.

Guild Wars 2 is successful within the space of the industry…unless WoW is the only successful MMO. And I don’t think most people believe that.

That is because ArchAge is actually even worse than GW2, it’s really sad that GW2 is successful because it is the least junky mmo at the moment lol

I’m more likely to believe what I see rather than what one of these sites say. If I log in and see flooded (or empty maps) of players that so called “anecdotal evidence” would speak volumes more to me.

‘We decided that a map is something which is too confusing for new players to read, so we decided to replace it with a blank page instead.’

I was honestly thinking of enlisting the help of other frequent forum members to put together a large, updating road map based on player input, but then I remembered that I’m lazy.

One more post demonstrating how the Gem Conversion debacle has been handled poorly.

From our own Gaile Gray:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Here’s an update for you:

It’s clear that quite a lot of you would like to have greater flexibility in using the Currency Exchange. Our intention when we designed the new interface was to streamline large volume purchases, which make up the majority of transactions.

In light of your feedback, we will update the Currency Exchange so that you can decide how you want to use it. We will keep the new streamlined system and also offer a new “Custom” button on the panel that you can use to exchange any increment of gems or gold.

We anticipate rolling this out soon. Stay tuned!

~~~~~

Sorry for the delay in posting this, but out of respect to our international community, we wanted to be able to post in several forums at once.

As far as communication and transparency goes, this post is too little too late. Though I, along with the entire playerbase, am grateful that changes are coming, here’s the problem.

1. No apology at all. This was a colossal mistake that should never have made it to the live build. An apology is due.
2. We finally get a rationale for the change after over 24 hours worth of well-founded opposition, and that rationale is at apparent odds with the practical experience of the players.
3. This, and two other posts, are worded as if the Devs have condescended to acquiesce to the playerbase on this, as if they are the ones taking the higher road.

And here’s the kicker: it took less than a few hours for players to suggest adding the “custom amount” button. It took less than a day for the Devs to decide it was doable.

SO WHY, BY THE SIX GODS, DID THE DEVS NOT THINK OF THIS ON THEIR OWN?

Madness? This is not madness. This is ANet.

Now I have to admit that I am on edge with this game for the last three months.
I was very open to defend this game before, but with the recent shown direction the game is taking and the lack of communication (it got a bit better, but is not on a calming level) I have just can`t relax.
There is no release the past few months that did not have a major problem in it.

There are bugs, weird design decisions (with lacking explanation, aside from metrics often), story and lore holes you can drive a truck through (Prometheus is nothing against it), etc.

It really drags down my hope and enthusiasm for the game.

All the hype the PR tries to bring and even the developers themselves have turned into the complete opposite.

Excitement has turned into the fear on what will go wrong.

Good things dwindle in the face of the bad. Yes there are a lot of good stuff, but then I think it is too little too late

Quality Assessment is lacking. I do not know why?
Do they not have the time for it?
People were asking them to slow down for better quality, but that doesn`t seem to happen.

Someone pointed me to some Glassdoor reviews (I know, I should take them with a grain of salt, but there are appeaerenlty some reviews from active devs), which say that the QA team is outsourced.
Which means it is in the hands of people not associated directly and not part of ANet.

If this is true, then it would explain some things, though I am not knowing enough of the buisnes to rate it.

Maybe these outsourcing companies are better, because they have an outside look on the matter, I do not know.

However, please note that I am (and I believe others as well) are very concerned about the priorities the company as well as the game is heading.

There is something called style over substance and I believe we are heading that way.
A lot of flash and glamour, but not the heart.

Or as one of my friends likes to say…“Check out them pixels.”

GW2 really really needs two things:

1. A Public Test Environment where these kinds of changes (along with balance, etc.) can get vetted by the public. That the devs think they predict every single ramification of a change, and that their ideas will actually accomplish their goal smacks of a hubris of epic proportions.
2. A clear and consistent design philosophy for each significant area of the game. ANet needs a benchmark whereby all changes and additions/subtractions are measured. A good design philosophy would allow ANet to justify the decisions they make, and give the playerbase the “roadmap” ANet keeps clamoring about.

I miss Reaper’s Rumble

A 1 second stun bonus should be added to every outfit that shows cleavage. Just for realism…

Instances are better than persistant world. Why is persistant world bad? Here is a list:

1) Success at a given task is driven by number of bodies. Content is either mind numbingly easy and thus boring with a zerg or simply impossible by yourself (depending on the event). Zerging is always incentivized for worthwhile content. The closest thing to an exception is dry top, but even that has too much zerging (skritt queen etc).

2) No coordination or teamwork required for all content except Tequatl and Triple Threat. Your build doesn’t matter unless you are by yourself, and even then most persistant world mobs are fodder. No reason to team up unless you want loot faster.

3) The “Challenging” (and not the good kind here) events like Tequatl and Triple Threat require migraine inducing effort on the part of the organizers and minimal effort on the part of the masses (“zerg”). A member of the zerg need only perform a handful of simple tasks: stand near Teq’s feet. Jump over shockwaves. Dodge stuff. Deal damage. How often does a member of the zerg need to pay attention to his teammates? Almost never. Maybe a warbanner. Maybe. If you replaced the zerg with NPCs I wouldn’t even notice. In a GW1 style instance, party members must be able to perform their role or the team fails. Team awareness and coordination are far more important. Tequatl would be much more enjoyable if it were scaled down and instanced for, lets say 10-15.

4) Playing on an arbitrary schedule is unnecessary and bad. Events on timers? No thanks. How about starting content the moment your team is ready? Gee, I wish we could do Guild Missions, but we don’t have 20 people. Would any of the guild puzzles really fundamentally change for a team of 8 if you scaled them down? Then why require 20? Same question for all other content.

I suppose the existing persistant world content could theoretically stay, for when people want something boring and monotonous to do, but for the rest of us, I beg of you, take a page out of the GW1 manual and release more instances. New living story content? Instanced for a party of 5. All of it. New maps? Instances, tower of nightmares style, but for a party of 5. Maybe 10 if you feel spunky. Maybe add hard mode of existing maps where all waypoints start out contested, and all events are scaled for a party of 5, and the map is…you guessed it…instanced. Give me a single reason to play 80% of the existing content why don’t you?

TLDR: GW1 had more content. Better content. No zerging. At any given moment a player had a long list of instances (100% of the content) that were challenging, compelling, and required teamwork (even if your team was AI characters, I coordinated more with Olias than random Zergling #27). I replay exactly none of the persistant world content in GW2, and I am not alone either.

This makes no sense to me, it worked fine before. I won’t enjoy for ever not being able to get the exact amount I need/fill in the rest. I can understand for plastic retail cards, but for pure digital?

Edit: The new Gem/Gold Exchange only have set options for 400,800,1200, etc

Edit 2: I can see the advantages of this new system as well, it’s faster if you don’t care or it happens to line up nice. Although I see no reason why we can’t have both.