Guild Wars 2

Vayne.8563:

BlueZone.4236:

Ashen.2907:

Last year the store I manage saw overall sales increases of more than 3%. EBITDA increases were in the +8% range. I restructured and reorganized aspects of the business not because it was bad but because there is always room for improvement. EBITDA is now up 5% over last year’s already great numbers.

Good for you. Well, Anet made these changes because they were common complaints. Complaints happened because they were bad.
(In before white knights counters with ’whiners whine about everything")

Vayne.8563:

I wasn’t talking about cohesion, I was talking about uneven quality. I didn’t really have a problem with the cohesion I had a problem with some events being less fun for me than others.

The beauty of that was, in most games if you didn’t like a big patch, you have to wait months for the next one. Waiting two weeks is a lot easier.

Good for you.
They’re making changes to living world because there were plenty of bad things about it.

Vayne.8563:

You didn’t say anything to the guy who said that the living story was bad (as an empirical statement). You did say something about me responding to him. I don’t know how else to take that but as a double standard.

Anet proved it with your logic.

Nope, improving something isn’t the same thing as saying it was bad to begin with. I’ve seen many foods that were new and improved, but they were fine before they were new and improved.

When I edit something professionally, I’m usually (hopefully) improving it. It could have been awesome and there’s still room for improvement.

Calling something bad just because there’s room for improvement would mean that everything is bad. Because there’s always room for improvement.

Anet made changes to something that wasn’t as good at first (to me), got better (to me), and now they’ve made it even better (to me).

I actually loved the Nightmare Tower, the Marionette Fight and the Escape from LA. To me it was good stuff. There was room for improvement even within those things I loved. But they were by no means bad (to me).

Yep, restructuring your team to address obvious complaints is because that’s what was bad about them. Because their old structure was bad, which reflected onto their content.
Just because you didn’t see the problem doesn’t mean other people didn’t see them. No need to put them on a pedestal.

Ashen.2907:

Last year the store I manage saw overall sales increases of more than 3%. EBITDA increases were in the +8% range. I restructured and reorganized aspects of the business not because it was bad but because there is always room for improvement. EBITDA is now up 5% over last year’s already great numbers.

Good for you. Well, Anet made these changes because they were common complaints. Complaints happened because they were bad.
(In before white knights counters with ’whiners whine about everything")

Vayne.8563:

I wasn’t talking about cohesion, I was talking about uneven quality. I didn’t really have a problem with the cohesion I had a problem with some events being less fun for me than others.

The beauty of that was, in most games if you didn’t like a big patch, you have to wait months for the next one. Waiting two weeks is a lot easier.

Good for you.
They’re making changes to living world because there were plenty of bad things about it.

Vayne.8563:

You didn’t say anything to the guy who said that the living story was bad (as an empirical statement). You did say something about me responding to him. I don’t know how else to take that but as a double standard.

Anet proved it with your logic.

Vayne.8563:

BlueZone.4236:

Vayne.8563:

darkace.8925:

Vayne.8563:

See the Living World wasn’t bad. It wasn’t bad on paper. It wasn’t bad in it’s execution though it was uneven. Toward the end of the first season the Living World picked up some converts that hated it in the beginning. The Marionette fight was very popular. Escape from Lion’s Arch was very popular too. So calling it bad, just because you say so is problematical.

You’re very conveniently ignoring the bug-ridden fiasco that was the Season 1 finale.

Edit: And again, I’ve got to point out your double standard. You closed your paragraph with “so calling it bad, just because you say so is problematical”. You opened that very paragraph with “see the Living World wasn’t bad”. Since what’s good for the goose is also good for the gander, I’m going to say to you “calling it good, just because you say so is problematical.”

How many times do we have to dance this dance. I’m RESPONDING to a statement. I’ve never come into a thread and said, the living word is awesome or good or great. I respond to people who empirically state it’s bad. I’m RESPONDING.

Why aren’t you picking on the person who made the wrong statement in the first place? Oh right, because you agree with him.

As a respondant, I always fight fire with fire intentionally. There’s no good or bad, it’s all just opinion. My opinion is stated in a way to head of his opinion.

Edit: And I didn’t ignore the finale. That’s why I said the quality was uneven. I didn’t say it was all great. I pointed to things that many people thought were great. The finale wasn’t as dismal a failure as some make it out to be. I also didn’t bring out the Nightmare Tower which a lot of people liked.

But I did say the Living Story season was was uneven in quality in many places. So far, however, the Living Story Season 2 has surpassed Season 1 in many ways FOR ME.

Nothing wrong with what I said.

You even say “The logic is, if the numbers aren’t supporting what they were doing they’d change it.”
Here’s a change because the numbers didn’t support it. If it was a good thing, they wouldn’t need to change it.

In any case, I don’t bother with arguing semantics anymore.

This isn’t a semantic argument. The argument you’re giving that they changed something has nothing to do with the quality of the living story in an meaningful way. It has to do with it’s temporary nature. Now if the living story stuff sucked so badly why would people want it in the game permanently. The answer is they wouldn’t.

And this thread is about Season 2 anyway, which is permanent. You’re the one playing semantics so let me rephrase.

If the player base weren’t playing the living story in Season 1 in numbers large enough to justify them investing the manpower and expense to create seaseon 2, Anet would have scrapped season 2 and went with a more traditional approach.

Looky, looky here. Who’s nitpicking on how to determine “the quality of the living story in an meaningful way”?
The temporary nature is (was) part of the “living” world. Trying to discount it is silly.

Anyway, it was bad enough to restructure their development process.

Angel McCoy.1832:

We’ve made a lot of changes for Season 2. We’re continually improving our processes with each new release. The most notable being that we no longer have 4 Living World teams, each making their own content; we have 1. This has allowed us to create much more cohesive releases, and I think you’ll find that our story hangs together quite well in Season 2.

By the way, I consider “cohesion” being related to quality, and that’s just part of what was bad (“bad”, haha).

Vayne.8563:

darkace.8925:

Vayne.8563:

See the Living World wasn’t bad. It wasn’t bad on paper. It wasn’t bad in it’s execution though it was uneven. Toward the end of the first season the Living World picked up some converts that hated it in the beginning. The Marionette fight was very popular. Escape from Lion’s Arch was very popular too. So calling it bad, just because you say so is problematical.

You’re very conveniently ignoring the bug-ridden fiasco that was the Season 1 finale.

Edit: And again, I’ve got to point out your double standard. You closed your paragraph with “so calling it bad, just because you say so is problematical”. You opened that very paragraph with “see the Living World wasn’t bad”. Since what’s good for the goose is also good for the gander, I’m going to say to you “calling it good, just because you say so is problematical.”

How many times do we have to dance this dance. I’m RESPONDING to a statement. I’ve never come into a thread and said, the living word is awesome or good or great. I respond to people who empirically state it’s bad. I’m RESPONDING.

Why aren’t you picking on the person who made the wrong statement in the first place? Oh right, because you agree with him.

As a respondant, I always fight fire with fire intentionally. There’s no good or bad, it’s all just opinion. My opinion is stated in a way to head of his opinion.

Edit: And I didn’t ignore the finale. That’s why I said the quality was uneven. I didn’t say it was all great. I pointed to things that many people thought were great. The finale wasn’t as dismal a failure as some make it out to be. I also didn’t bring out the Nightmare Tower which a lot of people liked.

But I did say the Living Story season was was uneven in quality in many places. So far, however, the Living Story Season 2 has surpassed Season 1 in many ways FOR ME.

Nothing wrong with what I said.

You even say “The logic is, if the numbers aren’t supporting what they were doing they’d change it.”
Here’s a change because the numbers didn’t support it. If it was a good thing, they wouldn’t need to change it.

In any case, I don’t bother with arguing semantics anymore.

Vayne.8563:

BlueZone.4236:

Vayne.8563:

darkace.8925:

Vayne.8563:

Every time you single me out with that kind of personal attack, you look more and more desperate.

Come on, now…you’re supposed to be above these kinds of silly games, aren’t you?

Nope, you’re really getting on my nerves and it feels quite personal. I don’t say “only Dark Ace” would do anything. By singling me out, you’re making a personal statement. Not to mention you ignore and trivialize the point I was making. It’s a way to ridicule people. It’s really bad to resort to that sort of attack and comment that I should be above it.

I laughed, because of the irony of you saying he’s trivializing the point you’re trying to make, considering your nitpick post.

In any case, the “living” world was bad.
We didn’t need numbers to know it was bad. It sounded bad on paper, and it was bad in practice.
If you think changes = proof, then they did make changes. They’ve started to compromise to provide more permanent, replayable content.

See the Living World wasn’t bad. It wasn’t bad on paper. It wasn’t bad in it’s execution though it was uneven. Toward the end of the first season the Living World picked up some converts that hated it in the beginning. The Marionette fight was very popular. Escape from Lion’s Arch was very popular too. So calling it bad, just because you say so is problematical.

You’re attempting to state an opinion as a fact.

I guess you missed the context. It’s bad because it’s gone. People missed out. They’re making changes now. Is it hard to guess why?
And besides, being popular is irrelevant. It was the only new content available.

Vayne.8563:

darkace.8925:

Vayne.8563:

Every time you single me out with that kind of personal attack, you look more and more desperate.

Come on, now…you’re supposed to be above these kinds of silly games, aren’t you?

Nope, you’re really getting on my nerves and it feels quite personal. I don’t say “only Dark Ace” would do anything. By singling me out, you’re making a personal statement. Not to mention you ignore and trivialize the point I was making. It’s a way to ridicule people. It’s really bad to resort to that sort of attack and comment that I should be above it.

I laughed, because of the irony of you saying he’s trivializing the point you’re trying to make, considering your nitpick post.

In any case, the “living” world was bad.
We didn’t need numbers to know it was bad. It sounded bad on paper, and it was bad in practice.
If you think changes = proof, then they did make changes. They’ve started to compromise to provide more permanent, replayable content.

darkace.8925:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

darkace.8925:

In one scenario the chefs are allowed only so much time to prepare each course, and then it’s served whether it’s ready or not.

Never had a dinner at a restaurant where the course was brought to me incomplete, or not ready . . . and from when I worked in it, the kitchen would not send out a plate which wasn’t done.

Then that’s where this analogy falls apart, because video games and their patches can and do ship before they’re ready.

Not if it’s run Hell’s Kitchen style, where the patrons are also Gordon Ramsay!

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

BlueZone.4236:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

BlueZone.4236:

Serophous.9085:

BlueZone.4236:

Yeah, I like my content the same way I like my meals. Served on a plate rather than drip fed.

Except you would take said food on said plate, shove it all into your mouth at once, finish the meal in one big gulp, then complain two seconds later about there not being any more food.

No, I’d eat it like a normal person, leave satisfied, and hope for another pleasant experience the next time round.
No need to project your experience onto mine.

And no need to impugn my dining habits of eating a salad and then the entree, either . . .

Yeah…no clue what you’re talking about. If you want to partition your meal and call parts of them salad, entrees and desserts. A bit silly, but be my guest.

You’ve never had a multiple course dinner, have you? Ever eaten at an Olive Garden? Any restaurant where you sit down and you have things come to you as they’re ready, like appetizers, then entree, then dessert?

Really?

Yeah, it’s a single course drip fed.
EDIT: Actually, it’s a single plate drip fed.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

BlueZone.4236:

Serophous.9085:

BlueZone.4236:

Yeah, I like my content the same way I like my meals. Served on a plate rather than drip fed.

Except you would take said food on said plate, shove it all into your mouth at once, finish the meal in one big gulp, then complain two seconds later about there not being any more food.

No, I’d eat it like a normal person, leave satisfied, and hope for another pleasant experience the next time round.
No need to project your experience onto mine.

And no need to impugn my dining habits of eating a salad and then the entree, either . . .

Yeah…no clue what you’re talking about. If you want to partition your meal and call parts of them salad, entrees and desserts. A bit silly, but be my guest.

Serophous.9085:

BlueZone.4236:

Yeah, I like my content the same way I like my meals. Served on a plate rather than drip fed.

Except you would take said food on said plate, shove it all into your mouth at once, finish the meal in one big gulp, then complain two seconds later about there not being any more food.

No, I’d eat it like a normal person, leave satisfied, and hope for another pleasant experience the next time round.
No need to project your experience onto mine.

Nick.6972:

That reminds me of.
Remember the last year (summer) when people said they disliked Living Story and asked Arena Net to work on other stuff instead? Remember how Arena Net commented that only smart percentage ot company is actually working on Living STory and how there are huge “secret” background projects? What happened to that?

EotM, wardrobe, Dry Top map, mega servers…
EotM took one whole year to develop.
It’s a guess, however it’s logical these were the so called big projects.

hannah mee.7925:

BlueZone.4236:

Jargon

Gems can still be purchased with gold and mobile apps shouldn’t provide any exclusive services/items that are locked behind a monetary gate.

They’ve come a long way from the Guild Wars 1 store where the only way to buy neat little in-game stuff was with real money. Now you can use a lot of virtual money to buy it too.

Not sure what point you’re trying to make here. If they made a free to download app where things cost gems, it’s no different than in game.
At the end of the day, there are people who will throw their real money at Anet even if there is a free alternative.

If there’s enough people foolish to spend hundreds (even thousands!) of dollars in the gem store, then there’s enough people foolish enough to spend money in a GW2 related mobile app.
Throw in some minipets, in-game NCSoft advertisements, achievement points, crappy skins, watch the money roll in.

Yeah, it would be interesting for the millions of accounts to have zero characters.
The game is dying in the west, so it wouldn’t help the western population, anyway. High five!

Uhh, no. I can only assume English isn’t your first language.
“it’s inaccurate” is not some vague term. It’s exactly what it means.
“could be estimated” refers to how they got that number. It’s obviously not the sales number. Full stop.

Please do not spread further misinformation. We’ll know in the future if the real sales is close to this number or not. The fact they had to say this means there’s enough noticeable difference for them to say it.

They did not.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/China-sales-news-were-inaccurate/4196529
Anet’s official twitter account says they did not.
All the gaming news site read off a reddit post, which read off a fansite, which supposedly wrote the number of characters on each server.

pdemo.8312:

So on Wikipedia the other day it said 7.3M. Now it says 3.5M did Anet change that again?

Wikipedia information isn’t maintained by ANet. Anybody can change any information to either correct it or to troll it. In this case, whoever changed it prevented further misinformation from spreading.

cheshirefox.7026:

BlueZone.4236:

No, this is not a doom and gloom post, so don’t get your panties in a twist

great attitude

Considering how knee-jerk reactions to positive and negative news is fairly common, and how no post have been deleted as of yet, it’s working so…yeah, thanks for the compliment.

Dusty Moon.4382:

BlueZone.4236:

No, this is not a doom and gloom post, so don’t get your panties in a twist:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2agzhp/gw2_china_sales_numbers_are_not_accurate/
which links to

http://twitter.com/GuildWars2/status/487745928137154560

We’d like to clarify recent news of GW2 China sales: it’s inaccurate, from a Chinese fansite, and they could be estimating characters.

I doubt this fansite has access to number of accounts, so who knows how they estimated this number.

Also, I think KongZhong is wrong about GW2 passing 4 million sales, because NCSoft/ANet did not make an official PR statement, which they have always done for every million milestone. With their aggressive discounted sales, it makes sense that they’re trying to hit the 4 million mark, but I don’t think they’re there yet.

Kong Zhong is the publisher and would know the numbers. A.Net would not as they are just the developer of the game. Just because A.Net/NCSoft did not make any official announcement, doesn’t mea it didn’t happen.

Late post to the first post.
This is an assumption on my part, but would be ridiculous and may be downright insane if not true. Anet has access to their database, since they are still the developers of the game. The need for the database access is to track information such as knowing account information, tracking and fixing bugs.

Also, I’ll edit my first post to clarify the second section of my first post.

Belenwyn.8674:

BlueZone.4236:

Sorry, just to clarify, the 4 million report I was mentioning in my second part of my post was what KongZhong said about the NA/EU sales, as I don’t think they’d be given the numbers for that side of things.

Since Arenanet did not deny this statement it could be true. The statement was made by KongZhong on their official GW2 site Feb 2014 when I remember it correctly. In September 2013 we had over 3.5 million sold copies in NA/EU. 500k in roughly 6 months is plausible. Maybe 4 million is not a milestone where Arenanet thinks it is worth a huge announcement.

In regard to the 3.8 million characters in China. I suspect there are tools to extract such data from servers. I know sites for LOTRO that publish accumulated logins for a given week. For WOW I remember sites where the number of characters and the distribution between Alliance and Horde was published.

17173 did the same now for GW2 China. gw2sns.com performed the same census with more details: http://gw2.17173.com/content/2014-07-12/20140712170452054.shtml

My personal guess for sales would be between 4 and 5 million in EU/NA and between 1.2 and 2 million in China.

They didn’t deny it because no English gaming site ran with that info compared to this which was run over tons of site.
This is to stop misinformation from running rampant. The 4 million misinformation isn’t being spread by the gaming press so not necessary to correct.

Sorry, just to clarify, the 4 million report I was mentioning in my second part of my post was what KongZhong said about the NA/EU sales, as I don’t think they’d be given the numbers for that side of things.

No, this is not a doom and gloom post, so don’t get your panties in a twist:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2agzhp/gw2_china_sales_numbers_are_not_accurate/
which links to

http://twitter.com/GuildWars2/status/487745928137154560

We’d like to clarify recent news of GW2 China sales: it’s inaccurate, from a Chinese fansite, and they could be estimating characters.

I doubt this fansite has access to number of accounts, so who knows how they estimated this number.

Also, I think KongZhong is wrong about GW2 passing 4 million sales in the west, because NCSoft/ANet did not make an official PR statement, which they have always done for every million milestone. With their aggressive discounted sales, it makes sense that they’re trying to hit the 4 million mark, but I don’t think they’re there yet.

Galen Grey.4709:

Palador.2170:

I’m skipping most of the thread, so I can give my answer without getting sidetracked by something else. Apologies if someone beat me to this.

I would rather have an expansion. Why? Quality. Let me compare Dry Top and Queensdale (to use a zone I think most players know fairly well) to explain what I mean:

Dry Top is a good area. Maybe even awesome. But it’s small. Why? Most of us seem to agree that it’s only part of the zone, and we’ll be getting the rest of it in installments as the story goes on. I’m going to take a guess and say it will be 6 installments, separated out over the course of LS2. Sounds good, right? New zone in the LS, we just get it in parts.

But that’s the problem, it’s in parts. This requires designing a zone that is broken up into smaller parts. Nothing in Part A can require Part B because Part B won’t be out yet when Part A goes live. And the zone can’t be wide open, there have to be pinch points where progress can be cut off to keep us from getting further into the zone than we’re supposed to at any point.

Now, look at Queensdale. There’s a zone that has a few pinch points, but only small areas (bandit caves) can be cut off from access. Mostly, it’s a fairly open zone with plenty of freedom as to where you go. Picture what they would have to do if they wanted to break it into 6 installment parts. It’s not pretty, and it pretty much wrecks the whole feel of the zone, right?

This is the real problem with the LS versus an expansion, the need to break things down into smaller updates. The need to make things fit into a smaller updates instead of releasing it all at once is a limitation on what they can pull off, and I’m sure it applies to more than just zones. LS2 Ep1’s plot had a very clear break in the plot, for example, to allow for people to stop at that point. It seems like a good stopping point at first, until you realize our characters would (most likely) NOT just stop there for a while. Again, it’s a break they’ve been forced to build into things to accommodate the LS style of updates.

This is the main reason why I think an expansion would be better.

You provide your own answer but totally ignore it. Yes dry top is a small map compared with Queensdale but its most likely a small part of the real zone too. If they were to release a full zone every 2 weeks they’d need to develop 26 zones per year on top of the living story instances. Thats way too much so they did like you said, they broke the map down releasing a new part every 2 weeks. if they break every zone into 4 prieces will get 6 new zones which are more manageable in a year time frame and they will not have to compromise on quality either. Dry top maybe small but we know its going to get bigger.

…That’s not how expansions work. Man, I feel old if I still remember how expansions used to work…

Etien.4601:

I was left with the impression that Dociu did the loading screen art. Am I wrong?

He also did some of the old ones. Don’t think he’s done any of the new ones.

You can scan through here to look at who’s responsible for what (no idea how accurate or up to date it is, but I think it’s ok).
Theo isn’t solely responsible for all the new art, though you’ll definitely know which was his and which aren’t. It’s really obvious compared to the others.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Category:Concept_art_by_artist

Also, be wary of quaggan overload if you visit Kekai Kotaki’s page.

Unfortunately, one of the old loading screen artist (Kekai Kotaki) left Anet.
Theo Prins who’s done most of the new loading screen likes doing abstract art.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/concept-artist-spotlight-theo-prins/
Sadly, it’s here to stay…
Note: Not saying he’s a bad artist, but I personally don’t like his style, as well.

Vayne.8563:

Boneheart.3561:

BlueZone.4236:

FYI, 2 + 2 = 4.
Next, you’ll tell me you don’t farm! Ha, ha.

Is that a joke? I’ve seen all too often the argument that nothing can be done in the game without farming.

Farming is a very specific activity. I gather everything while running around doing other stuff. Gathering that stuff might be considering farming, but I almost never go out to gather anything.

I don’t tend to farm dungeons. I run them when guildies need an extra guy usually. Eventually, over time, I’ll get whatever tokens I need, without needlessly going out of my way to do any specific dungeon. Is that farming?

I’ll do a few things at the end of the day see what dailies I’m missing and do them if they’re quite easy…is that farming?

Mostly I do whatever anyone else in the guild happens to need help or want company on. Is that farming?

Eventually I get enough gold, karma, mats or whatever to buy something.

I don’t consider any of that farming.

There were times I tried to farm, like back in the south sun event when everyone was trying to farm sharks for armored scales. I did pretty well for the 15 minutes I farmed. Then I got bored and went and did other stuff.

I’ve never hit DR, because I can’t keep doing the same thing over and over. I have to switch it up all the time.

Yeah…I’ve already heard about all the farming tricks. Avoiding DR, guesting, guesting with alts, join the world boss train, the karma train, etc etc.
That’s exactly how you farm in this game. I’m sure some of the things I’ve listed have now been “fixed”, I dunno which ones.

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

months and months of getting complementary chips and salsa waiting for a main course that isn’t gonna happen because the chef is too busy making chips and salsa, rearranging the seating, and doing a social media campaign. (About Chips and Salsa)

I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you. You were served the main course…split up into tiny pieces. That’s the reality.

Boneheart.3561:

BlueZone.4236:

FYI, 2 + 2 = 4.
Next, you’ll tell me you don’t farm! Ha, ha.

Is that a joke? I’ve seen all too often the argument that nothing can be done in the game without farming.

Not joking, but nothing to do with what can or can’t be done.
Just that he adamantly denies farming when called out, but has also described many of his farming habits countless times.
Which is just like farming, but not called farming. Just farming without the word farming.

FYI, 2 + 2 = 4.
Next, you’ll tell me you don’t farm! Ha, ha.

Vayne.8563:

Except I’m not enthralled. People keep saying it, and it continues to be wrong. To be fair-minded is not to be enthralled.

They aren’t wrong.

So I shouldn’t tell you I have over 7000 hours logged…gotcha.

Yeah, I like my content the same way I like my meals. Served on a plate rather than drip fed.
If they wanted to dump an expansion type release for free, more power to them.
Unfortunately, they need to play it like a traditional MMO and pad out the content because they need to stop the bleeding of players.

We know a single WvWvW map took one whole year, so it’s likely the current map (which they’re drip feeding) took a year or so, as well.
Unfortunately, it seems obvious these were their big projects, so whether you find that disappointing or not, it’s up to you.
Mega servers, wardrobe, China release were also probably the other big projects.
Who knows what their new big projects are, but expect similar results as above.

Sadly, they are extremely proud of their iterative process, so they’d have to drop that process to do an expansion type release. Which isn’t going to happen any time soon.

Dusty Moon.4382:

docMed.7692:

Vayne.8563:

docMed.7692:

Let’s just agree on what we have known about this game for some time now, the devs have missed the mark on a majority of patches/features and this development cycle/content implementation is generic/a failure.

You not liking something makes it neither generic nor a failure. I won’t agree to it, because that’s simply an opinion. We don’t even know if it’s a majority opinion. A lot of people I talk to really seem to like the new content. Certainly it gets enough upvotes on reddit.

Failure implies something very specific. You can say you don’t like something. You can say it’s not fun (for you). Calling it a failure is simply misusing the language.

Let’s see; twitch views are low, forum post views/comments are the lowest I’ve ever seen, pvp tournaments barely get 200 viewers (used to be 4,000 summer last year, a lot more before that), ArenaNet releases no figures supporting ‘active playerbase’ (just sales over the cumulative period since launch – which a vast majority is from the early launch period and these figures hide the actual active player base), servers were ‘merged together as a feature’, many implementations have been forgotten about (take for example guild missions), problems with bots (such as nerfing ‘fast farmers drop rate’) have yet to been effectively addressed, no new legendaries, pvp queue system remains broken, same pvp game mode since launch, no significant new dungeons/etc. I’d say all that is quite a good support of my comments above. Nonetheless, sorry you don’t agree with the clear opinion I painted that also happens to be significantly backed by the large amount of dip in both viewers, forum viewers, and forum commenters. Sure, some people don’t visit the forum, some don’t view twitch, etc – I still don’t see how a significant decrease in these numbers is not a clear indicator of a depreciating community & in turn a representation of said communities’ dissatisfaction. Cheers. You’ve been a fan-boy since day one, which is fine; I don’t agree with your opinion either.

Bots? I haven’t seen any bots in a long time.

Just because someone doesn’t agree with your opinion, they are not a ‘Fan Boy’. You have just taken your argument to the FOX News type of argument – which is condescending and generally non-productive.

I think straw man and semantic arguments do a good enough job to get someone labelled a fan boy.

Also, in before “decrease interest in GW2 outside of the game means nothing”.

Dal.5872:

StinVec.3621:

You need to run your game as admin so it has write access to the file that it needs to keep re-downloading.

If it cannot write to the file it will download the new one each time you start your game until you run it as admin so it can overwrite the file with the updated version.

Run As Admin

• Close your game completely.
• Right-click your GW2 game shortcut and click on “Properties”.
• On the “Compatibility” tab, check/enable the box at the bottom for your game to “Run As Administrator”.
• Hit OK after making sure this setting is enabled.
• Re-launch your game and see if the issue persists.
  It will likely need to do one final download to update the file properly. Any future launches should not have to download the file again.

That fixed it thank you, but again why with ALL other games do they prompt for Administrator access when required?

I assume your GW2 folder is in C:\Program Files or C:\Program Files (x86)
Windows doesn’t like non admin users messing with that folder.
You could try changing your GW2 folder to give yourself full permissions and see what happens (I don’t really suggest putting doing it for the entire Program Files folder, but it’s up to you).
(ie. right click on the folder -> Properties -> Security tab: Tick yourself with Full control)

These were the approximate dates and estimated numbers they released.
25/08/12: 1 mil – Preorder numbers announced
11/09/12: 2 mil – Press release
15/01/13: 3 mil – Press release
28/08/13: 3.5+ mil – 1 year anniversary

Plot a graph and tell me what you think.
Above excludes the Chinese release, though.

To be fair micro transactions are successful because they prey on the ignorant.

I agree with lowering expectations.
Most likely it’ll be grind to open a gate as a taster. Something like the how the Tower of Nightmares was introduced except more repetitive.

Maybe it’s related to this post?
I can only guess many of the hardcore WvW’ers decided the wait is too long and moved onto newer games?

DevonCarver.5370:

I’ll make a couple of points here to hopefully clarify this issue.

1) It takes a very large amount of time and effort to make a new map. It’s definitely more than a 6 month process from start to finish. Especially if we are talking about building a new borderlands taking all the thing we’ve learned since the game came out into account. With that in mind it’s a big task. It took us a little under a year to get EotM built and shipped from conception to release. So that is a more reasonable timeline for a new map.

2) The area we added to Obsidian Sanctum was in progress prior to the incident mentioned above and, while it didn’t take a particularly large amount of time, was still a process of over a month. We don’t release map changes without thorough testing. Keep in mind that was just a small change to an existing map, not a completely new map.

3) We currently, unfortunately, don’t have the ability to rotate maps in and out of the game in the manner discussed above. We have talked about this concept many times and it is something we’d like to be able to do long term, but it is not a small task given the technical structure of our game.

All of those things being true, we absolutely want to make new maps for WvW and when we have them ready to talk about and show off, believe me we will. It’s very important to us that when we do release a new WvW map it is a clear example of what we think the ideal WvW map would be. That means we will test the heck out of it and do everything we can to make sure it is even more awesome than the current maps. I realize this isn’t a timeline or an answer to where are more maps, but it’s as much as we can give you right now and it hopefully gives some insight to the size of the task. As I said, as soon as we have more to talk about or show, you will hear it.

Skitzoh.3985:

I haven’t played since around launch time, mainly because a lot of the events seemed repetitive. But the graphics we stunning, so thinking of giving it a second go.

Unfortunately, they didn’t improve on the repetitive aspect of the game.
In fact, the new content released has been increasingly trying to get you to repeat content.
However, if you’re returning for the graphics, then sure, it’ll be fine.

Maps will appear as somewhat busy since they’ve effectively “collapsed” all servers via the mega servers for PvE maps (EU & NA are still separate).

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

BlueZone.4236:

Vayne.8563:

Everyone was guesting to three or four servers. Lots of people if not everyone. Giving the impression that other servers had no population. No one really knows.

No, they weren’t. If “lots” of people don’t know basic combat, “lots” of people don’t even know about the guest function, which is in the main menu rather than in game.
If you mean every farmers know about it, and there’s lots of farmers, then yes, I’ll give you that.

Didn’t you play before megaservers where introduced or?
At the beginning of marionette on our server there where lots of players, then it got booring and some stopped doing it. While some stopped doing the event it got harder to compleate so people started to Guest to other servers, I mean whole guilds guested to other servers. People don’t know basic combat but when it comes to getting good rewards people do listen and follows the crowd and also there are even more people who do know basic combat and the guest function.

If those guys counts as “everyone”, then yeah, the player base is extremely small then.

EDIT: I think it’s fair you say one of the reasons for the mega servers (aside from falling population) is the fact the “majority” don’t know about guesting. Hence, automatic “guesting”, ie. mega servers.

Vayne.8563:

Everyone was guesting to three or four servers. Lots of people if not everyone. Giving the impression that other servers had no population. No one really knows.

No, they weren’t. If “lots” of people don’t know basic combat, “lots” of people don’t even know about the guest function, which is in the main menu rather than in game.
If you mean every farmers know about it, and there’s lots of farmers, then yes, I’ll give you that.

Remember fractals leaderboards, as well?
Hehe…

Simon.3794:

not really, the official pvp tournament with 10000 chinese dollar.
i got 4th place with my team there, 1 month later still no clue where our rewards are.
and now that company try to pretend like it never happened.

I’m curious to hear more about this! Got any more info? Did 1st-3rd get their rewards? Is esport (lol) taking off there?

Anyway, so I guess this is similar to the WvW season 2 rewards, except there’s not enough “whiners” to get them to do something?

Dusty Moon.4382:

The difference between Exotics and Ascended is so miniscule in damage – like max 5% (based on other people’s calculations)

It’s 5% minimum. The ascended weapon base damage is an increase of 5%.

I thought everyone and their grandmother knew about farming…

Im Mudbone.1437:

BlueZone.4236:

Well, they introduced mega servers because too many people keep coming back.
That’s what mega servers are…right?

Wrong. They made the megaservers because of all the dead servers to bring those dead servers into the more populated ones, meaning GW2 has LOST players.

Sorry, Im Mudbone…it was a joke :P

Anyway, I know people will say to take this with a grain of salt, but I think the achievement point percentile and achievement point leaderboards do show some indications of inactivity from many players, mainly from the dying servers.
It was something like ~3500 AP and you’re in the 90% percentile.
Note 1: that means you’ve got more AP than 90% of “all” players.
Note 2: “All” supposedly means active…but no one knows how long Anet considers a player active.

When are they coming back, guys? Soon™?

Well, they introduced mega servers because too many people keep coming back.
That’s what mega servers are…right?

Did someone seriously compare working towards an education, which provides knowledge and life skills, to an entertainment software, which involves pushing 1-1-1-F and running around like a hamster on a wheel?

Wow…just, wow.

Nerelith.7360:

BlueZone.4236:

Algreg.3629:

Azhure.1857:

Algreg.3629:

a) rewards: yeah, I know, just play for the fun of it. Thing is, noone plays computer games like that.

I do. Please don’t speak for me.

sure, isolate a single vulnerable line out of my post and ignore the context. Whatever works for you. Good for you.

Whoa now, let the poster speak for himself/herself:

Azhure.1857:

I’ve tampered with farming keys off and on. Its extremely time consuming.

He IS the Poster, and he IS Speaking for himself.

Uhh…ok?
Was just pointing out the discrepancy between what the poster said and what he does (or did, as he says).
In any case, the more he posted, the more he was agreeing with Algreg’s point whilst still claiming he’s not agreeing with his point. I dunno what’s going on anymore.

Having reread some of the posts in this thread, I can definitely see how toxic posters can also contribute to turning others off on this game.
Being constantly attacked just because someone misread a point another poster made (who was cementing his/her point along with an attack on me at every possible chance), just shows how much of a knee-jerk reaction some players have.
Having remembered a certain post in the CDI by a developer, I also noticed ANet also has such a knee-jerk reaction reaction to criticism, as well.

To reply to OP’s question, with another question: Is this what players should come back to? MMO’s are meant to be played with people, and when players just want to keep attacking you, well, that’s just shocking.
What a shame.

Azhure.1857:

Mudbone, you really need to reread through my posts on this thread. I was trying to make the point that just because someone farms, through whatever means or for however long, doesn’t mean that it is always the case and that they’re in the game for nothing but.

The kitten that I kept responding to was saying that because I had farmed keys at some point in the past, that it meant he/she could sum me up as a player that played for loot and not fun/enjoyment.

Do you want congratulations on your train activities? ‘Cause you aren’t getting one… But I wasn’t attacking any farmers of any kind. Do what you enjoy.

Amazing how many personal attacks you’ve done on me, whereas I’ve done none.
But yes, if we read on, we’ll realize how you didn’t find farming keys rewarding, thus not fun, and agreeing with the point you were trying to disagree with.
You didn’t find key farming fun because you found the loot unrewarding. Why are you agreeing with the initial point you’re supposedly disagreeing with? Why are you still attacking me while you stand on the same stance as him/her?!?!
I don’t get farmers sometimes…

Azhure.1857:

BlueZone.4236:

OK, so key farming is fun for you. What are you farming for? Fun? That doesn’t make sense. You’re farming for keys, then. What are keys? Rewards? Oh, fun?

Is key farming fun for me? No. Have I done it enough to know whether or not it was, for me personally? Yes. Does that mean that I continue to do it now, in the present, because its rewarding? No. Why not? Because its not fun.

Perhaps when you pull up my past comments, whether they be recent or otherwise, you should probably go with an example that shows that I’m currently and actively doing the very thing you’re accusing me of.

I see. So it was unrewarding, thus you didn’t find it fun, so you stopped key farming.
Hmm…So, it looks like you’re agreeing with Algreg.

Azhure.1857:

Concerning ‘key farming’: Do you even know that that is like? Rewards my kitten . It is not rewarding. You have better luck going to a casino.

And no, I don’t agree with his post – As I stated above. “I play for the fun of it.” Which is something he said “no one” does. But again, please continue your personal attack on me. Continue to pull up past remarks made by me as if it proves your point, and doesn’t just make you look like a giant kitten . Gotta say I’ve disagreed with people a lot on these forums but I’ve never stooped that low.

I have very little gold. I’ve never gotten a precursor or a legendary, nor do I ever intend to. I’ve never saved enough to craft anything ascended…. In fact the one time I came close to being ready to craft a full set of armor, I instead ended up selling all of my mats so I could contribute to a good cause (guild banning together to get a friend a precursor). I get my “lootz” over the long run. But its not something I’m farming 24/7 to have. It will happen when it happens.

In fact I get some heat from my server WBT activities because I don’t go to this champ or that champ, instead I have more fun going out of my way to have another champ ready for the rest of my guild. Why? Because THAT is how I have fun. I don’t give a kitten if I get a champ bag or not.

What personal attack? He/she said no one plays “just for fun” (note key word, just), you supposedly disagree, so I point out the part where you aren’t truthfully disagreeing with it.
OK, so key farming is fun for you. What are you farming for? Fun? That doesn’t make sense. You’re farming for keys, then. What are keys? Rewards? Oh, fun?